Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: Psalm 4 | Date: May 28, 2023 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

Today we look at the fourth psalm, a psalm that does not specifically identify the occasion of it, but we will take some guesses into that as we go along. Psalm 4. You’ll notice in the superscript that we have stated for us is the Psalm of David. I know this can be confusing, so I’m going to say it again. I’ll probably say it several more times as well until we make sure we understand it well.

There are two parts, often, of the superscriptions above the Psalms. One part of it identifies the authorship; the other part identifies the performance of the psalm. The performance aspect, when it appears, always appears first and, in fact, ought to be considered as the postscript to the previous psalm. There’s been some wonderful scholarly work that’s been done on that to demonstrate that. You can see that in our book when it comes out if you’re that interested. But that can be confusing. It’s not the entire superscript that goes to the previous; it’s just the performance aspect that will be a postscript to the previous psalm. So in this case, Psalm 4, we have “To the choirmaster” at the top—that’s for Psalm 3. But you’ll notice at the top of Psalm 5, we have “To the choirmaster” again. This has to do with performance, so that’s the subscript or the postscript to Psalm 4. So in any case, we have both the performance and the authorship for this. This is a Psalm of David, and that will become very important in working our way through it.

All right, Psalm 4, a Psalm of David.

Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness. You have given me relief when I was in distress. Be gracious to me and hear my prayer. O men, how long shall my honor be turned into shame? How long will you love vain words and seek after lies? Selah. But know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself. The Lord hears when I call to him. Be angry and do not sin. Ponder in your own hearts on your beds and be silent. Selah. Offer right sacrifices and put your trust in the Lord. There are many who say, “Who will show us some good?” Lift up the light of your face upon us, O Lord. You have put more joy in my heart than when their grain and wine abound. In peace, I will both lie down and sleep. For you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.

And then the postscript: “To the choirmaster, for the flutes.”

Let’s bow for prayer. Our Father, our hearts are stirred when we sing of your greatness, your holiness. As we sing this song that we have just sung, our minds go to the fourth chapter of Revelation and the great scene of all of the world rulers bowing before the God of majesty. And then we think: this is the God who loves us. This is the God who has come to us in His Son to save rebellious sinners. This is the God who has sent His Spirit to transform our hearts and draw us to Himself. We praise you, Lord, for your greatness. We praise you for your goodness. This morning, we praise you for your word as well, and we ask that you’ll open our eyes and our hearts to see it and help us to learn from the experience and the writing of King David to serve you more faithfully and to trust you more firmly. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

An Overview Of The Psalm

Well, as you can tell from the first line of the psalm, this is a lament psalm. You have the direct address and the introductory petition. That is the mark of a lament psalm. And this follows the usual form of a lament psalm with one little bit of a twist. In verse 1, we have the direct address to God and the introductory petition that God will be favorable to him and God be gracious: “Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness.” Then in verse 2, we have the lament that men are turning his glory to shame. And then verses 3 to 5—and this is where it’s a bit different—we have the confidence section. That’s typical of the Lament Psalms. But what’s different here is that in this confidence section, he’s not expressing his confidence to God, but rather he’s expressing it to his critics in a series of admonitions that he gives them, and we’ll work our way through those. That’s verses 3 to 5. So he has a series of seven admonitions that he gives to his critics.

Then we get to verses 6 and 7. We have the next typical portion of a lament psalm, and that’s the petition that God will favor his people in harvest: “Give us good, fill my heart with joy.” And then, verse 8, we have the confidence and praise in that the king goes to sleep: “In peace, I will both lie down and sleep. For you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.” So there’s an overview of the psalm.

Now the superscript, as I’ve said, tells us this is a psalm of David. That becomes very important for us; it’s essential to understand and interpret the psalm. The king is lamenting a crisis of some kind. He’s facing opposition and mistrust. And that’s expressed in verse 2: “O men, how long shall my honor be turned into shame?”

