Psalm 26
“A Plea for Vindication”
by Pastor Jason Van Bemmel

 

Of David.

¹ Vindicate me, O LORD,
    for I have walked in my integrity,
    and I have trusted in the Lord without wavering.
² Prove me, O LORD, and try me;
    test my heart and my mind.
³ For your steadfast love is before my eyes,
    and I walk in your faithfulness.

⁴ I do not sit with men of falsehood,
    nor do I consort with hypocrites.
⁵ I hate the assembly of evildoers,
    and I will not sit with the wicked.

⁶ I wash my hands in innocence
    and go around your altar, O LORD,
⁷ proclaiming thanksgiving aloud,
    and telling all your wondrous deeds.

⁸ O LORD, I love the habitation of your house
    and the place where your glory dwells.
⁹ Do not sweep my soul away with sinners,
    nor my life with bloodthirsty men,
¹⁰ in whose hands are evil devices,
    and whose right hands are full of bribes.

¹¹ But as for me, I shall walk in my integrity;
    redeem me, and be gracious to me.
¹² My foot stands on level ground;
    in the great assembly I will bless the Lord.

• Psalm 26, ESV

 

 

Can we claim righteousness in prayer? How?

 

Psalm 26 is a challenging prayer for many Christians to think about praying. David is openly asking the Lord to vindicate him, to judge him and find him blameless, on the basis of his own righteousness, his own faithful life and obedient walk before the Lord. At the opening and again at the close, David boldly claims that he has walked and will walk in integrity. He invites the Lord to prove him and test him and see that he is genuinely righteous in heart and behavior.

 

How could David pray such a prayer? How could we ever possibly think about praying such a prayer?

 

Well, we need to be clear about a couple of things:

 

1. David is not claiming to be perfectly and sinlessly righteous. He is claiming to be a man of integrity and not a hypocrite. He is claiming to genuinely be a man of God from the heart, not entirely blameless, but very different from his enemies.
   
2. Ultimately, this psalm – as with all the psalms – is given by inspiration of the Holy Spirit to point us to Christ. Jesus could pray this prayer perfectly and sinlessly, in stark contrast to the scheming, conniving, plotting enemies who sought to kill Him, to get rid of Him, while at the same time claiming to be believers.

 

And so, for us, as believers in Jesus, we need to know that we can only pray this kind of prayer through Christ, who alone is our righteousness, and only if we genuinely believe in Him and belong to Him.

 

But why would we need to pray this kind of prayer? On a human level, this is a prayer we might pray when we are the victims of slanderous gossip, or unfair and unfounded accusations. But the vindication we most need is from the plotting, scheming accusations of the devil. Because God is the holy and just judge of all, He is the one who weighs hearts and minds and is the only One who can truly vindicate us from the accusations and assaults of the enemy of our souls, the accuser of the brethren, the adversary.

 

Psalm 26 is structured very similarly to Psalm 5 that we looked at on June 22. Both psalms deal with the conduct of the wicked contrasted with David’s own heart. Both are prayers of David looking for relief from God in the face of wicked men. Both psalms have 5 stanzas arranged in a chiasm. The first and last stanzas parallel each other. In each one, David speaks of walking in integrity. The second and fourth stanzas parallel each other, too, as both of them speak about the wicked, just as the second and fourth stanzas in Psalm 5 did, too. But we have a key difference between Psalm 26 and Psalm 5: The central stanza in Psalm 5 was focused on the steadfast love of the LORD, on HESED. Psalm 26’s central stanza also focuses on worship but does not mention the LORD’s steadfast love. Instead, David speaks of HESED in verse 3 as the reason why his heart and mind are kept faithful in integrity, by being focused on the steadfast love of the LORD.   

 

Psalm 26 helps us in several ways:

 

1. It gives us a compelling picture of the heart of Jesus, who is the perfect fulfillment of this Psalm. So, it shows us what Jesus loves and hates, what He values and seeks.
   
2. It also gives us a picture of what a true believer looks like. It shows us the heart of a genuine worshiper of God as contrasted with hypocrites.
   
3. It gives us both conviction and correction for where we may be going astray and also assurance and confidence where we are seeking the Lord sincerely.
   
4. Finally, it provides us with encouragement and comfort when people are slandering us unfairly, when we are being unjustly judged by the gossip of others.

