The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): How should we approach God with our needs and requests? Today on the Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, David brings his urgent petitions and pleadings boldly before God in prayer, giving us a model for how we as Christians, righteous men and women of God, might pray.

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Psalm 17 is yet another short prayer of David's. It opens with David presenting arguments and evidence to God as to why God should hear his prayers and rescue him. Open your Bible and listen along with us today as we unpack the truths of the Psalm 17 prayer together.

Dr. James Boice: If you've ever done any academic study of the Psalms, not studying the Psalms inductively as I hope you do do, but academically reading what others have said about them and how they are handled in a scholarly way, you'll know that one of the things commentators on the Psalms do is divide them into categories which they call genres. That is done in a different fashion, I suppose, with each commentator depending upon the particular categorization that appeals to him, but a typical division of the Psalms would go something like this. I draw it from Tremper Longman, who is an associate professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary and has written a very easy-to-read and helpful book entitled How to Read the Psalms.

He says you have hymn Psalms, and laments, thanksgiving Psalms, Psalms of remembrance, Psalms of confidence, wisdom Psalms and kingship Psalms. A hymn usually begins with a call to worship and then it gives reasons why we should praise God and praises him for those very things. A lament generally presents some problem that the psalmist has and calls out to God for help with the problem. A thanksgiving Psalm thanks God for some blessing. Sometimes the blessing is his response to a lament that has already been given. Sometimes as we read the Psalms, we sense that a Psalm of thanksgiving follows a Psalm of lament and probably is intended to be that way.

Then you have Psalms of remembrance and confidence; they do just what they sound like. Wisdom Psalms usually present two different lifestyles or ways of living, contrasting them and showing that the one is the way of blessing and another is the unfortunate way, the wrong way to live. Psalm 1 is a perfect example of that. It begins by contrasting the man who does not walk in the way of sinners with the man who does. The sinful man walks in the counsel of the wicked, he stands in the way of sinners, and he sits in the seat of the mockers, but not so the man whose delight is in the Lord. Then you have kingship Psalms. They are of two types. There are Psalms that praise the king of Israel and pray for God's blessing upon him, and then there are Psalms that look forward and beyond that to the Messiah, the great king who is going to come, and sometimes one Psalm will contain both elements.

What kind of a Psalm is Psalm 17 by that categorization? It's very hard to fit it into any one of those genres. I suppose, given the types I've just mentioned, the thing Psalm 17 best fits is a lament because here David is in trouble, his enemies are pressing in on every side, and he is asking God for help. But when I study it, it seems to me that what it most is is just a prayer. And not only that, it's a model prayer. It is interestingly enough the very first Psalm in the Psalter that is specifically called a prayer. You notice that up at the top of the Psalms there are those little titles. Some quite lengthy, Psalm 18 across the page has a very lengthy introduction. Psalm 17 is short, it merely says a prayer of David, but that's the very first time that word prayer has been used. You look back and you find different things, a Psalm of David, a Miktam of David, nobody knows what that is, and several other things, but that's the very first time it's called a prayer.

And what I'd like to suggest is that it is a great prayer and a model prayer and one from which we can learn. David was a great man of prayer and what he does in this prayer is present arguments to God for why God should hear his prayers. We don't hear that very much today. I can't recall ever having heard a sermon in which a pastor instructed me how to present arguments to God when I pray. And yet that was a very common thing in a previous age. The Puritans did that a lot. C.H. Spurgeon did it a great deal and made that one of the things that he urged upon the members of the congregation. God doesn't have to be persuaded to listen to us by means of our arguments. God is more than anxious to answer, but rather when we present our petitions to God by means of arguments, the very act of formulating the arguments sharpens our mind and sharpens our sense of what it is we're really asking and why God should actually be doing it. The real changes take place in us and of course that's quite beneficial. Spurgeon loved this Psalm and he said of David when he was writing about it, David would not have been a man after God's own heart if he had not been a man of prayer. And then he added, he was a master in the art of supplication.

When you begin to look at Psalm 17, you find right away that it's a very urgent prayer. David starts in by asking God to hear him and he doesn't mince words. Hear, O Lord, my righteous plea, listen to my cry, give ear to my prayer. Later on he urges God to do certain things which almost fit into the same category. What strikes us when we begin to read it, however, is not the urgency with which he prays, but rather the first of the three arguments that I find here. And it's that he is praying not with deceitful lips, but with lips that speak truth and from an upright heart. The way to put that into our own terminology is to say that what David is pleading here is that he is innocent. He does it very strongly. He begins in the very first line by asking God to hear his righteous plea. We live in a more timorous age and we're more introspective. Moreover, we have been taught to pray that we are sinful at all times and that even at our best we are unprofitable servants. So when we come to something like this, I think that most of us are troubled by it. Hear, O Lord, my righteous plea. Which of us would really dare to say that to the holy God?