Three Questions That Determine The Interpretation

Now there are three questions that determine the interpretation of this psalm and how to understand it. And I have to say up front this: I’ve learned this from Dr. Bruce Waltke. I have found in reading scores of other commentaries on the passage, I have found, I think, one, maybe two other commentaries that have picked up on some of the things that he has caught, particularly in the Hebrew text here. Remember I’ve said early on in the lessons learning how to read and understand the Psalms that we can’t read the Psalms like we read narrative. This is poetry, and one of the marks of poetry is brevity. The expressions are terse, and often the meanings are hidden more. They’re more subtly conveyed, and you have to read it more slowly, more thoughtfully. And this is a perfect example of it here.

There are three things that we have to answer in this psalm to understand where he’s going. Number one is in verse 2: What is the identity of these men who oppose the king? “O men,” he says. We have to determine that. And then we have a translation issue in verse 4. Those of you with an ESV, like I have, it reads: “Be angry and do not sin.” Those of you with an NIV, it reads: “Tremble and do not sin.” So we’ll have to work our way through that. And then in verse 7 there’s another translation issue. Those of you who have the ESV like I have, you have: “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.” There’s a comparative statement. Those of you who have an NIV, it’s a temporal statement: “Fill my heart with joy when their grain and new wine abound.” So we’ll have to work our way through that, and these are not just extraneous details; these are essential to the interpreting of the psalm.

Direct Address And Introductory Petition

All right, verse 1, we have the direct address and the introductory petition. He takes his concern to God with this introductory request: “Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness. You have given me relief when I was in distress. Be gracious to me and hear my prayer.” Now again, there’s a difference in translation of the versions that we have here. In the ESV, what we have here is two petitions. There are three lines here in verse 1. There are three lines, and the first and the third are a petition. And then in the middle, you have a historical statement: “You have given me relief when I was in distress.” The NIV, those of you with that will notice, you have just three petitions: “Answer me, give me relief, have mercy on me and hear my prayer.” Now that’s because the verb in the second line is a little ambiguous. It can be translated as a simple past tense, or it can be translated as an imperative, “give me relief,” and that’s the way the NIV has taken it. Given that the first and third lines are petitions, I suspect that the second line ought to be taken that way as well. I think the NIV has it right there. So we have three petitions: Answer me when I call to you, my righteous God. Give me relief from my distress. Have mercy on me and hear my prayers.

All right, so though David has not yet expressed his lament, the atmosphere already is that of a crisis in verse 1, right at the beginning of the lament. And again, that’s typical of the laments. Be gracious to me. Give me relief. Have mercy. So: I’m helpless here. I need help. I’m unable to handle this myself. God, intervene for me. And then he calls Him “the God of my righteousness,” or NIV again, “my righteous God.” Either way, the idea is that he’s appealing to God’s righteousness here, or in the case of the ESV here, David’s own righteousness. But in either case, he’s asking God to right a wrong that is going on. The opposition that he is facing is undeserved, it’s wrong, and so he appeals to God, who is righteous, to set things right. And that’s verse 1. And that sets us up then for the rest of the psalm.

The Identity Of The Opponents

And so we have then in verse 2 the lament. And here he specifies his concern: “O men, how long shall my honor be turned into shame? How long will you love vain words and seek after lies?” Now the expression “how long”—you see that often in the lament Psalms as well—indicates for us that whatever this problem is, it’s been going on for some time. “How long shall my honor be turned into shame? How long will you love vain words and seek after lies?” So some are turning against him. There’s a mistrust of some kind.

And the first question now to answer, as I mentioned earlier, is: who are these men in verse 2? And it is, although it’s missed very often, it is fairly easy to identify what he’s talking about here. Literally, the reading here in the Hebrew means “sons of men.” But there are a couple of different expressions in the Hebrew where you can say “sons of men” or “O men.” And they each have different connotations. One of them, “sons of men,” just means people, ordinary people. The expression that’s used here is a different one, and it doesn’t mean just people. It means important men, leading men, those who stand forward in a given community—”highborn men” is a way you could translate it. Highborn men, nobility.

