How should i pray?
Our immediate, good, humble Christian impulse is to say, “No, of course not. I should pray that God will deal with me according to the righteousness of Christ, which is far greater than I deserve.” Amen to that. As David prays in Psalm 143:2, “Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you.”
But then we read some of the other psalms of David:
- Psalm 7:8 “The LORD judges the peoples; judge me, O LORD, according to my righteousness and according to the integrity that is in me.”
- Psalm 18:20 “The LORD dealt with me according to my righteousness; according to the cleanness of my hands he rewarded me.”
- Psalm 26:1 “Vindicate me, O LORD, for I have walked in my integrity, and I have trusted in the LORD without wavering.”
So, which is it? Should we pray Puritan prayers of self-loathing contrition, or should we pray eagerly for God to treat us as our righteous living deserves?
Gospel Grounding
It would be helpful at the outset to reaffirm some basic gospel truths. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23). “None is righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). In Luke 18:9-14, Jesus condemns the Pharisee who prays to God based on his self-righteous, arrogant sense of superiority, and esteems the humble prayer of the contrite publican. Humble prayers are fitting for sinful people.
And, even when God justifies us in Christ, counting his perfect righteousness in place of our sin (2 Corinthians 5:21), we remain sinners who battle our indwelling sin. “For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members” (Romans 7:22-23). God does not justify the godly, but the ungodly (Romans 4:5).
Salvation is all of grace, based not on our behaviour – praise the Lord! – but on the finished work of Christ. God says through Isaiah, “But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word” (Isaiah 66:2). Our prayers should acknowledge our sin, our need, and our provision of perfect righteousness in Christ. “Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand” (Romans 5:2).
A Messianic Prayer?
So, what are we to do with David’s appeals to his own righteousness before the throne?
One solution that has been offered is that David’s appeals to his righteousness are actually a veiled appeal to the righteousness of Christ. One writer contends, “In the light of the New Testament, this focus on the righteousness possessed by the Davidic king may be understood to be fulfilled in the righteousness of Christ the King.”[1] The idea, as I understand it, is that because of the interplay between David and his greater Son in the psalter, the lesser can stand in for the greater.
But this explanation, encouraging though it may be, does not seem to account for the actual language of the psalms. First, David (and the other psalmists) knows how to pray for God to deal with him according to an alien righteousness, often with the language “your righteousness” (Psalm 31:1, 35:24, 36:10, 71:2, 72:1, 119:40, 143:1). If he wanted to refer to God’s righteousness, or the righteousness of the Messiah, he had the language for it but chose different words.
Second, note that the language of the appeals to David’s own righteousness is set in inescapably behavioural language, as opposed to imputational language. David writes in Psalm 26:3-5, “For your steadfast love is before my eyes, and I walk in your faithfulness. I do not sit with men of falsehood, nor do I consort with hypocrites. I hate the assembly of evildoers, and I will not sit with the wicked.” Notice that those are actions, not a granted condition before God. Certainly, whatever righteous acts David performs are both instructed by God’s Word and empowered by God’s grace, but they are David’s acts nonetheless.
Consider also the behavioural language of Psalm 18:20-23:
The LORD dealt with me according to my righteousness;
according to the cleanness of my hands he rewarded me.
For I have kept the ways of the LORD,
and have not wickedly departed from my God.
For all his rules were before me,
and his statutes I did not put away from me.
I was blameless before him,
and I kept myself from my guilt.
Third, David does not apparently conceive of these appeals to his righteousness as arrogant or self-righteous, but as the plea of a contrite sinner. Right after this prayer in Psalm 18, David writes, “For you save a humble people, but the haughty eyes you bring down” (Psalm 18:27). In Psalm 51, David catalogues the wickedness of his sin with Bathsheba. In Psalm 32, David recollects his folly when he failed to confess his sin. Whatever these “my righteousness” prayers are, then, they are not a “holier-than-thou” put-down or a self-important demand, but the cry of a lowly heart for help from God.
Pleading for Righteous Judgment
What, then, does David mean by praying for God to “judge me . . . according to my righteousness”? In unravelling this tension, it’s critical to remember that the context of all these appeals in the Psalter is conflict. David is beset by an enemy (Psalm 7:2). He is rescued from a mighty foe (Psalm 18:17). He is encircled by bloodthirsty men (Psalm 26:9). David prays in the midst of conflict knowing that someone will win and someone will lose.
So, when David prays to God, “save me from all my pursuers and deliver me” (Psalm 7:1), he appeals to his innocence in this conflict as a reason for God to act. In essence, he is asking for God to judge based on who has a righteous standing in this war. Take, for instance, this part of his appeal in Psalm 7:3-5:
O LORD my God, if I have done this,
if there is wrong in my hands,
if I have repaid my friend with evil
or plundered my enemy without cause,
let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it,
and let him trample my life to the ground
and lay my glory in the dust.
In effect, David is saying, “God, judge between me and my enemy who is in the right.” Notice, he is not saying, “God judge between me and you.” David knows that he has been sinful from the womb (Psalm 51:5) and that he does not deserve to stand before God’s holy, peerless, sinless majesty. But in the court of human contest, David expresses his desire for God to bring justice to the offender and protection to the victim.
Take, as another example, David’s prayer for justice in Psalm 35. He says that his enemies attack him “without cause” (v. 7), that they repay him “evil for good” (v. 12), and even expressly says that they are “wrongfully my foes” (v. 19). In contrast, he showed kindness to them and mourned for their calamity (v. 13-14). So, he appeals to God to judge “for my vindication” (v. 23) and “according to your righteousness” (v. 24). In summary, David prays that God will judge his righteousness righteously.
So, should a Christian pray “according to my righteousness”? Not if that means a Pharisaic self-righteousness before God. But David does give us a model for how afflicted Christians can pray for justice when they have responded righteously in a conflict. At least, these psalms of David demonstrate that kind of prayer for us.
Why does this matter? Consider Christians living under threat of violent persecution, like in Nigeria today. How should they pray? In these psalms, God gives them language to pray for deliverance, for justice, for an end to the bloodshed and persecution and for fear not only based on God’s sovereign mercy, but also on the righteous acts he has wrought through them.
Brother or sister, when you are being wrongly attacked, slandered, or vilified, there are a host of biblical principles to apply – not returning evil for evil (Romans 12:21), loving your enemies (Matthew 5:44), and trusting in the God who judges justly (1 Peter 2:23), to name a few. But the psalms of David also teach us to pray that the Judge of all the earth will do what is right. We may plead the righteousness of Christ for our salvation, and in a conflict we may also plead that the Lord will decide for us righteously.
Cipplegate
