Psalm 31:23 – “Why Not?”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

²³Love the LORD, the all of His loved ones. The LORD guards faithful ones and repays abundantly one doing pride.

In the last post, I pondered the one thing that amazes me most about this verse – that the right response to all the Lord is and does is simply to love Him.

What I want to ponder a while this time is the question, “Why not?” As we’re talking about it, it would seem the simplest thing in the whole world would be to love God. So why does David think he needs to urge us to? Why wouldn’t I (we) love Him?

The first answer that comes to my mind would be, because we love something else. Martha loved to be busy. The Pharisees loved all their rules. The rich fool loved his wealth. Solomon loved “many women.” John Calvin once said, “The human heart is a factory of idols.” We are all naturally drawn to love all kinds of things rather than God – or should we say, in place of God.

As I ponder, I suppose that is part of the problem – that we deceive ourselves into thinking, “It’s not that I don’t love God, I just love …” We imagine in our hearts that we can love both God and money (or whatever).

 What’s important, of course, is that we do love Him.

Here’s another thought – we could sit around and beat ourselves up about what it is we really love instead of God. But I wonder if that’s really the best way forward? It seems like to me that my love for God grows in every way I get to know Him better. Just studying through this Psalm, I feel like has deepened my love for God. Even as I’m pondering these things, I tend to think somehow I need to look “deep in my heart” and discover my problems so I can repent of them – but that immediately just seems like a dark, cold, hopeless business. It is so much more encouraging just to look back through this Psalm, to see the Lord Himself in all His amazing love, and just let that fill my mind.

In my own life, it seems like the more I simply seek the Lord, the more I try to see His face, the less grip my sins seem to have on me. Even in the verse before us, He doesn’t say to us, “Love the Lord – instead of all your other lusts.” He says “Love the Lord,” and then reminds us who He is: “He guards the faithful and pays back the proud in full.” He’s a good God.

We do need to be aware that our evil hearts are drawn after everything else – as John says, “The lust of our flesh and the lust of our eyes and the pride of life” – our love of pleasures and possessions and applause. But I would suggest from my own life, we don’t conquer those things by setting about to conquer them. We conquer them because Jesus fills our heart and simply makes them less important to us. We conquer them by doing exactly what our verse encourages us to do: “Love the Lord.”

He is amazing. He Himself is the answer!

We’re right back where this whole Psalm started: “In You …”