 

1. Pleading for Vindication (vv. 1-3)
   
   ¹Vindicate me, O LORD,
       for I have walked in my integrity,
       and I have trusted in the Lord without wavering.
   ² Prove me, O LORD, and try me;
       test my heart and my mind.
   ³ For your steadfast love is before my eyes,
       and I walk in your faithfulness.

David opens Psalm 26 pleading with God for vindication. We don’t know the life circumstances David was in when he wrote Psalm 26, but it seems clear that he was being slandered by wicked men. He was being falsely accused.

We know David faced this both from King Saul and from his own son, Absalom. King Saul, who was king before David, accused David of plotting against him and being disloyal to him, even though David was Saul’s most faithful and effective general. Absalom sat for years in the city gate of Jerusalem and intercepted those who came to the capital city for justice, convincing them that his father had no one appointed to hear their case and telling them how things would be so different if he were king. This wasn’t true, but the word spread effectively enough that Absalom was able to lead an uprising and overthrow David for a time.

Gossip is one of the most vicious and most widely practiced and tolerated sins among God’s people. While all gossip is sinful, slanderous gossip is especially poisonous. In his wonderful book, Respectable Sins, Jerry Bridges calls out the sin of spreading negative information about someone, even if the information is true or you believe it to be true. One of the ten commandments forbids bearing false witness against our neighbors, and spreading false, negative information about someone is a clear violation of the ninth commandment, even if we believe the information is correct. Most often, even if the information we have is true, we only have part of the truth and not the whole picture.

Even if we are confident we have accurate information, we should not be spreading it, because we would not want someone spreading negative information about us. Jesus told us to treat others the way we would want to be treated. One of the things that should cure us of our sinful tendency to engage in slanderous gossip is either being a victim of such gossip ourselves or having someone we love be a victim of it.

So, David is crying out for a specific type of vindication, from slanderous gossip and false accusations by people who are political schemers. That helps us understand the kind of integrity he is claiming here – not a sinless perfection, but a sincerity of heart and life that make the accusations being made against him false. David is asking the Lord, who alone sees all hearts perfectly, to be the just and holy judge and to vindicate him.

How does David walk in integrity of heart? He does so by keeping his focus on the steadfast love of the LORD.

“For your steadfast love is before my eyes,
    and I walk in your faithfulness.”

Because David has focused on the character of God, especially on God’s steadfast love and faithfulness, this has anchored his soul and kept him walking in integrity. As he says in Psalm 16:8: “I have set the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.”

We see this even more clearly in Jesus’ life. Jesus was slandered by the gossip of the Pharisees, the Scribes, the Sadducees, the Herodians - every major political group and sect in Israel slandered Jesus. They accused him of being a Samaritan (a half-breed), or being demon-possessed, or of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebub, of being a glutton and a drunkard, or being a friend of tax collectors and sinners. In the end, they condemned Him as a blasphemer for claiming to be the Son of God.

Yet Jesus walked in perfect integrity. He was utterly sinless in His righteousness. How? He walked in the power of the Holy Spirit and He kept His focus on His Father – spending all night in prayer and seeking to do the will of His Father in all He did.

There is no way to walk in sincere integrity as a believer but by keeping our focus on the LORD.

1. Living Separate from Wickedness (vv. 4-5)

As part of the evidence of David’s sincere integrity, he highlights how he doesn’t mix and mingle with wicked people and their selfish scheming:

⁴ I do not sit with men of falsehood,
    nor do I consort with hypocrites.
⁵ I hate the assembly of evildoers,
    and I will not sit with the wicked.

This language strongly echoes the opening of Psalm 1 –

Blessed is the man
    who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
    nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
    and on his law he meditates day and night.

Now, we may struggle to see how these verses in these psalms point us to Christ, since He was known as the friend of sinners and he ate and drank with tax collectors. But Hebrews 7:26 tells us that we have “such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens.”  While Jesus did eat with tax collectors and with Pharisees, He did not let their sinful ways influence Him at all. He was clearly influencing them with the kingdom of God and not the other way around.

Those who love the Lord do not imitate the ways of sinful people. The ways of the world are directly contrary to the ways of God, and the world and its ways will be judged.

¹⁵ Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. ¹⁶ For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. ¹⁷ And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. – 1 John 2:15-17, ESV

You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. – James 4:4, ESV

III. Worshiping in Pure Devotion (vv. 6-7)

The central stanza of Psalm 26 gives us the central evidence of David’s sincere faith and of the heart of Jesus, too:

⁶ I wash my hands in innocence
    and go around your altar, O LORD,
⁷ proclaiming thanksgiving aloud,
    and telling all your wondrous deeds.