Rather we angle up to the throne of grace and say, Lord, if you're not too busy and you're willing to listen to a person who's as sinful as I am, I have something here which is probably wrong and I don't know that I really have any right to present it to you, but at any rate if you would be willing to listen, this is more or less, you probably are not willing to listen, it's all right, but more or less this is what I would like to have you do. That is not the way David is praying. Hear, O Lord, my righteous plea. And furthermore he says it does not arise from deceitful lips. If you think that's strong, you go on to the next of these stanzas that begins with verse three and listen to what he says. Although you probe my heart and examine me at night, though you test me, you will find nothing. Doesn't Jeremiah say the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked? How can David say that? As for the deeds of men, by the word of your lips I have kept myself from the ways of the violent, my steps have held to your paths, my feet have not slipped.

What he's doing here is praying as a first approach to God that his heart is right before him. Now, I have to say of course that when he prays that he is righteous, he's not saying that he's sinless. You and I know that and we've also dealt with that earlier in the Psalms. When David pleads his innocence in the Psalms, generally he is pleading, and often it's quite explicit, that he is innocent of the charge that's been made against him. Quite often his enemies are accusing him of something and doing it wrongly and he goes to God because that's the only person he can go to. He says to God, you know I haven't done this, I'm innocent of this alleged crime and therefore I plead my innocence, vindicate me. Probably he's thinking about that here because verse two actually calls for vindication. May my vindication come from you. And yet I don't want to let it go as easily as that because here we have a model prayer, and what I want to say is that one solid basis for making requests to God is to come before him with an upright heart and with hands innocent of great transgressions.

Furthermore, I think we're encouraged to do that not only by David's example but by other things that are said in the scripture. Think of the case of Job, for example. Now Job was certainly not a sinless man. He was a sinner just as you and I are sinners. Nevertheless, in his case when God first mentions Job to Satan, as we're told about it in the early chapters of that book, God himself, not Job in this instance, calls attention to Job's upright character. He says to Satan, have you considered my servant Job? He is upright and blameless, there is none like him in all the earth. That's God speaking about Job. When you get to the very end of the book, which has to do with prayer, God says to the advisors, the false counselors of Job that made his life so difficult during the major portion of that book, I'm going to have my servant Job pray for you and I'm going to listen to him because he hasn't spoken folly as you have. God is saying there, I'm going to answer Job's prayer because Job is upright before me, he is innocent.

What I want to say is that you and I have to give more attention to that when we pray. And what we really need to do is to examine our hearts as we come to God and confess the sin that is there so that when we pray, we may pray with upright hearts and with a clear conscience. I want to suggest a few areas in which we can conduct a self-examination. It's proper to urge that upon ourselves because to give just one example, Paul when he's talking about coming to the communion table says that we're to do it, let every man examine himself so he doesn't eat of the bread or drink of the wine unworthily. So when we pray, we're supposed to examine ourselves and here are a few things that I would suggest. First of all, let's ask the question, are we being disobedient? When God speaks through Isaiah in the 59th chapter of that book, he says that his arm is not shortened nor is his ear heavy that it can't hear, but rather our sins have separated between him and us, and that's why we're not getting the answers to our prayers. We're disobeying his law.

So the first thing we have to do when we examine ourselves coming to God in prayer is ask the question, am I being disobedient? You have the moral law before you, you know what it says. Honor the Lord your God with all your heart, your mind, your soul, your voice. Are we trying to do that or are we dishonoring him by what we do? We're to worship God and God only. We're to remember the Sabbath to keep it holy. Do we use the Lord's day as a time of worship? Is it something special in our week or do we mix it up with all sorts of other things? How about our fathers and our mothers? Do we pay them the proper respect and honor that is their due? Do we break the law by stealing, by committing adultery or other kind of sexual sins? Are we coveting? If we're doing those things, how can we possibly pretend that we're coming before God with an upright heart? Certainly in those areas we are unable to plead our innocence as David does.

Let me ask another question. Are we being selfish when we pray? Naturally we're to pray for our own concerns. We're encouraged to do that and David himself is doing that. Here are his enemies pressing in on him round about, he's got a problem on his hands, he brings it to God. God, save me from my enemies. That is a perfectly proper prayer, but it is very easy in our prayers for proper requests for things that we need or which concern us to pass over into mere selfishness and we find that what we're really praying for is that God will bless us rather than others or bless us in ways that we really don't need or prosper us in ways that we just want because after all we just want to prosper in that way. One of the guards against that is to make it a point in our prayers always to pray for the needs of others before we pray for the needs of ourselves. Even in the Lord's Prayer when the Lord instructed us to pray, he didn't say that we should say give me this day my daily bread and keep me from evil, but it was always us and our. He always makes it plural.

