If we were honest, I think we would admit that one of the most challenging things we face as we seek to obey the Lord is other people. I mean, we see it with Peter at the end of John’s gospel. Jesus tells him that he’s going to end up being a martyr for the cause of Christ, and his first response is, “What about this man?” pointing to John (John 21:21). Jesus’ response is perfect, as he answers, “What is that to you? You follow me” (21:22). And in one sense, it’s easy for us to stand and judge Peter, isn’t it? Why does it matter what the Lord’s plan is for John. That doesn’t affect Peter at all, does it? Is it going to make the piercing of the sword a little easier or the flames burn a little cooler if John is meeting the same fate? Of course not.
But on the other hand, we understand exactly what’s going on in Peter’s heart, don’t we? After all, there is a sense in which it is easier to endure things if those around you are enduring the same thing. It’s easier not to covet if your neighbor doesn’t have anything nice either. It’s easier to live in hard conditions if your brother is facing the same thing. It’s easier to take up your cross and obey, when those around you are taking up their crosses as well. Isn’t this why it’s tempting to gossip sometimes? It’s not that you necessarily have anything against the person, but they just have something – possessions, a lifestyle, or even just happiness – that you want and envy. And since you can’t take what is theirs, you are tempted at least to point out their weaknesses to other people. We’re tempted to think that bringing some suffering on them, even through our words will make our perceived suffering a bit easier to tolerate.
But this struggle concerning our obedience and other people perhaps reaches its pinnacle when we consider the wicked around us flourishing. I know from my own experience that I had intense internal struggle and questioned the Lord as I watched my unbelieving friends pursue sexual immorality and seemingly getting out of life its sweetest rewards. As the psalmist in Psalm 73 said, “My feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked” (Ps 73:2-3). Obeying amidst the prosperity of the wicked is hard.
There’s no sense in us pretending that it isn’t. It is. The guy who cheats on the test and gets a good grade while you work hard with integrity and struggle makes it harder for you to continue to labor in integrity. The person who is unequally yoked in marriage because they were tired of being alone and now seems to be prospering, makes it harder for you to walk content in singleness. And we could go on. But the reality is, if we are called to obey Christ in this world, then we are called to obey Christ in the midst of wickedness. We are called to obey in difficult circumstances. We are called in the midst of evil seemingly having the day. After Genesis 3, we aren’t called to obey in the middle of paradise but in a world where paradise has been lost and death reigns.
So, how do we do it? How do we strengthen ourselves when the prosperity of the wicked can be seen on every corner? One place we can look to find that answer is Psalm 37. That’s the theme of this psalm – obeying in the midst of wickedness and wicked people. The psalm itself reads like something out of the book of Proverbs, as it seems to give brief lessons throughout, like, “Better is the little that the righteous has than the abundance of the many wicked” (v. 16). That, in fact, sounds much like Proverbs 15:16, where we read: “Better is a little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure and trouble with it.” And, like the proverbs, it’s a bit hard to discern a structure to this psalm.
Now, in one sense, the psalm is quite structured. The psalm is an acrostic, where every few lines begin with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. But it’s almost as if the psalmist, because he has structured it this way, then provides little structure to the themes in the psalm itself. Again, it reads like something we might see in the book of Proverbs. For this reason, it has been labeled an instructional psalm by some. So, instead of walking through this text, looking at the first few verses, then the next few, etc., I want us to walk through this psalm thematically, noting the repetition of different themes throughout the psalm. And the themes, I think, will help us answer the question, “How do we faithfully walk in obedience in the midst of the wicked prospering around us?”
And the first answer the psalm gives us is:
Multiple times David tells us not to focus on the wicked. We read, for example, in verse 1, “Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of evildoers!” Again, in the second half of verse 7, “Fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way, over the man who carries out evil devices!” He even warns us against allowing their prosperity drive us to anger and evil, writing in verse 8, “Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath! Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil.”
So, the first place to start is just not to fret over them, envy them, or let them bother you. Don’t let them be your focus. And just as it’s really hard to look at the sun for a while and then turn and try to put its impression out of your mind, so it’s hard to fix your attention on the wicked, let their prosperity consume your thoughts, and then try not to fret over them, envy them, and let them rouse you to anger and frustration. So, don’t let your focus be fixed on them.