Now, just to show you that, if you would look at Psalm 49—keep your hand in Psalm 4, we’ll be right back—but look at Psalm 49, verses 1 and 2: “Hear this, all peoples, give ear, all inhabitants of the world, both low [sons of man] and high [and there’s the expression we have in Psalm 4, highborn], rich and poor together.” So there they’re both used in contrast. And the second one there is the one we have in Psalm 4. It’s the highborn or the nobility. If you look over again in Psalm 62, verse 9, we have it again: “Those of low estate are but a breath. Those of high estate [and there’s the expression we have in Psalm 4], those of high estate are a delusion. In the balances they go up; they are together lighter than a breath.”

So what we have then, and David identifies them for us in verse 2, is highborn men, important men. This is David’s leadership, his nobility. Maybe we could say it’s his cabinet. These are important men in the kingdom who for some reason now are turning against him. And so the crisis that David faces is a crisis of leadership. The important men in his kingdom—not that any are unimportant, but the leadership, the important men in that sense—are turning on him. And how long will this go on?

Well, the nature of their offense then, he tells us as well in verse 2: “How long shall my honor be turned into shame?” That is, these men who before thought so highly of me and they praised me, they sang songs about me, and now they’re critical of me and they’re undermining me. “David can’t do it. David’s not up to it.” They were previously supportive. They acknowledged his divinely appointed glory. And now they’re defecting. They’re undermining him. You see them talking in the corners, and you hear the scuttle. And they’re turning against him, and you can then almost sense the hurt as David writes the psalm.

And then the rest of verse 2, we find that their mistrust of David entails apostasy: “How long will you love vain words and seek after lies?” Now, the New International Version that you have here paraphrases this, but I think it gets the sense very well: “How long will you love delusions and seek false gods?” It’s a paraphrase, but he gets the sense, I think, of what’s going on. To turn against the king in Israel necessarily means you’re turning against God, because God has appointed him. This is God’s anointed. And you turn against the king, you turn against God. And I think verse 5 may hint of that, where it says, “Offer right sacrifices.” Evidently, they’re turning to another god, and we’ll see more of that in a minute. So the point here is that there’s mistrust of David, and that entails a mistrust of God, or an apostasy from God. Rather than acknowledging David’s appointed glory from God, they’re now trash-talking him, they’re criticizing him, they’re undermining him, they’re defecting from him. And having rejected David, they’ve rejected the Lord. And rejecting the Lord, now they’re looking to other gods, which we’ll see presumably will be the god Baal.

The Occasion Of The Crisis

All right, that brings the next question, then. What occasioned the crisis here that David is lamenting? Verse 6 gives us a hint. We’ll come back to it in a minute, but notice it just briefly here. Here in verse 6, he quotes the people at large: “There are many who say, ‘Who will show us some good?'” What’s the good? What is the good that they’re looking for? They’re looking for something from God. “Lift up the light of your face upon us, O Lord. Give us some good.” And so we’ll have to determine what that good is.

And then in verse 7, the king speaks: “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.” Now here we’ve got to take our time with some translation again. I don’t like to be that persnickety as we go through it in a message, but I think we have to for this. This is the key to the entire psalm in verse 7. The ESV here reads: “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.” The NIV reads: “Fill my heart with joy when their grain and new wine abound.” Now the difficulty here is not that it’s just plain black and white; how should this be translated? Either translation is justifiable. The particular Hebrew preposition here with the word “time” can be in a comparative sense or it can be in a temporal sense—so “from the time” or “when it happens,” or can it be in a comparative sense or “more joy than when the harvest is full.” So there’s two ways of looking at it; it can be translated either way.

But this particular expression that we have in the Hebrew here appears elsewhere in the Old Testament, and every other time—there’s no exception to it—every other time, it is in a temporal sense, not a comparative sense. I think the NIV has it right; it probably shows Dr. Waltke’s influence in the Translation Committee. It is: “Fill my heart when the grain and new wine abound.” You have an example, if you’d like, of this same expression in Isaiah 48, verse 16, and some other places as well.