Here's the third question. Are we neglecting some important duty? We come to God in prayer, but are we leaving something undone? We're instructed in the scripture to care for members of our family, for instance. Paul writing to Timothy said if a person doesn't care for the members of his own household, he's worse than an infidel, that is worse than an unbeliever. Why should God hear the prayers of one who is worse than an unbeliever? We certainly have things that we ought to do. We say in one of the collects, from morning prayer in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done and we have done those things which we ought not to have done and there is no health in us. We have to deal with the undone things, the neglected things, as well as the outright transgressions of God's law.

Here's another question. Are we doing some wrong or have we done some wrong that we should make right? Jesus himself gave us instructions along those lines. He said when you bring your gift to the altar, if you remember that you have a problem with your brother, leave the gift at the altar, go make it right and then come back and offer your offering. That sort of thing can be a barrier to prayer and worship. How about priorities? There's another category. Are our priorities right when we pray? Prayer will certainly indicate what priorities we have if we're praying honestly. Are they right? Are we praying first of all for God's glory and God's will and God's kingdom as the Lord instructed us to do in what we call the Lord's Prayer and after that for our own interests and even then only coupling those with the interest and needs of other people? Or do we pray for those things which concern us and which probably if God would grant them would only do us harm?

Self-examination should be a part of it and having done that, we should be able to pray as David does here, Lord, hear my righteous plea because it does not arise from sinful lips. I suppose that in our day where we in the church in America are not certainly very well known for prayer, and in which religion is at a very low ebb, that this sort of thing is almost beyond most Christian people. We have to come praying for our many sins and asking forgiveness for our many sins and to think of praying to God fervently and effectively on the basis of an upright character, well that is almost beyond us but it ought not to be. David who models prayer shows us how it should be done. He does it in verses one through five.

Now he has a second argument and the second argument begins in verse six. It goes from verses six through 12 and it has to do with the character of God. In this case it has to do mostly with his love. He speaks about it in verse seven. Show the wonder of your great love, you who save by your right hand those who take refuge in you from their foes. That verse, verse seven, is the heart of the prayer and it stands almost at the very center. Now we read that, show the wonder of your great love, and it's meaningful but it's not nearly as meaningful to us in the English as it is in the Hebrew for anybody who can understand that because when it says love or great love as it's translated here, that's not a word simply denoting some kind of general benevolence of God, the kind of love he shows when he sends rain upon the just and the unjust alike. There is such a thing as common grace but that's not what it's talking about here. The Hebrew word is hesed and what that refers to is covenant love.

It's kind of a hard word to translate. The New International Version gives us a very weak translation, great love, and it's true it's great, but that doesn't say very much about it. Sometimes that word is translated, especially in the King James Bible, loving-kindness. Or better yet in some of the modern versions, steadfast love. Because that really begins to get to the idea. This is the love God shows when he, as we read, sets his love upon an individual or upon a people. It's the kind of love he showed when he established a covenant with Abraham and with his descendants after him, promising to do certain things, saying I will be your God and you will be to me a people. It's the kind of love he showed to the nation of Israel as a whole when he entered into covenant with them. Now that's what it's talking about. And so when we read it, we find that's a very, very strong thing that David's pleading.

He's not just saying in a general way to God, God, I know you're a good God and therefore I know you like to help people and here am I, I need some help. I suppose that would be a valid prayer in itself but it's much stronger than that. He's saying to God, God, you are one who has set your covenant love upon your people and I am a member of that covenant people. So I plead with you on the basis of your steadfast love and your great promises which you do not break. Do you ever do that when you pray to God? Do you know that you can come to God that way, pleading the promises, knowing that you're a member of his covenant people? I want to suggest it's even stronger than that. Again, this is something that's a little hard to see immediately in the English unless you're very, very careful, but this verse seven contains within it very clear references to the song of Moses that you find in Exodus 15.

There are three words there that appear in that earlier Psalm in which Moses is praising God for his deliverance of the people from Pharaoh. Great love, hesed, the covenant love is one of them. The wonder of your great love is another. You save by your right hand, that is another. All three of those ideas there appear in several verses in Exodus 15. It's very clear. In English it's sort of clear, you recognize there's a parallel, but in the Hebrew it's the same words that occur in both passages. And not only that, the very next verse, verse eight, has echoes of another song of Moses. The very end of Deuteronomy in the 32nd chapter you have a hymn in which Moses praises God followed by his blessing upon the 12 tribes. But in the song of Deuteronomy 32, you have that phrase the apple of your eye, very clear where that comes from. That's an unusual phrase, but it comes from Deuteronomy and under the shadow of your wings, that occurs in the same context right there.

