Vindicate me in your righteousness, O LORD my God; do not let them gloat over me. – Psalms 35:24

Today’s Scripture Reading (February 21, 2013): Psalm 35

When I was very young I was required to write a poem as an assignment for an English class (or as it was called then – a Language Arts Class.) And I remember the poem only because of the mistake I made at the last line. I had planned to end the poem with the question – Is there life after death? – but in the writing up of the final draft I reversed the question. The question that I ended up asking in my poem was - Is there death after life? And I still remember the day that the poems were handed back and my teacher wanted to talk to me. And at that moment I still did not realize what it was that I had done. So she called me up to the front of the class and wanted to have a discussion about the last line of my poem. My problem was that, at this point in time, I still did not know what the last line was – and so I was quite unprepared for discussion.

I think I was in grade four when I wrote the poem, and even then I knew that the end of the poem that had happened by accident was much better than the one I had planned. And I have to admit that several times over the past forty plus years I have had that conversation, in my mind, with the teacher that I was unprepared for on that day when I was called up to the teacher’s desk.

I also have a better recognition that sometimes I do not even know the true meaning of the words that I say. And as I read this Psalm I get the feeling that David is also writing about something of which he does not really comprehend the meaning. All the way through the Psalm he seems to be struggling to make the case for why God should choose him against the other – why God should bless him and curse his enemy. But finally he arrives at this line – Vindicate me in your righteousness. The cry is this – God, let your righteousness be the rule by upon which I am judged. God I am sure that I match your measure of righteousness closer than my enemy does. And he is right, even though I think David has missed the reason why. And what he missed was that God had laid his righteousness on top of him – and that was the only reason why God would see him as pure.

We desire Christianity to be a religion or spiritual system – but both of those put the onus on us to act properly – to be holy in our own accord and according to our own practices and traditions. But that is really an unrealistic expectation. We will never really measure up. Instead, God gives to us his own righteousness. He lays righteousness of Christ on our lives. In love he not only judges us according to his own righteous standards, but like David, he gives us his righteousness to make sure that we really do measure up.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Psalm 36