However, it’s not enough to say that we shouldn’t focus on them. After all, you can’t have a neutral focus. Your focus will be on something. So, David does not only give us a negative (i.e., don’t fret, don’t be envious, etc.), he gives us many positive exhortations. We see them in verses 3-4, “Trust in the LORD, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord . . .” Verse 5: “Commit your way to the LORD: trust in him.” Verse 7, “Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him.” Verse 27, “Turn away from evil and do good.” And verse 34, “Wait for the LORD and keep his way.”
You see, David is giving us something positive to do as well. We don’t fret over the wicked and keep from envying them by setting our focus on the Lord and on obeying him. We trust in him, delight in him, commit our way to him, keep his way, and do all that he’s commanded us to do. This is much like Paul writing to Timothy, “Flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart” (2 Tim 2:22). Do you see the negative and positive aspects? We’re fleeing our lusts but pursuing righteousness. It’s the same in Psalm 37.
So, one of the steps in walking in obedience in the midst of the wicked prospering around you is to fix your focus on obeying the Lord instead of fixing your focus on the prosperity of the wicked. But more needs to be said, doesn’t it? And David does tell us more. One other element that I think is implicit in David’s writing in this psalm is that you must:
When Lili and I lived in Louisville, we lived just a few miles from school. If the roads were clear, it was probably a ten-minute drive. But going to the school around 7:30 each morning turned it into about a thirty-minute drive. I could get out of my neighborhood okay, but I immediately had to turn left onto the main street where traffic would be backed up because people were dropping kids off at the school. Then, I’d inevitably have to come to a standstill because there was no turning lane, and I’d be stuck behind a car that wanted to turn left with much on-coming traffic. And, finally, there was always a chance I’d get caught by the train that seemed to run on as unpredictable a schedule as possible. And, oddly, I rarely got frustrated or upset.
Now, I say “oddly” because there’ve been times I’ve sat at the light at the end of Ashport on my one-mile trek to the church in the morning, screaming, “Just change, you crazy light” because it seemed to be needlessly turning my two-minute commute into a five-minute commute.
Now, it’d be fair to ask why I could be frustrated by my two-minute commute turning into a five-minute commute while I was okay with a thirty-minute commute in Louisville. But the answer is obvious, I think. It’s that in Louisville, I expected a thirty-minute commute. I planned for it. I prepared for a long journey. Leaving my house each morning, I foolishly tell myself, “This should take about two minutes” so that when it doesn’t, I’m upset.
Well, in Psalm 37, David, I think, sends us many hints that we should prepare for a long road of obedience. The words with which David exhorts us are words that suggest it could take a while. We are told to trust in verse 3, and the exhortation to trust implies that you can’t see the end. It’s not immediate. You don’t tell someone as you’re paying them for a product, “Trust me that I’ll pay you.” They don’t have to trust, you’re immediately paying them. But if you can’t pay immediately, you may well tell them, “Trust me. I’m good for it.” Similarly, the exhortation to commit our way to the Lord suggests that David has in mind, that we are thinking about obeying not just for a short while.
But if the theme of setting our bearings for a long road is not completely apparent in those verses, it is in verse 7, where we’re told to “wait patiently for him” and in verse 34 where we are exhorted, “Wait for the LORD and keep his way.”
You see, there is a theme in the Bible that says we need to be ready for our lives to end at any minute. We need to be ready for the Lord to return today. But there is also a theme of needing to be ready for the long haul. Do you remember the parable Jesus told of the virgins who went out to wait for the bridegroom? All of them took lamps, but only some of them took extra oil. And what happened? The wait took so long that only those who were ready for a long wait were prepared. Others had to go back and get oil, and they missed the bridegroom. The point of that parable is to be ready for the possibility of the Lord’s return taking longer than we think. Be ready for the long haul.
Similarly, the life of a believer isn’t one where our struggles are immediately relieved and our hardships quickly go away. We may well face adversity all of our lives. We may obey and never quite see the fruit we want. And we know this in real life. We don’t discipline our children and see an immediate turn-around in their behavior. And probably every parent has asked, “Is our discipline having any effect?” And you may be tempted to give up. But giving up is not the answer. Rather, we obey the Lord, discipline our children, and trust in him. We commit ourselves to obeying the Lord and wait for him to act.
