Your gentleness made me great: reflections on Psalm 18
Your gentleness made me great
Psalm 18:35
Sometimes a line in God’s word really strikes you. This one did me. But number eighteen in the divine songbook is not a nice, lovey-dovey psalm. David was on the run from many enemies, not least his king and erstwhile employer, Saul. The world seemed to be against him. He wasn’t exactly enjoying a quiet, easy life. Psalm 18 is a psalm of war, not peace:
37 I pursued my enemies and overtook them,
and did not turn back till they were consumed.
38 I thrust them through, so that they were not able to rise;
they fell under my feet. […]
42 I beat them fine as dust before the wind;
I cast them out like the mire of the streets.
They’re not verses you’d want to put up on your Instagram story. Where is this gentleness?!
It’s in David’s relationship with the Lord his God. Amidst all the turmoil of his life, he discovered that soul-rest and deep well of goodness in his Maker. In a world of motion, he found One who is constant:
1 I love you, O Lord, my strength.
2 The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer,
my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
Look at how many different names and words for the Lord David uses in just those two verses—and all with possessive pronouns!
David became great, not because of his tenacity or his fighting ability or the size of his ego, but because of who he discovered God to be. His heart pulsed with a new purpose. David was made great and he was grateful to God’s gentleness for it all!
There’s much that could be said about the third longest psalm in the book. It’s full of beautiful, psalmic parallelism. David reflects back in detail on his life-story and God’s faithfulness throughout it. But I just want to consider his reference to God’s ‘gentleness’ in verse 35, a word that only crops up twice in the whole Old Testament.
Gentleness in God’s training school
In the Lord’s gentleness, He prepared David for the tough times. In the relative peace and quiet of the Judean hillside, watching over his sheep, David’s mind and heart was drawn to the Lord. During his solitary life out under the stars, pursuing a humble vocation, this shepherd boy first learnt to trust in God. It wasn’t until his thirtieth year that he became the mighty king who would defeat his enemies (2 Samuel 5:4).
It was the same for the Lord Jesus. When He was made man, His Father didn’t throw Him in at the deep end right away. It wasn’t until Jesus’ thirtieth year that the Holy Spirit led Him in the wilderness in His first full-on contest with Satan (Luke 3:23, 4:1). In those early years, Jesus was busy being a carpenter, probably living to all intents quite an ordinary, unspectacular life, yet during this time God was also training Jesus’ mind, body and soul for the mission He was about to embark on, to defeat sin, death and hell.
As it happens, I’m now into my thirtieth year and whilst it may have gone quickly in some regards, I feel like I’ve already lived a whole lifetime of God’s gentleness. By His grace, there have been far more good times than hard times. Does that mean I am being prepared for some tough trial ahead? Perhaps, perhaps not. Either way, like all of us, I must always make the most of the peace and quiet to restore my soul and seek after God. God’s gentleness in the good times prepares us for the hard times, and God’s gentleness in the hard times even makes them feel like the good times.
Jesus is the gentleness of God incarnate. ‘I am gentle and lowly in heart,’ He says (Matthew 11:29). But He’s not that to everyone, as Psalm 18 says:
25 With the merciful you show yourself merciful;
with the blameless man you show yourself blameless;
26 with the purified you show yourself pure;
and with the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous.
God sometimes leaves people to themselves: the most tragic fate to befall anyone.
God only accepts David through David’s perfect righteousness (Psalm 18:20, 24). But wait, isn’t this the guy who committed adultery and murdered an innocent man? How can he talk about the ‘cleanness of my hands’ and being ‘blameless before [God]’ (Psalm 18:20, 23)? He must be a delusional, self-righteous hypocrite! Or maybe this was written before he realised he’s a massive sinner?
