Psalms 37:5
“Commit your way to Yahweh. Trust also in him, and he will do this:”
Where this sits
From a long psalm about the puzzle of watching dishonest people do well. David writes it as an old man — later in the same psalm he says he has been young, and now is old.
Reflection
Commit is a mild English word for what the Hebrew actually says. The verb means roll. Roll your way onto Yahweh.
It is a picture of weight. Something too heavy to carry is not lifted and handed over; it is rolled off you onto something that can take it. The same physical image turns up when Peter tells his readers to cast their anxiety, and in the proverb about rolling your works onto the Lord. Scripture keeps reaching for this gesture, and it is never a delicate one.
What gets rolled here is your way — not a problem, not a decision, but the direction of a life. That is a larger handover than most of us have in mind when we pray about a situation.
Then the line stops in an odd place. Trust also in him, and he will do this: — and the sentence simply ends. What he will do is described in the next verse, not this one. The promise is deliberately unfinished where it sits.
That is not a flaw in the editing. It is a fair picture of the thing itself. You commit, and you do not receive the details in the same breath. There is a gap between the handover and the seeing, and the psalm is honest enough to leave that gap on the page.
Written, remember, by a man old enough to have watched it work out.
- Theme:
- Trust
- Book:
- Psalms