Whenever I read this “Psalm of David,” I can’t help but wonder, “What happened, O king?” If this song was written before the Bathsheba event, did David stop singing of “covenant loyalty & justice” and making music to Yahweh (1)? Did he stop pondering “the way that is blameless” (2a)? Obviously he stopped walking “with integrity of heart” within his house (2b), and he was not careful with what he looked upon with his eyes (3). Did he not realize how perverse his own heart was or how prone he was to flirt with evil (4)? Did he endure too long his own “arrogant heart”(5)? Why did he fail to “look with favor” on faithful Bathsheba & Uriah and realize how “blameless” both were (6)? He himself became “one who practice[d] deceit” and lived a lie for nine months (7). David himself became an “evildoer” in “the city of the LORD” (8). Even as I wonder about King David, I wonder the same things about myself and realize that I am susceptible to and guilty of the very same dangers.
Some Bible scholars think this psalm may have been written after the Bathsheba event as a coronation song for future kings. Obviously, no king in Israel’s history lived up to its high standards — except King Jesus! What a day to reflect upon this, on the very day we remember that Jesus was crucified for the official charge that he was “the King of the Jews” (Luke 23:38). Little did those who crucified him know that only Jesus fulfilled this psalm (as he did many of the psalms) by living a blameless life of complete integrity and died for the very sins & evil that nailed him to the cross. I thank God that Jesus’s sinless life of complete obedience and substitutionary death as a willing sacrifice cover those of us who have not so lived. Today we look to Jesus in faith and sing of God’s “steadfast love and justice” mingled with the blood of Jesus, the blameless One whose “way” was the path of painful suffering & death on the road to triumphing over all evil.
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