(This is the sixth of six posts having to do with Psalm 34.)

Many adversities come to the one who is righteous,
but the Lord delivers him from them all.
He protects all his bones;
not one of them is broken.
Evil brings death to the wicked,
and those who hate the righteous will be punished.
The Lord redeems the life of His servants,
and all who take refuge in Him will not be punished.

Psalm 34:19-22

Many adversities come to the one who is righteous,
but the Lord delivers him from them all.
He protects all his bones;
not one of them is broken.

It doesn’t take long before life teaches us that something is amiss, that there is an evil present in the world that assaults us all regardless of how noble our life. It’s a dangerous world. No matter how we live—in obedience to God or not—for as long as we live in the flesh evil stalks our lives. Misery, distress, and injury are ours to contend with alongside the pleasures and joys of life. You could live a perfect, sinless life and adversities would still show up at your doorstep.

Just ask Jesus.

But together with the promise of adversity in this world comes an even greater promise, that of deliverance!

True, the Lord’s rescues take strange form at times. Again, look at Jesus. Father’s deliverance from adversity came in the form of a triumphant death on a cross, a death that didn’t need His legs to be broken to hasten its coming like those crucified with Him.

As was the case with our Elder Brother, the ultimate deliverance of the righteous—of those who have placed all their hope in the Son of God—lies through  death’s doorway to everlasting life and home with the Father of all.

Evil brings death to the wicked,
and those who hate the righteous will be punished.

Although physical death comes to everyone, there is the awfulness of spiritual death, of separation from God, that is of the worse sort. And to persist in evil is to persist in separation from Life Himself. For didn’t Jesus declare that He was the life? (Jn 14.6) To hate the righteous, those who love and live in obedience to the Son of Man, is to hate God and so bring the awful death of separation from Him upon one’s own head, a severe punishment, indeed!

I do not like the Holman Bible’s translation of the Hebrew word, asham, as “punished”. It is a word that means to offend, be guilty. To hate that which is righteous is to be guilty, certainly. Yet non-redemptive punishment for punishment’s sake alone strikes me as foreign to the God I have come to know through Jesus. For the One who commanded us to love our enemies, to bless them and do good to them, will He not do the same? Not even the guilty are beyond the love of God in Christ Jesus, in this world or the one to come.

The Lord redeems the life of His servants,
and all who take refuge in Him will not be punished.

God is all about redemption: taking that which has been lost and restoring it to wholeness. Each of us who have yielded ourselves to Christ have found Him ever working to heal our brokenness. No matter to what depths sin—either our own or that of others—has marred the landscape of our lives, our heavenly Father promises an eventual outcome beyond our imagination!

To take refuge in the midst of a world chock full of devilish storms of all kinds by seeking the shelter of the love of God in Jesus Christ is the essence of wisdom! To be clothed in His righteousness, to exchange the dirty rags of our own feeble works for Christ’s glorious goodness, is to flee from guilt and all its eternal consequences into everlasting life and joy…

~michael