So the king here, in verse 7, is not praying for something that will give more joy than a full harvest. He’s asking for joy in a full harvest, when we have the full harvest. “Fill my heart with joy when their grain and new wine abound.” In other words, then, David’s crisis of leadership is occasioned by a drought, a famine. There’s no rain, and as a result of it, people are mistrusting the king. You’ve got to blame someone; the buck stops there—blame the king. And in fact, in a historical setting, that makes perfect sense. If it sounds silly to you, I assure you it makes perfect sense in a historical setting. I’m particularly dependent here on the work of John Eaton in his book Kingship and the Psalms, where he demonstrates that ancient Near Eastern kings were responsible for their people’s well-being in every respect, including the rain. And so you look at the Hittite kings, and the Assyrian kings, and the Egyptian kings, and you look at them all, and they all boast about how God hears their prayers, and the kings take credit. “When I pray for rain, it comes. And the reason you have rain is because I prayed for it. The sun rises and sets on my prayers. The reason the ground is fertile is because I prayed for it, and you owe this to your king.” And this is all around Israel’s neighboring nations.

And here we come now to Israel, and David isn’t like that. He’s not a pagan king who would boast like that. But he prays. He looks to the Lord who anointed him and appointed him to office, and he prays, and there’s nothing. There’s no rain. And the famine continues. And this, for some extended period of time—how long will this go on? Well, as a result and consequence of that, the nobility are becoming impatient, they’re losing confidence in their king, and they’re turning to false gods, presumably the god Baal, who’s the storm god, naturally the one you’d turn to.

It’s significant here, by the way, in Psalm 4, that there’s no mention of any enemy. David doesn’t mention any enemies. Now, commentators on the book of Psalms routinely mention David’s enemies in this psalm. David doesn’t mention any at all. That’s a rare exception in the laments. The reason is he’s not facing an enemy here. You have people who are defecting, but there’s no external enemy. There’s no threat of military invasion; there’s nothing like that in Psalm 4. The problem is an internal one, and they’ve lost confidence in him. The opposition in view in Psalm 4 is so far at least only verbal, and it’s disloyalty. The leadership is becoming disaffected from the king, not because of an external threat, but because of a famine.

Now, then that raises the question: what’s the occasion of this? And we don’t know for certain, but there’s one occasion in the life of David that stands out as our best guess at least, and I think the probable explanation for what the occasion is, and that’s in 2 Samuel 21. There we have a three-year famine in Israel that’s mentioned. And the narrator tells us very explicitly it was three years, year after year. It was a long time for a famine. People were no doubt suffering from it. And you read 2 Samuel chapter 21—we won’t go there now, we don’t have the time—but in the light of that famine, David finally inquires of the Lord: what’s going on, why this famine? And the Lord responds—remember David is a prophet—and the Lord responds to David and says: “There is blood guilt on Saul and his house because he put the Gibeonites to death.”

Now, Gibeon is a little town about six miles northwest of Jerusalem. And at some point—it’s not recorded for us in the historical narrative, but we find it here, mentioned by the Lord to David in 2 Samuel 21—Saul evidently did some slaughter of the men of Gibeon. How extensive it was, we don’t know, but evidently extensive enough. And so now, in consequence of that, there’s a famine, God says. That’s why I’ve sent it. And the reason it’s so bad is, one, it was a slaughter, but two, it was more importantly than that: a couple of generations back, Joshua had led the people into the land, and they’re knocking out everybody in the land. The Gibeonites see this coming, and the Gibeonites said, “We don’t want this to happen to us.” You remember they had this little subtle ruse that they bring into Joshua, and they tricked their way into making a treaty with Joshua? And that treaty is binding. And it’s binding permanently. And Saul evidently sees the Gibeonites and he’s somewhat resentful—maybe it’s national pride, I don’t know what it is—but he doesn’t like the treaty and so he breaks the treaty and goes in and wipes them out. And God says, “Now there’s blood guilt on Israel because of the works of the king.”