Actually when this psalm was written is immaterial: David always knew he was a sinner (Psalm 51:5). Instead, the reason he can talk about his own righteousness is because, as Christopher Ash writes,
blamelessness does not mean sinlessness but rather a cleansed conscience after repentance and forgiveness through the sin-bearing death of Jesus Christ.1
David’s righteousness was not his own. God has ‘made [David’s] way blameless’ (v32) out of his chesed love (v50). David was forgiven; forgiveness means wiping the slate completely clean. How much David understood the precise mechanics of the Gospel I don’t know, but he certainly knew the joy of salvation, the burden of sin lifted. It was through Christ’s righteousness that David was declared righteous. He had faith in the One to come, the perfect Davidic King (even as King David’s own faith was imperfect).
It’s for the same reason that we too can find in the Lord Jesus Christ a precious Redeemer and Friend who will never leave us.
Gentleness in God’s battlefield
The language of Psalm 18 is very martial, yet it’s also intensely spiritual and personal. This was more than just a flesh-and-blood bout between a tyrant king and the young pretender. It was a struggle for David’s heart, for his very soul. He knew what he was up against:
4 The cords of death encompassed me;
the torrents of destruction assailed me;
5 the cords of Sheol entangled me;
the snares of death confronted me.
Where do we find hope in despair? Courage in spiritual warfare? Freedom from the clutches of sin, death and hell?
Not in ourselves, that’s for sure. Try taking on the world, Satan and yourself: you won’t get far. It’s like attempting to paddle a kayak up a waterfall—impossible!
We can only make any headway by the grace of God through Christ Jesus. As David puts it (v29):
For by you I can run against a troop,
and by my God I can leap over a wall.
If there’s any good in us, any small triumph over sin in our hearts, and victory against the temptations of the world, then it’s ‘by my God’.
When you read this psalm, it may strike you as ironic that the God of gentleness spends more time fighting than David does. The battle is the Lord’s; He does the fighting. ‘Devouring fire’ came from God’s mouth as He ‘rode on a cherub and flew’ to David’s help (Psalm 18:8, 10). Heaven and earth unite at His call; He rends the heavens to come down and save His own.
We couldn’t get up to Him, so He came down to us. To be Immanuel, God with us. To unite mankind with Himself. To restore His image in us.
Restoration works aren’t straightforward, let alone in wartime. But Jesus will one day complete His work in us and make us perfect by His Spirit. We will have no battle scars, no PTSD, but Christ will bear on His hands the marks of what it cost Him for all eternity. The battle that won us the war was won on that cross on Calvary.
Christ is the rider on the white horse (Revelation 19:11-16) and with His strength inside, we can have the confidence to follow Him into the last few skirmishes against our fleeing foes. Now we can fight against all that would corrupt our heart away from the pure worship of God.
Sin may still be present in our hearts, but it no longer has mastery over us (Romans 6:14). Our ship has a new helmsman, a new captain, and though we don’t know what route He’ll take us, we know where we’re headed: His home port, our safe haven of eternal rest. The world could be completely against us, but it wouldn’t matter:
If God is for us, who can be against us?
Romans 8:31
One guy who knew the power of that verse (and lived like it!) was a Scottish preacher who died in his thirtieth year, Robert Murray M’Cheyne. In a letter to a grieving friend, he wrote:
You will never find Jesus so precious as when the world is one vast howling wilderness. Then he is like a rose blooming in the mist of the desolation—a rock rising above the storm.2
Gentleness makes us great
When Jesus slept in the boat on a pillow amidst a storm that made even hardened seafarers fear for their lives, He wasn’t just showing off (Mark 4:35-41). Whilst all around Him the world was in turmoil and His disciples were panicking, Jesus could rest safe in the protection of His Heavenly Father.
And it’s the same for us, when the storm rages around us and everything seems so chaotic, we know who has lordship over the wind and the waves; if we know God’s gentleness, if we trust in God, then deep inside our soul a still, small voice whispers that all is well.
David was made great by the gentle God of the universe. A pathetic and wretched sinner became great and did many great things for the Lord. And David’s God is our God. Not many of us were great when we were first called to follow Him (1 Corinthians 1:26-29), but because of God’s gentleness, whether in this world or the next, we too will one day all be great too and shine as the jewels in His crown. All glory to the powerful and gentle name of the Lord Jesus Christ!
