Psalm 18: presumptuous David?

[David] sang to the Lord the words of this song when the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul.

"The Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness,
    according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight."


Psalm 18 is a celebratory anthem, filled with David's excitement at what God has done in his life. Surrounded by psalms of five to fifteen verses, it's 50 verses of David just really not being able to shut up about how awed he is by what God has done. "I mean, have you seen my enemies??? These are impressive dudes! And I'm still alive! What's more, they're dead! Is it because of my skills of flight and fight? No chance. Luck? Definitely not. Random happenstance? I tell you, NO - God did this."

"Yahweh protected me and cared for me, because I have kept his decrees blamelessly."

Huh?

Forgive me for questioning the Lord's anointed one, but I am, after all, a 21^st-century Westerner, and we don't exactly believe in the Divine Right of Kings anymore. David sounds really confident that God has caused his unexpected military success. What's more, David knows why: God has done this because David is righteous and his foes are not.

Here's where I stumble, perhaps along with many of you reading this. I don't think that way. When something good happens to me, I usually don't think it's because I've been a good boy. When I defeat my "enemies," I don't see God favoring me over them. Like the prophet Habakkuk, I've lived through too many occasions where it seems like God is silent "while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves" (Hab 1:13). No, God doesn't merely visit good on the good, visit bad on the bad, and call it a day. The world is more complex than that.

What's more, I don't take the Bible at face-value anymore. Once upon a time, I might have read this psalm & said to myself, "I need to think more like David. Lord, help me to see Your hand when things go well for me." Now that I'm a few years older, perhaps a few years more cynical, I allow myself the potentially dangerous freedom of questioning the sacred text. Even King David is fair game.

First, I think to myself, it's a pity David went in this direction with his reasoning. He had an out: he could have said that Yahweh gave him victory because of the special place he held in the divine plan for Israel. The good king David was a type, forerunner, and ancestor of the King of kings, Jesus. If David had said, "God protected me, because he has a plan to bless the world through his people Israel," we wouldn't be having this conversation - I would have accepted that reasoning. It fits my theological system. David does pay brief homage to that reality, in v. 50:
"[Yahweh] gives his king great victories;
    he shows unfailing love to his anointed,
    to David and to his descendants forever."
But, this comes across as an afterthought. The heart of the psalm is an eleven-verse reflection on that darn idea mentioned earlier: God rewards good girls & boys and punishes bad girls & boys.

So what do we make of this? Was David's faith really that shallow? Was he stuck in an underdeveloped stage of moral reasoning? Did he write this as a young man & grow up into a more mature view of how God works in this world, such that we should just ignore this psalm and move on to Psalm 22?

There's at least one more option. Perhaps this was David's deep personal conviction regarding the reality of his situation in this particular case.

"I know this is why things went the way they did, and I want to tell you why, so that you can glorify God with me. I fully acknowledge that it doesn't always turn out this way, but it did this time around. No, I can't prove it; I can say that this turn of events is statistically improbable without an underlying cause, and I can affirm that the logic of my conclusion is internally consistent. I can also tell you one more thing: I know in my bones that God did this. I believe this conviction has come from the Spirit of God. I can't control whether you find that convincing or not, and I don't expect it would hold up in a court of law. But that's what I know, and that's how I know it. Nothing more, nothing less."

What do you think? Would you believe David? Have you ever experienced God in such a way that you cannot prove to another human being that it was God who showed up, but you're still certain it was him with every fiber of your being?¹

I have. An experience from this April stands out in my memory. I was in Dulles Airport, on my way from Madrid to Chicago for Rick & Anne's wedding. In the midst of a moment of deep doubt and despair, I experienced an irrational level of calm when my suitcase didn't show up on the carousel at customs. I knew it was the Holy Spirit's work. God used that peace to make me a blessing to the people around me - airline employees, fellow passengers, another guy whose bags were lost, the folks working the counter at Potbelly... and it blessed me deeply on a personal level as well. I felt the presence of God in a way I hadn't in some time, perhaps years.

Could you explain the entire chain of events naturalistically? Yup; it would be a statistical outlier, but you could still explain it. Does that dent my confidence that it was truly God who was active in that whole situation? Not particularly.

So, King David, for what it's worth, I believe you.

The Lord lives! Praise be to my Rock!
    Exalted be God my Savior!
He is the God who avenges me,
    who subdues nations under me,
    who saves me from my enemies.
You exalted me above my foes;
    from a violent man you rescued me.
Therefore I will praise you, Lord, among the nations;
    I will sing the praises of your name.



1. Obligatory evangelical caveat: Good, orthodox followers of Christ recognize the limits to this kind of reasoning. We can't use these subjective experiences of God to force others to do anything. In the absence of common reasoning, "God told me you need to..." is religious manipulation, not prophetic clarity. Human interpretation of personal experience also should not be a basis for bending one's theology out of line with orthodoxy. As the Wesleyan Quadrilateral rightly points out, Scripture is the measure by which experience is tested.)