Well, David got his answer and so he goes to the men of Gibeon. “How can we repay you for what’s been done? How can we make this right?” Well, it’s such a serious offense you can’t just give them money. A life for a life. Well, Saul’s dead. How do you deal with this? David says, “What do you need?” And the men of Gibeon said, “Give us seven of Saul’s sons, and we’ll hang them before the Lord.” It had to be a gut-wrenching thing for David to do. But he hands over the seven men, the sons of Saul, to the men of Gibeon. They hang them. And then we read of their burial. And then we read, later after that, God responded to the plea for the land.

I suspect that’s the background of Psalm 4, during that famine. We have three years of famine. Three years of famine is just devastating to any culture, particularly an agrarian country or a pre-modern country. It’s not like you can send off an email to Nebraska and say, “Send us a few shiploads of wheat.” It’s not going to happen. And it’s devastating for them. And now Psalm 4, as a result, the leaders are turning against the king and they’re turning against his God. “David can’t cut it. He’s in over his head. He’s not the king we need. We need a better one. A better king would have better protection and better care for his people.”

Well, that then, in turn, explains the “good” of verse 6: “There are many who say, ‘Who will show us some good?'” The good is rain, a fruitful harvest. And actually there’s precedent for that in the Psalms and elsewhere in the Old Testament where the “good” simply refers to the rain or to the harvest that comes. And in fact, there’s one commentator that I found who paraphrases this, translates it very freely, and he says: “Who will show us some rain?” I think that’s the sense of it. And so in verse 6: “Who will show us some rain? Who will give us some good?” And then they pray: “Lord, lift up the light of your face upon us. Lord, give us rain.” You can sense then something of the severity of the crisis. This drought has been staggering to the people and that now is David’s crisis. It’s not his fault, but he’s being faulted for it. The opposition is unfair and it’s unfounded, but it’s growing. And so in verse 7, David prays for God to give him joy when the full grain abounds.

The Admonitions

Now with all of that in mind, now we can come to better understand the admonitions. This is David’s confidence section in the psalm in verses 3 to 5. David responds:

But know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself. The Lord hears when I call to him. Be angry and do not sin. Ponder in your own hearts on your beds and be silent. Offer right sacrifices and put your trust in the Lord.

So this is the confidence section of David’s lament psalm. David’s faith is not wavering. He’s not questioning whether God is God. He’s not questioning whether God is good. But he turns to his critics and admonishes them in the psalm. He admonishes the detractors.

First of all, verse 3, the top of the verse: “Know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself.” Guess who that is? That’s David. God has set apart the godly for himself. David’s confidence here is confidence in his divine appointment. “God has made me king,” and his confidence in that promise is unwavering. “I belong to God. I am his king by his appointment. And you better know that. Know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself. The Lord hears when I call to him.” So David’s first admonition then to his critics is: don’t doubt it. I am the Lord’s king.

And then in verse 4, at the top of the verse, we have a pair of admonitions: “Be angry and do not sin.” Now again, we have a translation issue here that I mentioned. The NIV translates it, not “be angry,” but “tremble and do not sin.” And that, by the way, is the same way that the King James translates it and the way that the New American Standard translates it as well. Now the verb here, translated either “be angry” or “tremble”—the Hebrew verb here means to tremble. It means to shake. But it depends on the context to connote what kind of trembling is in view. Is it fear or is it anger? Trembling with anger, trembling with fear. What’s going on? You have to go to the context for it to understand that. Well, the usual connotation of this verb in the Old Testament is that of fear. And in the context here in verse 4, “be angry” doesn’t seem to make any sense in the context. And so I think the NIV has it right: “Tremble,” that is tremble in fear. Tremble in fear of apostasy. Tremble before God. Tremble before God and do not sin by turning away from God and from his king. Tremble before God, do not sin by turning against him, against the king or the God who appointed him. So it’s a warning about the consequences of apostasy. In opposing me, you oppose God. Be very afraid. That’s the sense of it.

And then, we have, in verse 4, another pair of exhortations that continue that same thought: “Ponder in your own hearts on your bed and be silent.” Ponder in your own hearts on your bed and be silent. That is, when you lie in bed at night, alone, quiet, and you’re thinking, and your mind is pondering all of this, be silent. Again, it connotes some kind of fear. Be afraid. Hold your tongue. Consider your actions carefully. Search your conscience when you’re in bed tonight, alone. That’s the sense of this.

