Salvation from Wrath

“The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry. The face of the Lord is against those who do evil to cut off the memory of them from the earth.” (Ps. 34.15-16)

The psalms give us a stark contrast between the blessed man who follows God and the wicked man who does not (as in Ps. 1). Here this contrast comes near the end of what starts out as a psalm of praise. In response to his encounter with Abimelech in 1 Samuel 21, David begins Psalm 34 by praising God for his deliverance and calling others to do likewise.

But David probes deeper than material deliverance. His testimony of praise is just the door into understanding what it means to be saved, and he begins that understanding with the fear of the Lord. “Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack!” David is not talking about the material wealth that comes from a rich uncle, but the provision of what we need that comes from a loving father. Our access to that father begins with the fear of him.

For the next few verses, David changes tone from the imperatives of a call to worship to the language of a wisdom psalm. “Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord.” David is pleading for the attention of those listening to him sing in his day, and the plea continues to go out through all time. “What man is there who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good?” Duh! All men! But now that David has our attention, his instruction is deceptively simple: “Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.”

In other words, the fear of the Lord in this context is not a fear that makes us cower, it is a fear that motivates us to do what God has called us to do. And it is on the heels of this understanding that we get the verses quoted at the beginning of the article. God draws a distinction between how he treats the righteous (those who fear the Lord) and how he treats the wicked, and that distinction should motivate us to fear him from both the positive and the negative.

We fear the Lord because He gives us what we need, and we fear him because judgment will come upon the wicked. These positive and negative motivations are interconnected. For what do we need more than salvation from God’s wrath? And what greater good has he given us other than that salvation?

For the righteous, the troubles of this life do not represent the wrath of God. They are the crucible on which he forms our character. As David points out, God will deliver the righteous from affliction, but “affliction will slay the wicked.” Why? Because “the Lord redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.”

We Christians need not fear that we will lose our salvation, because God is not capricious. Affliction does not mean we are bad Christians, and we have God’s promise of protection from his judgment. But if affliction instills bitterness rather than the fear of the Lord in us, we urgently need to remember the judgment that we deserve and the cost that God paid to save us from it.