This theme continues in verse 8, too –

⁸ O LORD, I love the habitation of your house
    and the place where your glory dwells.

The passion of both David and ultimately Jesus is not primarily negative. They are focused centrally and primarily on the worship of God along with His people.

To approach God in worship and to walk around His altar requires true righteousness. Jesus was perfectly righteous. No accusation made against Him could stand. But we must have the same hope as David: that God will cleanse us by the blood of Jesus and make us innocent.

David prayed this in Psalm 51, his great psalm of repentance after his sin with Bathsheba:

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
    wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Let me hear joy and gladness;
    let the bones that you have broken rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins,
    and blot out all my iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
    and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from your presence,
    and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
    and uphold me with a willing spirit.

• Psalm 51:7-12, ESV

 

We’re given this great invitation to God’s altar-throne presence in Hebrews 10:

 

since we have a great priest over the house of God, ²² let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. ²³ Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. ²⁴ And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, ²⁵ not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.– Hebrews 10:21-25, ESV

Then, in worship, the heart of those who love the LORD is focused on the LORD’s greatness – to proclaim thanksgiving and to tell of all of God’s wondrous deeds. The focus is on what God has done for His people – giving Him thanks for it and proclaiming it joyfully!

Do you love worshiping with God’s people? Do you long to come into His presence and worship Him as He deserves? Do you love to give Him thanks for all He has done for us? Do you love to hear and to tell of all His wondrous deeds- the great acts of salvation in Jesus Christ? 

The heart of those who truly love the LORD loves to be in His presence and among His people. It doesn’t look for excuses to miss church, and it doesn’t make church all about us. This is the central and defining characteristic of a heart that walks with the LORD in integrity, in sincerity.

What would you think of someone who claims to love baseball but never really wants to go to a game? What would you think of someone who says they love a certain band or musical artist and yet has no interest in seeing them in concert? Or someone who says they love the ocean but never really gets excited about going to the beach?

If we love the LORD, we will love being in His presence with His people. Are there annoyances and inconveniences? Of course! As there are with baseball games, concerts, and trips to the beach. But we must not let those things distract or deter us!

1. Loving God's Dwelling Place (vv. 8-10)
   
   As we love God’s dwelling place, we are reminded of the holy justice of God, and that reminds us of the final end of the wicked:

⁹ Do not sweep my soul away with sinners,
    nor my life with bloodthirsty men,
¹⁰ in whose hands are evil devices,
    and whose right hands are full of bribes.

This might seem like an abrupt and unexpected turn from verse 8, but we see the same effect of going to worship in Psalm 73. It was in going to the sanctuary for worship that Asaph saw the destined end of the rich and self-satisfied wicked he was tempted to envy.

 Ultimately, the reason for keeping separate from the wicked and their ways is that we don’t want to share in their eternal destiny. We want to be with God, not to be swept away with the sinners and bloodthirsty men. We want to be in the eternal company of the redeemed, the washed clean sincere worshippers of God and not with those who are evil and self-serving.

1. Confidently Seeking Gracious Redemption (vv. 11-12)

No, we have a far better hope and a far better confidence, but it only comes by God’s gracious redemption:

¹¹ But as for me, I shall walk in my integrity;
    redeem me, and be gracious to me.
¹² My foot stands on level ground;
    in the great assembly I will bless the Lord.

David’s prayer in verse 11, “redeem me, and be gracious to me,” is a clear indication that he wasn’t ultimately trusting in His own righteousness for salvation, but he was looking to the LORD to redeem him and be gracious to him.

Only by God’s grace to him does David have confidence that will stand in the great assembly, in the gathering in of all of God’s people from all over the world, to worship forever in the presence of the LORD.

Looking for Vindication in and from the Righteous One

When we are feeling falsely accused by Satan, by our own troubled consciences, or by slanderous people gossiping about us, we can find vindication only in and through the Righteous One, our Great High Priest, our only righteousness, the Lord Jesus Christ. As we focus our hearts on Him, we get assurance, and we find joy in gathering with His people to worship Him.

We can be tempted to try to get back at people slandering us. We can be tempted to justify ourselves from all kinds of false accusations. But rather than doing any of that, we need to focus on the steadfast love and faithfulness of the LORD found in Jesus Christ and on worshipping Him together with His people!