Psalm 24:3-6
3 Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD, and who shall stand in His holy place?
4 He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false, and does not swear deceitfully.
5 He shall receive blessing from the LORD and righteousness from the God of his salvation.
6 Such is the generation of those who seek God, who seek the face of the God of Jacob.”
This Psalm asks and answers a very important question in verse three, namely, “Who gets to experience God? Who gets to be near Him and experience that as a radically good thing? Who gets to enjoy fellowship with Him?” David may be asking and answering the question from both the eternal and temporal perspectives, but my guess is that he primarily has the immediate in mind in light of what follows in verses five and six. Notice that his question is not one many Christians are asking these days. Today we are far more concerned with getting our salvation patches ironed on and getting on with the real business of life, like going to work, making money, accumulating things and living comfortably and safely in the suburbs. David did not think that way. As a man known for his heart for God, meaning he really loved and therefore desired Him, David was on the lookout for God all the time, though just like us, he was a sinner through and through, and at times, just like us, a divided man. Yet he understood deeply that the best of all places is near God, which begs the question, “Who is the person who gets to be close to God, close enough to enjoy and savor Him?”
“He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully.” David is making the link between practical, lived out righteousness and the soul’s communion with God, a relationship sin always wants to downgrade. In our day (as in times past), we have been led to believe that there is no link between sweet communion with God and living in the light of “Be holy as I am holy,”(1 Peter 1:16) and so we have lots of people calling themselves Christian yet sucking at a great host of broken cisterns much like the rest of the world (Jeremiah 2:13). “Hands” alludes to the actions that one engages in, and “heart” refers to that deep down engine which inspires and compels those actions. As we have seen repeatedly in the Psalms, what one embraces tightly in one’s guts will be evidenced in action, for both good or ill. Here the “clean hands” and “pure . . . heart” are conduits to closeness with God. It is always this way; God is never cherished in the swamplands of sin’s embrace, rather, He is despised.
The third portion of the verse describes what is easy to spot all over the place, the lifting up of the soul to what is false. How aptly this describes us today; we care far too much about what people think of us and so labor hard to keep up appearances, making sure our masks are snug; we really believe this life is all there is and so we spend disproportionate amounts of money (God’s money) on ourselves; we lead “lives of quiet desperation,” and therefore become addicted to things we think will make us feel better. We walk or stumble like drunks to our respective altars, reach into hollowed out chests, pull out what’s left of our bleeding souls, and lay it there before the gods of food or consumerism or comfort or pornography and masturbation or entertainment or the general anesthesia of the wilting American Dream, all false and fading, none everlasting, and yet wonder, “why is this not working for me,” oblivious to the fact that our souls, our substance is made to be lifted up to what is true, and radiant, and beautiful and holy and pure, that is to say, to God alone, and everything that pours out of Him. We devote huge amounts of time and energy to accumulating more for ourselves, and in our boredom and pain distract ourselves with one banality after another.
A telling example of this is our use of pornography today. Legions of men and now women (30% of Internet sex viewing is done by women) are wasting lots of time and money “lifting up their souls to what is false” on a regular basis, most of them oblivious for example to the fact that 75-90% of pornographic actresses are also prostituted, and that a great majority of them were sexually abused at a young age, some of them by their own fathers. The picture of perpetual sexual ecstasy that porn portrays carefully edits out the reality of rampant drug and alcohol use on and off set, addiction and disease. Most people don’t know that the average porn star is carrying four sexually transmitted diseases, some of them, like genital herpes, incurable. The sex-for-sale world is a real world sending out a glut of false messages, and loads of people are listening and worshiping lies and in bondage to them. A result is that in 2006 pornography in the U.S made more more money than Major League Baseball, NFL and NBA combined, a staggering 13.3 billion dollars. “Lifting up our souls to what is false.” Indeed.
David is making the point that communion with God has everything to do with leading a morally upright life that is fed by a pure heart and an orientation towards not lifting up one’s substance to what is false and therefore misleading. In verse five he now says the person who lives this way “ . . . shall receive blessing from the LORD and righteousness from the God of his salvation.” God is the giver of all good gifts, and His definition of what is good is matchless, so to be the receiver of any of His blessings is a glorious thing. Moreover, the second part of the verse promises a particular kind of blessing; “righteousness from the God of his salvation.” God is perfectly holy and therefore perfectly righteous, and we of course are not. God is like a Pacific Ocean of righteousness and our righteousness, our practical lived-out holiness is always stained with some level of impurity, and is quite thimble sized. It is so very, very slight. Note here that David is not talking about the perfect righteousness that is ours through Christ, that allows us to stand before God. He’s talking about the day to day righteousness that is expressed in how and what we think about, what we say, and what we do. One of the gifts of being in communion with God is receiving more of His righteousness and expressing it through a life that is constantly being renewed in Christ. This makes for satisfied and happy Christians.
David helps us a bit more by giving us verse six and then pausing; “Such is the generation of those who seek God, who seek the face of the God of Jacob.” He is encouraging us by telling us that this life of receiving blessing, receiving more practical lived-out righteousness and communion with God (verse 3) is what the seeker receives. It is not the reward of the lazy couch potato or the worldling who has God as a lapel pin. He uses the word “seek” twice to make it clear that as Christians we are to be hunting for God, listening to what He says, praying to Him, obeying His commands, loving Christ’s presence with us, and pursuing Him as He works in the lives of people who invest in us and whom we invest in.
There is always more of God to be sought and enjoyed, so let us hunt for Him in Christ today. Amen.
We often say, “the enemy of the great, is the good.” In this case, the enemy of the great is the impostor, the liar and the great lie of the age that imitation intimacy will make you whole.