Psalm 34 - God’s Hidden Presence and the Righteous vs. the Wicked

Text: Psalm 34:15-1

¹⁵ The eyes of the LORD are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry.
¹⁶ The face of the LORD is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory of them from the earth.
¹⁷ When the righteous cry for help, the LORD hears and delivers them out of all their troubles.
¹⁸ The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.
¹⁹ Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all.
²⁰ He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken.
²¹ Affliction will slay the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be condemned.
²² The LORD redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.

Context:

The title of Psalm 34 begins: “Of David, when he changed his behavior before Abimelech, so that he drove him out, and he went away.” The story of David and king Abimelech (or, Achish) is recorded in 1 Samuel 21:10-15. On the run from Saul, David is captured by a foreign army and taken before the king of Gath with this somewhat anecdotal charge: “Is not this David the king of the land? Did they not sing to one another of him in dances, ‘Saul has struck down his thousands, and David his ten thousands’?” (1 Sam. 21:11). In other words: “Here we have found a foreign trespasser, a royal enemy of the state, and an incredibly dangerous and brutal one at that.” Fearing for his life, v. 13 tells us that David “changed his behavior before the [unsuspecting] king” and began to “pretend to be insane.” Upon seeing David’s condition, Abimelech chastised his soldiers and sent David away.

What’s interesting to me about this Psalm is how absent God appears in 1 Samuel 21, and yet how full of praise to God David is when he reflects back on the incident. Everything about the narrative points not toward a miraculous rescue by some mysterious, divine Presence, but to a much simpler explanation: David saved himself. After all, it was David’s quick thinking and clever actions that fooled the king of Gath and led to his freedom. Nowhere is it mentioned that God was at work. And yet, all through Psalm 34, David gives God the glory for his deliverance.

Another interesting element is the clear delineation (particularly in vv. 15-22) David sees between God’s treatment of the righteous and his treatment of “those who do evil” (i.e., “the wicked”). For example: God’s “face” is toward the righteous, His ears are open to their cry, and He delivers them from “all their troubles.” On the other hand, the Lord’s face is “against those who do evil” to “cut off the memory of them from the earth.” Similarly, while affliction, although besetting the righteous, will never ultimately overtaking them, it will (in the end) destroy and condemn the wicked. In all of this we see that, although God is a God of love, He is also a God of unrelenting justice.

Implication (Gospel):

My problem with God’s justice is this: I’m on the wrong side of it. Contrary to the fears and anxieties that most commonly beset me (fears about money, relationships, and reputation mostly), in reality, the biggest problem in my life is God himself. You see, if God’s orientation toward a person is so deeply effected by their righteousness (or lack thereof) what hope do I have of getting anything other than the worst that Psalm 34 says awaits the wicked?

The gospel answers this question by telling me that real hope lies not in cobbling together some pathetic and self-glorifying righteousness of my own, but instead in admitting my abject spiritual poverty and laying hold of Christ. Take vv. 15 and 16 for instance: the only reason God’s eyes are upon me and his ears “open to my cry” (v. 15) is because (on the cross) He set his face against Jesus to cut him off the memory of “those who do evil” from the earth (v. 16). In other words, Christ, the righteous, became as “those who do evil” so that I, the one who really does “do evil,” might become righteous.

Or, to use vv. 21 and 22: on the cross, Christ took the place of the wicked—being slain by my afflictions and experiencing the condemnation I deserved (v. 21)—so that, through this act of substitution, my life might be redeemed and the promise fulfilled: “none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned” (v. 22).

Application (Life):

Today I will focus on two things: one, recognizing God’s help and aid in the mundane things of life (i.e., in those place where I wouldn’t naturally see Him act work); and, two, giving up my worthless and prideful pursuit of earning righteousness in order to relying more and more on Christ.

The Gospel According to N. T. Wright

(See Part One Here)

By way of introduction, John Piper opens The Future of Justification by chronicling a litany of Wright’s statements from a variety of works aimed at defining both what the gospel is as well as what it is not. The first of these statements, as it regards the gospel positively, captures well the basic thrust of Wright’s thought:

The “gospel” itself refers to the proclamation that Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, is the one, true and only Lord of the world.^[5]

Key to Wright’s understanding (as Piper’s larger catalog makes clear) is the word “proclamation.” The gospel is, after all, news: the public declaration of something that has (first and foremost) happened in space and time. What precisely Wright means by the word “proclamation”—i.e., his formulation of the events themselves (both historically and theologically speaking)—is outlined at length by Wright in his earlier and frequently cited work, What Saint Paul Really Said. There the “gospel” is unfolded as an essentially “fourfold announcement about Jesus”:

1. In Jesus of Nazareth, specifically in his cross, the decisive victory has been won over all the powers of evil, including sin and death themselves.


2. In Jesus' resurrection the New Age has dawned, inaugurating the long-awaited time when the prophecies would be fulfilled, when Israel's exile would be over, and the whole world would be addressed by the one creator God.