So, don’t commit yourself to temporary obedience. Don’t think that you’ll commit yourself to being a good wife for the next three years because surely your husband will change by then. No. Commit yourself to lifelong obedience. Realize that the fight with sin will never end in this life, and this life may take a while.
So, instead of fixing your focus on the wicked and their prosperity, fix your focus on obeying the Lord. And fix the disposition of your heart for a long road ahead. Commit to obeying for the long haul. Be like the virgins who brought extra oil, knowing that the Lord may call us to labor in these circumstances for a long, long time.
But, I think we’ll all admit that we need more. I mean, trying not to focus on the wicked and knowing that we may be called to obey amidst the wicked prospering for a long time, doesn’t keep you from those moments where you can’t help but note the prosperity, success, and seeming happiness of the wicked. You can keep your focus off of them all you want, but what do we do in that one moment where we just notice that they seem to have what we desperately want, and they seem to have gotten it through their wickedness? How do we keep our hearts from saying, “I can’t do it anymore; I’m giving in”? David gives us two answers. First, he instructs us to:
You see, the reason it is easy to be envious of them and tempted because of their seeming happiness is because we lose sight of those things that our eyes don’t see. Our eyes only see what is in front of us. Our eyes see them in their seeming happiness. Our eyes see their prosperity. Our eyes see their prestige. Our eyes see their riches. And our eyes can cause us to envy, lust, covet, and give up the fight.
But what our eyes don’t see is what David reminds us of in this psalm, namely, they’re under God’s judgment. In verse 22, David says that “those cursed by [God] shall be cut off.” Right now, that wicked man is under the curse of God. He’s under the judgment of God. As much as you think you want to trade places with him, you don’t. God’s condemnation is bearing down on him. And God’s condemnation is no empty threat. Rather, one day, the wicked will taste God’s merciless wrath.
God’s wrath in this text is represented by the notions of being cut off, being removed or no more, or being destroyed. Listen, for example, at the repeated refrain:
“For they will soon fade like grass and wither like the green herb” (v. 2).
“For the evildoers shall be cut off” (v. 9) . . . in just a little while, the wicked will be no more; though you look carefully at his place, he will not be there (v. 10).
“The Lord laughs at the wicked, for he sees that his day is coming” (v. 13).
“Their sword shall enter their own heart, and their bows shall be broken . . . for the arms of the wicked shall be broken” (vv. 15, 17).
“But the wicked will perish; the enemies of the LORD are like the glory of the pastures; they vanish – like smoke they vanish away. . . . Those cursed by him shall be cut off. . . . The children fo the wicked shall be cut off” (vv. 20, 22, 28).
“Transgressors shall be altogether destroyed; the future of the wicked shall be cut off” (v. 38).
One day, those who refuse to bow the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ and obey him with their lives will hear, “Depart from me, you worker of iniquity, for I never knew you.” They will be thrown into a lake of fire that never ends.
Our eyes play tricks on us, don’t they? And in the moment, I know how hard it can be. I remember battling depression as I considered my unbelieving friends in high school, and how they seemed to be doing everything I was fighting against and seemingly enjoying every minute of it. It wasn’t easy, obeying in their midst. I envied them. But my eyes were playing tricks on me, for it wasn’t easy for me to see God’s wrath hanging over them. It wasn’t easy for me to look beyond this world to judgment. But that’s exactly what David tells us to do.
So, I know your road of obedience may be extremely difficult. You may be in a hard marriage, fighting to honor God, and realizing that your spouse may never repent. This may be your lot for life. And you can look across the street and see someone that has no commitment to their marriage and seems to be getting everything you long for. Well, don’t be deceived. The Lord is not mocked. Judgment is real.
And yet, that’s not the only motivation. David doesn’t simply tell us that the day is coming where the wicked will be judged. Rather, he also tells us that we must:
It’s not just that the wicked are under the judgment of God, for David also reminds us that we are the focus of the Lord’s blessing. We read in verse 22, “Those blessed by the LORD shall inherit the land.” Now, it can be a bit confusing to read “inherit the land” because what in the world is this psalm talking about? What land are we getting?
