Psalm 15 Commentary

It’s a pretty tall order spiritually speaking.  The job description for the person who can dwell in God’s sacred place stacks up pretty fast and in the end sketches an ideal and nearly perfect person.  Indeed, when we read this, the thought all-but inevitably occurs to us that really, the only person who ever fit this particular spiritual and moral bill is Jesus himself.  The rest of us may achieve some or all of these things in fits and starts but we also know that for every thing listed here, there are also days when we don’t clear the bar at all.  We fail.  We do the opposite things.

Sometimes we do slander people and utter slurs against them.  Sometimes we don’t keep our promises when doing so hurts.  Our walk is a far sight short of blameless and we’d be fooling ourselves if we claimed our righteousness is without blemish.  The Bible itself in 1 John assures us in fact that if we say we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.  On any given week in worship if your church has a liturgical moment for “Confession and Assurance,” no honest person would ever claim they’ve nothing to confess such that they’d just check out mentally during that portion of the service.  “I had a perfect week.”  Nope.

Given this fact and given that the Bible itself reminds us of this and warns us from living the lie that we’re perfect and blameless, what we are to make of something like Psalm 15?  Since we cannot see ourselves fully in the picture sketched by this song, do we just dismiss it as pie-in-the-sky thinking?  Or theologically can we reflect on something to which the psalm points, something lovely and redolent of grace?

First, we can grant the premise here: God is holy and righteous.  God is the cosmic straight line against which all crooked lines stand in contrast.  But as many parts of the Old Testament make clear (think Leviticus), a holy God cannot dwell amidst an unholy people.  God’s holiness gets tarnished by association if that happens.  God’s got a reputation he needs to uphold.  In fact, the only way this was ever going to work in Israel was through the complex sacrificial system in the Temple.  The people could not live holy lives.  Not all the time.  So atonement had to be made.  Blood had to be spilled.  This was serious business morally speaking.

But eventually in the history of Ancient Israel even with that system in place the whole thing broke down in the end.  People would offer half-hearted sacrifices but had no interest in actually cleaning up their lives.  The Minor Prophets in particular assailed the people for thinking they could live morally cavalier lives and God wouldn’t notice so long as they stuck a sacrifice on an altar once in a while.  In the end as we can see in Ezekiel 10 and 11, the presence of God left the Temple and left Jerusalem and quite literally headed for the hills.

Second, however, God still desired to live with God’s people.  God desired to fulfill all of God’s covenant promises.  So what could be done?  Well, the incarnation of God’s own Son could be done.  God would keep our end of the covenant bargain through Jesus who, as we already noted, alone truly fits what something like Psalm 15 describes.  Jesus is himself the ultimate and true Temple of God and we can dwell in that Temple through our union with Christ that came about by way of our baptism.

What’s more, all that blameless living and holy righteousness described by Psalm 15 gets credited to our spiritual bank accounts.  God looks at us and sees only Jesus.  This is the doctrine of justification.  It’s rather silly but some of us have heard a way to remember what “justified” means by suggesting it’s “Just-As-If-I’d never sinned.”  True, this side of glory our lives won’t look like the perfect life of God’s Son.  Not really.  We’ve still got those sins to confess on a rolling basis.  But through Christ Jesus and his sacrifice, his death, his resurrection, his ascension and reign, God has made the relationship with God’s people work after all.

Thus, rather than dismissing Psalm 15 as a portrait of life too ideal to be considered, we can use this song like a window through which to glimpse all of the glorious grace of God’s plan of salvation culminating in the ministry and sacrifice of Christ Jesus our Lord.  Yes, we can look at Psalm 15 and use it as a reason to feel bad about ourselves in that we fall so far short of most everything described here.  But we can also look at it as a reminder of all that is kind and loving about our great God.  And then Psalm 15 becomes an occasion to celebrate all over again that amazing grace of which we sing.

The psalm concludes that anyone who can live in the ways described in this song “will never be shaken.”  And we can now apply this to the life of faith.  We have God’s own assurance of our salvation by grace alone through faith alone.  It reminds us of the opening of the Reformed Confession of The Heidelberg Catechism.  “What is your only comfort in life and in death?  That I am not my own but belong, body and soul, in life and in death to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.”  On the foundation of that Gospel comfort we stand and build our lives.  We will never be shaken.

Illustration Idea

Frederick Buechner once helped to explain the theological meaning of “justification” by referring us back to the literal meaning of that word when it comes to printed documents.  On our computers today we can “right justify” or “left justify” or “full justify” any document.  Mostly we opt for left justification which means that unless you purposely indent a line to start a new paragraph, the first word of every line in the document will begin at the same place on the same vertical plane—in the same column—such that they all line up. “Justification” for those lines mean that they stand in a right relationship with the straight edge of the paper itself.  The paper is a straight vertical line along its left edge.  For words and lines to be “justified” with that, they line up, they are as straight as the paper’s edge itself.  They are in a right relationship with the straight edge of the page.  (And if you do “Full Justification,” then both the left and the right columns do this with the left and the right straight edges of the paper on which the document is printed.)

When we read Psalm 15, we see it as almost a measuring stick.  It’s the straight edge of morality against which everyone will be measured.  Does my life line up with that straight edge?  Or am I crooked and jagged and out of alignment at many different points  Most of us have to acknowledge we are largely out of alignment.  We are not justified relative to this psalm’s straight moral edge.

But in Christ we have been fully justified by grace alone.  We line up.  We match.  We measure up after all.  Thanks be to God!