3. The crucified and risen Jesus was, all along, Israel’s Messiah, her representative king.


4. Jesus was therefore also the Lord, the true King of the world, the one at whose name every knee would bow. . . .

The royal proclamation is not simply the conveying of true information about the kingship of Jesus. It is the putting into effect of that kingship, the decision and authoritative summoning to allegiance. Paul discovered . . . that when he announced the lordship of Jesus Christ, the sovereignty of King Jesus, this very announcement was the means by which the living God reached out with his love and changed the hearts and lives of men and women, forming them from the paganism which had held them captive, enabling them to become, for the first time, the truly human beings they were meant to be. The gospel, Paul would have said, is not just about God’s power saving people. It is God’s power at work to save people.^[6]

As Piper’s own comments readily display,^[7] Wright’s focus upon the kerygmatic (or, proclamatory) nature of the gospel as the express declaration of Jesus Christ’s lordship is far from controversial.

It is, however, upon what Wright says the gospel is not where disagreement begins:

My proposal has been that “the gospel” is not, for Paul, a message about “how one gets saved,” in an individual and ahistorical sense.^[8]

“[T]he gospel” is not an account of how people get saved.^[9]

The gospel is not . . . a set of techniques for making people Christians.^[10]

Paul’s gospel to the pagans was not a philosophy of life. Nor was it, even, a doctrine about how to get saved.^[11]

To these statements more could of course be added (not least because of Wright’s prolific body of work). However, rather than simply add “precept upon precept” (quote upon quote), the most useful (and, it ought to be pointed out, the most recent) summary of both Wright and Piper’s position on the gospel appeared last year in a June 2009 Q&A with Christianity Today. There, in the wake their successive books, both writers provided summary statements regarding their understanding of the gospel proper:

Piper: The heart of the gospel is the good news that Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead. What makes this good news is that Christ’s death accomplished a perfect righteousness before God and suffered a perfect condemnation from God, both of which are counted as ours through faith alone, so that we have eternal life with God in the new heavens and the new earth.

Wright: The gospel is the royal announcement that the crucified and risen Jesus, who died for our sins and rose again according to the Scriptures, has been enthroned as the true Lord of the world. When this gospel is preached, God calls people to salvation, out of sheer grace, leading them to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ as the risen Lord.^[12]

Thankfully, there is much that could be said about the agreement between these statements; nonetheless, for our purposes, it is not so much their agreement that concerns us, but rather their disagreement. As such, the primary difference lies squarely in Piper’s inclusion of the traditionally reformed doctrine termed imputed righteousness (what Piper refers to as being “counted”; see especially note 12) within the gospel message proper—i.e., within what the gospel in and of itself actually declares. Wright, as we will see, not only rejects the concept of “imputed righteousness” (though he is quick to replace it with a robust doctrine of union with Christ), he also draws a sharp distinction between what the gospel is as an historical proclamation of good “news” and what the gospel does as a result of its proclamation. For Wright, the gospel does not save because it is a message about how to be saved—not, in other words, because it is a set of ahistorical instructions (repent and believe) about what a person must do to inherit life in the “age to come.” Rather, the gospel saves but because when it is announced God is active (through his Spirit) to bring its hearers under the saving lordship of Jesus Christ. Repentance and faith come about as a result of God’s grace exercised through such preaching.^[13] They are the covenantal badges by which God’s people are marked out.

The real crux of the matter, therefore, is not whether the gospel saves from sin via Jesus’ penal substitution (both authors affirm that is does). Nor is it Wright’s preference for Christus Victor as the controlling concept for understanding the atonement. Instead, the dispute lies in whether or not the gospel (to be the gospel) must include justification by faith through the imputed righteousness of Christ.

With this question in mind, our next task will be to begin examining the doctrine of justification itself.

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^[5] N. T. Wright, “Paul in Different Perspectives: Lecture 1: Starting Points and Opening Reflections.” Pastors Conference at the Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church, Monroe, Louisiana (3 January 2005). 28 December 2009. http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Auburn_Paul.htm.

^[6] N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 60-61.

^[7] “Yes. That is an essential announcement of the gospel.” Piper, Justification, 18.

^[8] Wright, Saint Paul, 60.

^[9] Ibid., 133.

^[10] Ibid., 153.

^[11] Ibid., 90.

^[12] Trevin Wax (compiler), “The Justification Debate: A Primer.” Christianity Today. June 2009. 12 April 2010. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/june/29.34.html?start=2. Equally interesting is the follow-up question: “How This Happens.”

“Piper: By faith we are united with Christ Jesus so that in union with him, his perfect righteousness and punishment are counted as ours (imputed to us). In this way, perfection is provided, sin is forgiven, wrath is removed, and God is totally for us. Thus, Christ alone is the basis of our justification, and the faith that unites us to him is the means or instrument of our justification. Trusting in Christ as Savior, Lord, and Supreme Treasure of our lives produces the fruit of love, or it is dead.

