God’s Condescension

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I’ve been studying Psalm 18 for several weeks now. While it only takes a moment or two to read through the Psalm, the God David writes about is extraordinarily complex, and I want to know more.

David is described in I Samuel 13:14 as someone the "Lord has sought out for Himself, a man after His own heart” and the one the Lord appointed to rule over His people in place of Saul, whom the people wanted as their king instead of the God of the universe. From my perspective, wanting a man to replace a creator God is incomprehensible, but I forget how easily I sway toward appearance rather than substance, too. Their desire or pull to be like the world they live in is no different from mine.

David begins his Psalm with his love for the Lord and gratitude for his salvation from his enemies by God’s strength. His relationship with God is personal, close, and strong, developed and strengthened through the very circumstances that ensued when God chose him to become king over His people. Throughout the Psalm, David makes it very clear that God is the one doing the delivering, yet strangely enough he also recognizes his own part in that deliverance.

David sought God when he needed help instead of relying on his own strength. The creator God of the universe was David’s best friend and ally, and he felt comfortable calling out to Him for help. However, unlike many of us might, David didn’t develop a sense of himself and his own importance when God exercised all His power in a mighty defense of David (see verses 6-19). He recognized that God equipped him; God strengthened him; God trained him for battle; God became his shield. God did the rescuing to accomplish His purpose.

After God saves him, David declares himself blameless in verses 20-24 and suggests that God has recompensed him according to his righteousness. At first glance, that seems rather arrogant and self-focused, but by the time David gets to verse 30 and declares that “as for God, His way is blameless,” I begin to understand that he is drawing his blamelessness from God’s. When David finally states God “makes my way blameless,” I see that David’s previous statement is justified, and that’s about the time it kicks in that God makes my way blameless, too.

Just as God defended David before his enemies and declared him righteous, God is the One who took on my sins, died for me on the cross, rose again, and then condescended to offer me the clothes of heaven—a robe not my own—white, pure; yes, even blameless . . .

God’s condescension (a word we often think of in a negative light) means that He willingly, voluntarily even, yielded His just claims and rights. He relinquished them for me. He clothed me in His righteousness. It is instant, this clothing, yet the trappings of maturity in Him take time. Maturity takes time. All the while, God is working in me, through me, around me, developing me into who he wants me to be. It is what God does that makes any of us great—He does ALL the work, willingly giving up His superior post to make me something useful (or not if I choose to walk away). He does all this without demanding the credit. This quiet condescension steals my heart. And my heart becomes His heart, and then I, too, have a heart after God’s own heart.



David obviously gets this, and I am so glad he did because every time I dig a little further into Psalm 18, it just convinces me further that David really was a man after God’s own heart (as if God could’ve been wrong about him . . .) so that I could be a woman after His heart, too. So what are the chances that God is wrong about me? About you? He willingly died for us, offering the righteousness not of our own making. Is it possible He’s waiting for us to see that we, too, are men and women after God’s own heart?

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