And then verse 5, we have a final pair of admonitions: “Offer right sacrifices and put your trust in the Lord.” Offer right sacrifices and put your trust in the Lord. So he’s calling his leaders back to the faithful worship of God. Trust in the Lord and offer sacrifices to Him, not to Baal, the supposed storm god. Now note again—and we’ll see this more as we go along—this is common in the Psalms. It’s very common in the Lament Psalms that they call us to trust God in the face of contrary circumstances. David here does not offer any explanation for the lack of rain. Evidently, he doesn’t know that yet. If the situation is 2 Samuel 21, it’s before this was revealed to him. But he’s telling them: “Put your trust in God.” Even a famine is no reason to mistrust the Lord. Even anything else is no reason to mistrust the Lord. He is always deserving of our trust and we are obliged always to honor him with the trust that he deserves.

And so David exhorts his leaders: Know your king (verse 3). Verse 4: Understand the consequences of your sin, be very afraid, search your heart, listen to your conscience. And then verse 5: Hold fast to the Lord our God. This is tantamount to a call to repentance and faith. Trust in God, turn away from your sin, in your opposition to me and to the Lord. He doesn’t try to explain why God has withheld the rain. He just calls them to trust. That’s very important. No explanation given, just trust the Lord.

David’s Confidence And Praise

Well then in verse 7, we have David’s petition for rain: “Fill my heart with joy when their grain and new wine abound.” And then verse 8, we have David’s confidence and praise: “In peace, I will both lie down and sleep. For you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.”

And we saw this last week in Psalm 3. Psalm 3, and again now in Psalm 4, David mentions that he sleeps. In Psalm 3, it was a morning prayer. He says, reflecting back on it: “I lay down and slept. I woke again, for the Lord sustained me.” And now in Psalm 4, we have an evening prayer. He’s looking toward the sleep: “In peace, I will both lie down and sleep. For you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.” And I mentioned this last week, that if we’re not careful, when we read through a poem like this, you’ll read through it too quickly, not carefully enough, and you’ll miss the significance of the sleep. “Okay, he went to bed.” But in Psalm 3, you remember, it was David on the run from Absalom, out in the wild, by himself, without any protection. His life’s in danger, and his trust in God was such that: “I laid down and I slept.” And now we have the same. We have a potential mutiny going on in his kingdom. He says, “You know what? I’m gonna go to bed and I’m gonna sleep. And I’m gonna trust the Lord.” In both Psalm 3 and in Psalm 4, David entrusts himself to God with such confidence that even though the danger remains, it doesn’t interrupt the sleep.

And so we reach the end of the Psalm now, and David’s prayer is still unanswered. There’s still no rain. The crisis presumably is still there. And yet he’s so confident in God that he says, “I’m going to bed. And I’m going to sleep. I’m not going to fret over this.” The king’s heart is calm. He’s at peace. And he’s at peace because he trusts the Lord. And then we have the postscript: “To the choirmaster, for the flutes.” David intends the people of God to sing this with him with some musical accompaniment.

How Do We Sing This Song?

So the question is, then, how do we sing this song? How does this psalm become ours to sing, to read, to pray? How can we sing this psalm? Well, the answer to that question is a question of perspective. Where do we find ourselves in Psalm 4?