So when you have not only one reference but two references, and you have not only in Psalm 17 one verse but two verses that refer back to those Psalms of Moses, it's quite evident what David has in mind. Those are the Psalms in which Moses, the great lawgiver, praised God for his deliverance. What David is saying is that this God to whom he is praying is the same God. The God who was faithful to his people then and delivered them from Egypt, the God who was faithful to Moses through all the years of his wandering in the wilderness, who kept them, who provided for the people, who directed them every step of their way. That is the same God who is David's God, and it's to that God that he prays. He says God, remember me according to your great love, show the wonder of your great love to me as you showed it to the others. I'd encourage you to pray that way. We sometimes have such a privatistic approach to religion that we think that it's to be measured only by our own experience. That's a bad way to do it because generally our own experience isn't very great.

But if the God we worship is the God of all the saints who have gone before, then if it's to his character that we appeal when we pray, then our horizons in prayer are expanded and we can be bold to say this is the God I'm praying to and he's the same God as our fathers before us and he will work the same way for me. We change, he changes not. That's what the scriptures say. So the God of Moses is our God and he has not changed and the God of David is our God and he has not changed and God the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ is our God and he has not changed. That God is the same yesterday, today and forever and we can appeal to him, we can pray as we approach him on the basis of that character.

There's a third argument in the prayer. I guess it seems fairly humdrum to us after the first two. Talk about innocence, that gets your attention, and talk about the covenant love of God, that is the weightiest idea of the Psalm. Here beginning in verse 10, he talks about the danger that surrounds him. It seems humdrum to us, but it wasn't humdrum to David, you can be sure of that. It was a real danger. He was surrounded by enemies and they were out to get him. Out to get him really didn't mean in that day they were just going to make it difficult for him at work or they were going to see if they could hurt him financially. They were going to kill him if they could. He spells it out. They close up their callous hearts. That's a difficult thing to translate. The Hebrew has to do with them being enclosed in their fat. It must be an idiom but most people don't know quite what to do with that. It seems to refer to them being implacable, that is they were people without mercy, which is why the NIV translates it this way, they close up their callous hearts. You're not going to expect any mercy from these enemies.

And their mouths speak with arrogance. David's already talked about that. We've seen it in our earlier studies, how the wicked make great boasts against God. They say I've gotten here by my own strength, who is ever going to hold me up to account? That's the kind of enemies he had, he couldn't even appeal to God. Don't do that because God will be mad, they don't care about God. Then he talks about what they're trying to do. They have tracked me down, they surround me with eyes alert to throw me to the ground. They're like a lion hungry for the prey, a great lion crouching in cover. They are only waiting for the moment to spring upon me and take away my life.

I don't know how to apply that in your case, but you probably know that yourself. You know whatever danger you're in, if you are in danger, you can plead that. One Bible teacher of an earlier generation said that whenever anybody was after him, he always said to God, Lord, your property is in danger. He meant he was in danger and he belonged to God and it was up to God to protect his own property and he was sure that God would. You and I could do that. You can say as you go into a difficult situation at work or at home or in the world or anywhere at all, you can say God, I'm yours, I'm here to serve you, this is a dangerous situation, keep that which is yours. I appeal to you to do it. Certainly David knew how to do that and he did it again and again. We'll find it again and again in the Psalms.

In verse 13 we come to the wrap-up. There are two stanzas there, verses 13 and 14 are one, and then the second half of verse 14 and verse 15 are another. The New International Version translates it well. It's an interesting thing we find here in terms of its form. I've been trying to teach something about the way the Psalms are written, mingling it in here so you don't get bored as we deal with the Psalms, and last time I talked about Hebrew parallelism. It's the most obvious feature of Hebrew verse. That is the way in which something is said and then it is repeated again. Sometimes it's even said in such a way that in a worship service the person who was leading it would say the first line and then those who were worshipping would say the second line. There's a whole Psalm later on that we'll come to in which the people say your love endures forever over and over again, I think about 30 times in the Psalm. They repeat that after everything the leader says.

