Psalm 25:1-9 Commentary

Some years back I was asked to preach at a worship service in a congregation that was celebrating that day the launch of the new church education year as well as the start of the new academic year at a local Christian day school.  To tie in with that theme, I eventually found my way to Psalm 25 as it seemed a highly apt preaching text for the occasion of celebrating all things educational.  

Indeed, a lot of the first 9 verses as assigned by the Lectionary talk pretty extensively about the need to learn God’s ways, to be instructed in God’s law, to be directed to all the correct paths to walk in a life dedicated to glorifying God.  This is a theme that crops up a lot in the Hebrew Psalter.  A couple of times in the last months the Lectionary brought us to a snippet of Psalm 119 and as we know, that psalm is one very long meditation on the laws and statutes of God as well as on our constant need to remember those rules and live accordingly.

Biblically the ways of God as enshrined in things like the Ten Commandments but also in things like the Beatitudes of Jesus are presented as a kind of north star for believers.  We look to these teachings as the guiding and organizing principle of our lives.  God’s ways are like the cosmic straight edge against which we measure up our own living and if we appear to be walking a crooked or zig-zag path vis-à-vis that cosmic straight edge ruler, then we know we are straying, that we are in need of a course correction.

In theological parlance we talk about the doctrine of justification.  We need to be justified by grace alone through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  But “justified” in this sense aligns—literally and figuratively—with what we mean in a word processing program if we say we “left justify” the page.  That means that every first letter in every line will be in a straight vertical line corresponding to the straight edge of the paper on which the document would be printed and how it appears on the computer screen.  If we do full justification on a word document, both the left side and the right side will line up and you won’t have the jagged edge you get on the right-hand side with some lines being shorter or longer than the ones above and below them if you do not do right justification.

To be justified is to line up with a straight edge and that is what we get morally when Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us.  We now stand in a right relation with the Creator God of the universe.

But of course on the ground level of our actual lives, at any given moment we don’t line up.  We sin.  Even as baptized believers we don’t always live the right way before God.  Even the psalmist pleads with God at one point to not remember the sins of his youth and previous rebellious ways.  But it is not just the past but the present that needs God’s ongoing forgiveness.  Verse 8 as much as acknowledges this with the reminder that the ones who need to be instructed in God’s ways are “sinners” and that is a group to which we all belong.

But verse 9 provides a key reminder: to follow God and to be willing to take instruction from God requires humility.  One needs to be humble—humble enough to admit error, humble enough to admit the need for external guidance, humble enough to take instruction when it comes and not proceed on the assumption that we don’t need any help in knowing how best to live our lives.  A book in the Bible like Proverbs would say that this is the posture of the wise.  Wise people know the truth about themselves and are humble enough to receive a rebuke when one is warranted and to admit needing help in knowing what is right.  The opposite of wisdom is of course folly.  And it is often said that fools are often in error but never in doubt.  Fools are unteachable.

But even with all of that said, we need to admit something else in this area as touched on by Psalm 25: actually more often than not (if not flat out most of the time just generally) we already know right from wrong.  The great writer Samuel Johnson once observed that “we need more often to be reminded than instructed.”  Yes, there are true moral conundrums that we all encounter sooner or later, situations in which the precise right thing to do is by no means obvious.  Or there are times when we face what my ethics professor at seminary called “cruciform choices” in which there is at least something a little bit—and sometimes quite a bit—wrong or broken no matter what we choose to do in a given scenario.

But honesty compels us to admit that those situations are by no means an everyday occurrence.  We know what is right much of the time. We know that engaging in this juicy bit of gossip might hurt someone but it’s just too delicious not to share with a friend anyway.  We know that lying about something we once said or did is dishonest but we do it anyway because sometimes telling the truth is too embarrassing or uncomfortable.  We know it’s wrong to engage in name-calling on social media or to join in with those who are clearly posting up half-truths designed to assassinate someone’s character but we click “Share” anyway.  

We need more often to be reminded than instructed.  And so to riff on Psalm 25, we need to pray not only that God instruct sinners in his ways but that God remind us of what we were previously well instructed about in the first place as to the ways of God.  

Illustration Idea

They say that in politics in places like Washington D.C. the coverup is always worse than the crime.  The covering up of some wrongdoing always ends up being worse than whatever happened in the first place.  Yes, the break-in of the Watergate Hotel building back in 1972 was a crime but that alone may not have led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation from office.  It was the furious coverup and denials and all the lies that got told to smother the truth that led to Nixon’s undoing.  Yes, the sexual acts that President Bill Clinton engaged in in his relationship with his young aid Monica Lewinsky were wrong but what led to his impeachment was looking straight into a camera one day and denying there was any sexual relationship whatsoever.

Or we can remember the fine Rob Reiner film A Few Good Men in which a Navy attorney is asked to investigate the death of a marine at the Guantanamo Bay Marine post.  As it turns out, the base’s CO, Col. Nathan Jessup, ordered what was known as a “Code Red” to teach a wayward Marine a lesson—a fairly common occurrence on some bases apparently.  But the Code Red went wrong and the Marine was accidentally killed as a result of the prank pulled on him.  But then Col. Jessup swung into action to deny he had ever given the Code Red order.  He had his top aide forge a phony transfer order.  He suborned perjury from another aid who testified falsely under oath to deny the order.  Finally Col. Jessup perjured himself on the witness stand and ended up getting caught in his web of lies before the judge and jury.  The coverup was for Col. Jessup worse than the crime in terms of the consequences that accrued to him.  If he had just admitted a terrible accident had happened and he had been a part of it but never dreamed it would have gone so wrong and it would have ended there. 

We noted above that much of the time it’s not that we genuinely do not know right from wrong in any given situation but that sometimes we consciously choose the wrong action or word anyway.  But once we see what we have done, then we face another choice: come clean about it and confess or compound it by making a series of more wrong decisions and evasions.  The humble know enough to ask not just for God’s forgiveness but for God’s guidance in making a better path forward.  Or we could also say as noted above that we need God to remind us of what we already know to be true and then give us the strength by God’s Spirit to then follow the right path that is before us.