Well, in the Old Covenant, God took a people, Israel, brought them out of Egypt, and them brought them into a land that he gave them as their inheritance. And there were some who didn’t believe, and the Lord judged them, not letting them enter into the land. This is what Psalm 95 makes reference to, for example, when the Lord says in that Psalm, “For forty years I loathed that generation and said, ‘They are a people who go astray in their heart, and they have not known my ways.’ Therefore I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’” He’s talking about the generation that he didn’t let enter the land. And because the land represented a state under God’s care, protection, and blessing, it is referred to as his rest.
Well, when you read through the book of Hebrews, it becomes clear in chapters 3-4, that the land and the rest of the Lord in the Old Testament were just a type or shadow of the blessing that will belong to believers in eternity. The land represented the new heavens and new earth that the Lord will bring about when he frees the earth from its bondage to sin (Rom 8:20-22).
So, when we read Psalm 37 about the blessed inheriting the land or dwelling in the land, we can draw the parallel to the believer getting to be in eternity with the Lord. But what I want us to see is that this one, the believer, is described in verse 22 as “those blessed by the Lord.” And the reason I want us to see it is because this too is hard to see with our eyes.
When you’re living in a hard marriage or enduring the cost of obeying Christ in difficult situations, it can be hard to see that you are blessed. It doesn’t feel much like it sometimes, does it? It doesn’t feel like you’re the one blessed when you’re suffering and your neighbor is prospering.
But you are indeed blessed. If your faith is in Jesus Christ, who lived, died, and was raised on the third day, you’re blessed because God’s judgment and condemnation is not on you. You don’t bear his wrath. You don’t have to fear hell. Your sins are forgiven. You’re credited with the righteousness of Christ. That’s what the psalmist means by “those blessed by the LORD.” That’s you.
And that’s not all. The Lord will one day vindicate you. He will one day pour out on you all the riches and blessings you can imagine by raising you to be with him in eternity. We see these future blessings spoken of in this psalm again and again. Just listen to a sample of these:
“He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday” (v. 6).
That is, you will be vindicated as the righteous child of God before all the wicked on that great and final day.
“The meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace” (v. 11).
We will be with the Lord in eternity and know peace in contrast to the agony of those facing God’s judgment.
“The Lord upholds the righteous. The Lord knows the days of the blameless, and their heritage will remain forever; they are not put to shame in evil times; in the days of famine they have abundance. . . . The steps of a man are established by the Lord, when he delights in his way; though he fall, he shall not be cast headlong, for the Lord upholds his hand” (vv. 17-19, 23-24).
These verses remind us that the Lord is watchful over us. Those the wicked come against us, he will not let us be ultimately destroyed. Yes, we may die, but we will live in eternity. The Lord upholds us. He cares for us. He provides for us. The Lord will give you everything you need in order to honor him and obey him in this life. He guarantees it. For some of us and on some occasions, it may mean we need much grace, but if that’s the case, he’ll give much grace. He is committed to us, and he will bring us to the end. As verses 28 and 33 remind us, he will not forsake us or abandon us.
In the end, the Lord will save us. Thus we read in verses 39-40, “The salvation of the righteous is from the Lord; he is third stronghold in the time of trouble. The Lord helps them and delivers them; he delivers them from the wicked and saves them, because they take refuge in him.”
So, as you struggle and fight to obey and persevere in obedience while the wicked around you prosper, seek the Lord. Turn to his word and remember where our ultimate home is. Eternity is long, and this life is short.
And I know it’s hard to keep in mind. But that’s one of the glorious things about coming to the table every week. We get to be reminded of why we stand as righteous before God – because our faith is in the one who lived, died, and was raised for us. We get to be reminded that our present distress will not last forever. He is returning and will eat this meal with us again. And we get to be strengthened in the gospel for obedience.
So, is obedience challenging for you this morning? Sure it is. Does the prosperity of the wicked make our knees to buckle sometimes? Sure it does. So, what do we do? Remove our focus from the wicked, and fix our hearts on obeying the Lord (realizing it may be a while until he delivers us). And keep in mind the present status and future destruction of the wicked as well as your present status as a child of God, awaiting the blessing of eternity. And as we keep these things at the forefront of our minds, I pray that we’ll find ourselves strengthened to obey in a world of wickedness. May indeed our light shine in the midst of darkness so that many will see our good works and glorify our Father in heaven. Amen.