Parallelism is not a simple thing in Hebrew verse. It has all kinds of variations and that's what makes it so interesting. When we were talking about Psalm 15, I pointed out several kinds of that. Sometimes the second line virtually repeats what's in the first line, like Psalm 15:2, he whose walk is blameless and who does what is righteous. The second half of that almost says again what's in the first half. Sometimes it does it in a contrary fashion. The first half is positive, the second half is negative. You do this but you don't do that. In the 15th Psalm, the second half of verse two and the first part of verse three have that form. Who speaks the truth from his heart and has no slander on his tongue. Again that's a parallelism but the first is positive and then the second part is negative. Sometimes the second part adds to the first part as if to say and not only this but also that. You have an example there also in Psalm 15, who despises a vile man but honors those who fear the Lord. He not only turns from evil, he also follows that which is good.

The reason I mention that is that there is another kind of parallelism that I didn't mention in the study of Psalm 15 because it doesn't occur there, but which does occur here. It's called chiasm and the reason it's called that is because the Greek word khi or kai is in the form of an X and that more or less describes what happens. The first line has the form A-B and then the second line has the form B-A. Look, you find it in verse two, kind of subtly. My vindication comes from you, may your eyes see what is right. My vindication refers to David, comes from you refers to God, may your eyes, that is God's, see what is right, that is me. So what David does there is A-B-B-A. It's a parallelism and it has some variety. The reason I mention that again is because sometimes it's not just a couplet that has that form but sometimes the entire composition does. And that's what you find here in Psalm 17. The form of the Psalm, the prayer thus far has been this. David protests his innocence and then he speaks of his enemies.

Here at the very end, beginning with verse 13, you have the same thing in reverse. David speaks of his enemies and then he ends up by protesting his innocence. Verse 15, and I in righteousness, I will see your face. When he gets to the end of the Psalm, he's gotten right back to the point at which he started out. That is a great thing to be able to do in prayer. To come to God in prayer, to have your heart open before him, knowing that he sees it anyway, letting it all hang out before him, presenting all your needs and then having done that, turn away again with an upright heart to go into the world to confront the problems or face the task he's placed before you. That is what David does and it's the way a prayer should operate.

That very last verse, and I in righteousness will see your face, in the King James it says and as for me. Harry Ironside, who loved the Psalms and wrote a helpful though very brief treatment of them, said he always liked to put a number of verses together there when he got to that place. Psalm 18:30, Psalm 103:15, and this verse, verse 15 of 17. The first verse, Psalm 18:30, says as for God, his way is perfect. The second text, Psalm 103:15, says as for man, he is like grass. The third verse says as for me, in righteousness I will seek your face. Whenever we look to God we say his way is perfect, it doesn't make any difference what comes into our lives, whether it's relatively pleasant times or suffering or pain or sickness or trouble at work, whatever it may be. David was surrounded by enemies who were trying to take away his life. Whatever that may be, nevertheless God makes no mistakes. His way is perfect and his ways with us are perfect, it's good to know that. It's the point at which we start out.

We turn from that to man and we say as for God, his way is perfect, but as for man, what is he? He is like grass, grass that springs up today and is gone tomorrow, which is quickly burnt out by the summer sun, which is gathered into bundles and burnt. That's what man is like, here today, gone tomorrow. What then? David says because I know that, because I know that God's way is perfect and I know that man is like grass, as for me, I'm going to pursue the face of God. In righteousness I will seek your face and when I awake, I know I am going to be satisfied with your likeness. May I suggest nothing else is really going to satisfy you? You and I live in a world that's trying to convince us that we'll be satisfied if we only follow its lifestyle, if we only buy this, do this, buy this, spend this, go there, all of that, then you'll be satisfied. But you know you're not, you'll never be satisfied with anything, you'll not even ever be satisfied totally with another person because you see as Saint Augustine said so long ago, our hearts are restless and they have no peace until they rest in you. God has given us an infinite vacuum in our souls. And the only thing that can fill that is the infinite God himself.

That's what prayer is meant to do. It's to bring us into the presence of God and satisfy us with God and his likeness and his will and his ways and above all with his person. I urge it upon you and I urge you to learn from David who certainly knew how to pray. Let us pray. Our Father, we don't know how to pray well and we don't do it often, most of us, but we need to learn and we want to learn and here we have the opportunity to learn from this great Old Testament saint, King David, with all his responsibilities, but who nevertheless knew that his strength comes from you and he had to seek your face. Teach us how to do it. Enable us by your grace to so cleanse our lives of known sin that we can come with an upright heart and an innocent life before you to plead your grace, with minds and hearts taught by your spirit so we know what you are like, that you are a covenant-keeping God, and when we approach you that way, not to fear to present the real need, the danger, and to look to you to intervene and save us in it, above all manifesting yourself.

Grant that as we see you, we might grow in grace and so by that same grace live in increasingly acceptable ways to the praise of the glory of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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