“Wright: God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ (the faithful Israelite), has come, allowing the continuation of his plan to rescue human beings, and, through them, the world. The Messiah represents his people, standing in for them, taking upon himself the death that they deserved. God justifies (declares righteous) all those who are ‘in Christ,’ so that the vindication of Jesus upon his resurrection becomes the vindication of all those who trust in him. Justification refers to God's declaration of who is in the covenant (this worldwide family of Abraham through whom God's purposes can now be extended into the wider world) and is made on the basis of faith in Jesus Christ alone, not the ‘works of the Law’ (i.e., badges of ethnic identity that once kept Jews and Gentiles apart).”

^[13] Piper’s otherwise incisive comments in The Future of Justification about the questionable goodness of such a bare declaration—namely that Jesus is the world’s true Lord—are easily assuaged by Wright’s inclusion of the line “who died for our sins” in his definition of the gospel offered in Christianity Today. Cf. Piper, Justification, 18: “But one wonders how the death and resurrection of Jesus could be heard as good news if one had spent his life committing treason against the risen King. It seems as though one would have to be told how the death and resurrection of Christ actually saves sinners, if sinners are to hear them as good news and not as a death sentence.”

Introduction - N. T. Wright and the Doctrine of Justification

[T]he arguments I have been mounting . . . [are genuinely] fresh readings of Scripture. They are not the superimposition upon Scripture of theories culled from elsewhere.
—N. T. Wright, Justification (22)

My conviction concerning N. T. Wright is not that he is under the curse of Galatians 1:8-9, but that his portrayal of the gospel—and of the doctrine of justification in particular—is so disfigured that it becomes difficult to recognize as biblically faithful.
—John Piper, The Future of Justification (15)

Since the time of the reformation, the doctrine of justification has enjoyed a sort of controversial pride of place within widest circles of confessional Christianity. From Martin Luther’s quintessentially polemic statement on the foundational nature of sola fide—“if this article stands, the Church stands; if it falls, the Church falls”—to the Council of Trent’s “anathema” reply,^[1] few doctrines have garnered such extended scrutiny and fierce debate. In recent years, however, a new voice has entered the fray. Led initially by the scholarly work of Krister Stendahl (Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, 1976) and E. P. Sanders (Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 1977) and now carried on by the writings (both popular and scholarly) of N. T. Wright and James D. G. Dunn, the so-called “new perspective on Paul” has launched a fresh round of debate and (perhaps most interestingly) drawn fresh lines in this once firmly established dispute.

As the already immense bibliographies attest, this new exchange has not lacked for ink (whether digital or print).^[2] In light, therefore, of such a sizeable pool of resources, rather than engaging the new perspective head-on in an attempt (at the very least) to summarize the various positions and counter-positions, the purpose of this series will be to examine the doctrine of justification as it appears in the work of N. T. Wright. As such, this analysis will draw primarily upon John Piper’s initial “response” to Wright’s earlier formulations in The Future of Justification^[3] as well as Wright’s own most recent reaffirmation of his position in Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision.^[4]

However, before delving into the specific (and far more contentious) issue of justification, it would be best to begin by briefly sketching Wright’s understanding of the gospel itself. We will explore this foundational topic in the next post.

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^[1] “If any one saith, that by faith alone the impious is justified; in such wise as to mean, that nothing else is required to co-operate in order to the obtaining the grace of Justification, and that it is not in any way necessary, that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will; let him be anathema.” The Council of Trent: Canons on Justification (Canon 9).

^[2] See especially Michael F. Bird’s nearly eighteen page un-annotated “Biography on the New Perspective on Paul” from The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification, and the New Perspective (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2007), 194-211.

^[3] John Piper, The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright (Wheaton: Crossway, 2007).

^[4] N. T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2009).

Dynamics of Spiritual Life - Justification

Richard F. Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Renewal (pg. 101-2)

Only a fraction of the present body of professing Christians are solidly appropriating the justifying work of Christ in their lives. Many have so light an apprehension of God’s holiness and of the extent of the guilt of their sin that consciously they see little need for justification, although below the surface of their lives they are deeply guilt-ridden and insecure. Many others have a theoretical commitment to this doctrine, but in their day-to-day existence they rely on their sanctification for justification, in the Augustinian manner, drawing their assurance of acceptance with God from their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, their recent religious performance or the relative infrequency of their conscious, willful disobedience. Few know enough to start each day with a thoroughgoing stand upon Luther’s platform: you are accepted, looking outward in faith and claiming the wholly alien righteousness of Christ as the only ground for acceptance, relaxing in that quality of trust which will produce increasing sanctification as faith is active in love and gratitude.

In order for a pure and lasing work of spiritual renewal to take place within the church, multitudes within it must be led to build their lives on this foundation. This means that they must be conducted into the light of a full conscious awareness of God’s holiness, the depth of their sin and the sufficiency of the atoning work of Christ for their acceptance with God, not just at the outset of their Christian lives but in every succeeding day.