Psalm 18

". . . He rescued me, because he delighted in me.

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.

So the LORD has rewarded me . . ." (Psalm 18:19-24).

This comes from a joyful psalm in which a man who loves the Lord passionately is celebrating the many deliverances he has enjoyed from God's hand. The Lord appears equally passionate for this man, growing visibly incensed toward the psalmist's enemies, shaking the mountains with his wrath, and blowing smoke from his nostrils when cry of distress of his loved one reaches his temple.

The excerpt I have chosen above is in the middle of the psalm. I asked myself why these words are so energizing to my soul. I think it is because for many years I have been in confusion---almost unconsciously---over whether it is right and legitimate to aspire to the kind of perfection that the psalmist describes, and that he himself walks in. There have been "indistinct bugle sounds" in the teachings I have sat under, to put it in the language of 1 Corinthians 14:8.

On the one hand, we have been exhorted to imitate Christ. On the other hand, we are regularly told that we cannot do it well---that we are sinners and will always be fairly pathetic till the Lord returns. I suppose that much of the argument here hinges on where you place the fulcrum in the matter of residual sin in a Christian's life. Is it closer to the perfection end of the plank? Or closer to the chronic failure end?

I think we have gone too far in taking this psalm (and every other instance that describes exemplary obedience) as being merely veiled prophecy of Jesus. Surely Jesus is in the entire Old Testament, and surely He is the only one of whom it can be said without qualification that He had cleanness of hands and kept the ways of the Lord and did not wickedly depart from them and kept His statutes blamelessly.

But to reduce this entire psalm to Christology is to do violence to its plain meaning, it seems to me. The text tells me that this man committed himself to loving and living for God blamelessly, and he did it. Moreover, the Lord delighted in him and rewarded him.

"Be perfect," Jesus says, not meaning the infinite degree that only the Godhead enjoys, but the perfection that is given to man to enjoy. "Be perfect," Jesus says, and if He commands it, will He not grant what He commands? "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me," says Philippians 4:13. Not an absolute sinless perfection, to be sure. But certainly more than I had been led to think was possible.

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