Psalm Chapter 7

Psalm 7: The Man Who Dared God to Search Him

There is a particular kind of courage that shows itself not in fighting but in flinging open every door and saying, search me. That is what David does here. Accused — wrongly, he insists — he does not merely protest his innocence to the crowd. He turns to God and makes a terrifying wager: if I have done this, if there is iniquity in my hands, then let the enemy take my life and lay my honour in the dust. It is the prayer of a man with nothing to hide, or at least nothing he is unwilling to have found. Most of us would never pray this way, and that reluctance tells us something about ourselves. But the psalm does not stay in the courtroom. It lifts to a cosmic vantage point where God is judge of all, where the wicked dig pits and tumble into them, where mischief conceived in secret returns upon the schemer like a boomerang. There is a moral architecture to the universe, David is saying, and it is self-correcting. The psalm ends, as so many do, in praise — because when you have staked everything on God's justice and found it trustworthy, what else is there to do but sing?

00:00 In Thee Do I Trust
00:20 The Wager of Innocence
00:38 Arise, O Lord, in Anger
01:00 God Tries the Hearts
01:22 The Pit He Dug for Others
01:45 Praise to the Most High