It might be that as we read through Psalm 4 and pick up all of these details, we can best identify not with David, but with his critics. They’re going through a time of crisis and they begin to lose confidence in their king. They begin to defect. And in our time of crisis, we can fall apart and lose confidence in our king and begin to defect. And it might be that in our crisis what we need in Psalm 4 most is the admonitions of verses 3 to 5. “Know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself.” Don’t turn away from this king. Be very afraid of turning away from this king. And we need to remember the promises of our king: “I’m with you always, even to the end of the world.” “I’ll never leave you. I’ll never forsake you.” “When you pass through the waters, I’ll be with you.” “There’s no suffering taken, temptation taken, but such is common to man. I’ll make a way to escape.” “Suffering of this present time is not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed in us.” It might be that we need to remember these admonitions; we are challenged back to faith ourselves. Over and again, over and again, over and again in the Psalms, they call us to a robust kind of faith that defies the circumstances. It might be, it might be in your crisis, your pressures, you need to focus on these admonitions and you need to hear David’s admonition: Don’t mistrust your king. And in every event, we owe it to God to honor Him with the trust that He deserves, whether it’s in sickness, financial loss, or job loss. And I’ll say it, even if a loved one is taken, we may trust our king always to do what is right and what is good and what is wise. It might be that we, in the midst of some pressures and crisis, sing the psalm with tears. But we trust our King always to do what is right.

Now, of course, what we want as we sing this psalm is not to identify with his critics. We want to identify with David. And what we want is to sing this song of faith and confidence with David and sleep restfully in the midst of any kind of crisis. As I said last week in Psalm 3, this is what a person who knows God can do. He can sleep in the midst of crisis. This is exactly what another psalmist meant in Psalm 127 when he says, “The Lord gives his beloved sleep.” This is what the prophet meant in Isaiah: “You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you.” This is what the apostle Paul meant when he says, “Be anxious for nothing.” Don’t be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God and the peace of God that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. That’s David’s confidence, and that’s what everyone who knows God ought to be able to do. The Psalms throughout, and the Lament Psalms in a particular way, tell us that God is deserving of our trust in every circumstance. It dishonors God to mistrust Him and to complain in mistrust. We’ve seen that the lament Psalms complain, but it dishonors God to complain in mistrust.

And in fact, this Psalm even hints, just barely hints, of this kind of confidence and hope that we can have even at the time of death. Let me read you this from Andrew Bonar:

Christians may sing this psalm while they cling more and more every day to Jehovah as their all-sufficient heritage, now and in the age to come. They may sing it, too, in the happy confidence of faith and hope when the evening of this world’s day is coming, and may then fall asleep in the certainty of what shall greet their eyes on the resurrection morning.

Verse 8 just might hint of that. In perspective of the whole Bible, at least, I think it does. When we are on our deathbeds, we can say: “In peace, I will both lie down and sleep. For you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.” Early church theologian Augustine read the psalm exactly this way. He connected verse 8 to the death and resurrection of Jesus, and he connected it then to 1 Corinthians 15 and our resurrection as well. We lie down, that is in death, in confidence that we awake safely. Martin Luther, the reformer, evidently took this verse this way as well, and he asked that the words of verse 8 would be the final words that he heard sung to him when he was dying: “In peace I will both lie down and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.”

Psalm 4, as Psalm 3 that we saw last week, calls us to honor God with the trust that He deserves. Even when the circumstances are threatening, we respond as people who know God. We know His character, we know His promise, and we sleep accordingly. And that takes us, I think, to say that we can also sing this psalm of Christ himself, the great king who trusted God supremely. David the king, as we’ve seen, is prospective of his greater Son who will come in the midst of danger. Our Lord, as we saw last week, slept (Mark chapter 4). And then after the crisis was over, He exhorted His disciples to a greater faith. Through the severest kind of opposition, our Lord entrusted himself to Him who judges justly. And in terms of verse 8, our Lord laid himself down in the sleep of death, confident of God’s safekeeping. He said: “Into your hands, I commit my spirit.”

God promised David a kingdom. And our Lord Jesus Christ inherits that promise. His kingdom will not falter because of a famine. His kingdom will not falter because of opposition or anything else. He has died for sin. God has accepted His sacrifice. He’s raised Him from the dead in vindication. He’s ascended to the throne and has taken universal rule over all things. And He will come again to bring God’s kingdom to consummation. And so like David, we can rest peacefully as well. Whatever the circumstances, we can fall asleep at night singing of the universal kingship of Christ, singing of the uninterrupted advance of His kingdom, singing of the certain consummation of that kingdom, and singing of the great safety that we have in Him forever. A God we can trust whose promises will be fulfilled infallibly for every one of us. Amen.