The Man Who Asked to Be Tried

If someone asks you

Petty vendetta with a theological alibi

The psalmist has a personal enemy, and rather than deal with him he asks God to do it — 'let the enemy pursue my soul and take it, and tread down my life on the earth.' He wants a divine hit carried out on a man he names. And he grounds the request in his own spotlessness: if I have done this, if there is iniquity in my hands, then let it happen to me. That is not humility, it is a man betting his innocence in front of God to win an argument with a neighbour. Your own Scripture calls that posture out elsewhere — the Pharisee in the temple thanking God he is not like other men prays in exactly this register, and Christ says he went home unjustified.

At full strength. Look at what the man actually prays. He asks God to rise up in anger (7:6), to brandish a sword and bend a bow (7:13), to have arrows and "instruments of death" ready (7:14), and to bring his enemy's iniquity down on his crown (7:17) — all over words. Nobody has been stabbed. He has been slandered. And in the middle of this he tells the Almighty to judge him "according to my justice, and according to my innocence in me" (7:9), which is the precise posture Jesus mocks in the Pharisee at the front of the temple. So: a man with an inflated view of his own record, asking heaven to kill people who insulted him. Christians who pray this are laundering resentment through liturgy and calling it devotion.

Answer. Take the violence first, and notice a fact the objection has to skip: the psalmist never asks to do any of it. Every violent verb in Psalm 7 has God as its subject. He does not sharpen a sword; he asks that God be judge. That is not an evasion — that is exactly the transfer the New Testament commands. "Revenge is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord" (Romans 12:19). A man who hands his enemy to a judge has, by that act, given up handling it himself. The alternative to this psalm is not serenity. The alternative is a man waiting in a parking lot.

Second, the self-curse in 7:3-5 makes the vendetta reading impossible. Before he asks for anything, he offers to go first: if I have done this thing, if there be iniquity in my hands... let the enemy pursue my soul, and take it, and tread down my life on the earth. Nobody constructing an alibi opens by inviting the judge to destroy him if he is lying. That clause is the psalm's proof of good faith, and any reading that ignores it is reading half the text.

Third, on self-righteousness: the claim is bounded by a conditional — "if I have done this thing" (7:3). It is a plea to a charge, not a résumé. The same author, in the same book, writes that in God's sight no living man is justified (Psalm 142:2 Douay / 143:2 Hebrew). And St. Augustine, reading Psalm 7 against Psalm 6, notes that the confidence here belongs to a man already brought through obedience — one "called" who "has held and kept the commandments which he received" — and then immediately reaches for another psalm to say whose light it is: "You, O Lord, will light my candle." That is not a man grading his own paper.

Fourth, St. Thomas supplies the rule that keeps this prayable: to desire another's evil "as evil, being intent on the evil itself" is the sin of cursing; to desire it "under the aspect of good" — as justice, or as a remedy "that he may himself reform" — is lawful (Summa II-II, q. 76, a. 1). Psalm 7 satisfies the rule on its own terms. Verse 13 makes the sword explicitly conditional: "Except you will be converted, he will brandish his sword." The bow is bent and held. The psalm would rather have the man converted.

Say it out loud: "Every weapon in this psalm is in God's hands and none of them are in mine. That is the point of praying it."

'My justice' is precisely the inherent righteousness Rome teaches and Scripture forbids

Verse 9: 'judge me, O Lord, according to my justice, and according to my innocence in me.' According to MY justice. IN ME. That is not imputed righteousness received from outside; that is a righteousness the man claims to possess and asks God to weigh — and it is the exact thing your Council of Trent defined when it condemned the imputation view and taught that a man is justified by a justice inhering in him. So either the psalmist is presuming on a righteousness no son of Adam has, in which case Isaias is right that our justices are as a filthy rag, or your doctrine is right and Paul is wrong that there is none just, no not one. Pick.

At full strength. Isaias says all our justices are as a filthy rag. The Psalter says no living man is justified in God's sight (142:2 Douay / 143:2 Hebrew). Paul says by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified. Put those together and the conclusion is forced: the only righteousness that can stand at that bar is an alien one, Christ's, credited to an account that never earned it. Rome instead teaches a justice infused into and inhering in the believer — Trent, Session VI, canon 24, has it "preserved and also increased before God through good works," and canon 32 calls those works his "merits." But a righteousness that is genuinely mine, however it got there, is still a creature's righteousness, and Isaias has already priced it: filthy rags. Psalm 7:9 can only be covenantal shorthand. The instant you make it inherent, Isaias collapses it.

Answer. The psalm itself supplies the distinction, two verses later. 7:9: "according to my justice." 7:11: "Just is my help from the Lord: who saveth the upright of heart." The justice claimed in verse 9 is help-derived by verse 11. The psalmist never says he needs no help; he says the help arrived and did something real.

On Isaias 64: the oracle is addressed to a people in open apostasy, describing works performed apart from God by a nation under judgment. (Note in passing that the Douay's rendering of that line is far more graphic than the familiar English one, and it is worth reading in the original context before deploying.) It is a devastating description of religion without grace. It is not a metaphysical claim that grace is incapable of producing genuine justice in a man — which is exactly what it would have to mean for the objection to land, and which would make the Holy Ghost an ineffective agent.

On Trent, quote it accurately, because the canons cited are not the whole hand. Session VI, chapter 8 first: "none of those things which precede justification — whether faith or works — merit the grace itself of justification," and "faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation, and the root of all Justification; without which it is impossible to please God." That is Catholic dogma, and it grants the Reformed instinct everything it is actually right about — nobody buys the front door. Canon 11 then denies that men are justified "by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ... to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Ghost," because a verdict that leaves the man unchanged is a legal fiction, and God does not issue those. Canon 32 holds both ends at once: the good works of the justified are God's gifts and also his own merits. The conjunction is not a hedge. It is the doctrine.

So David can say "my justice" the way a son says "my house" of the house his father bought, paid for, and put in his name. It is really his. It never for one second originated with him.

And grant the strong part, because it is true and the Church teaches it: no man may presume on his own record at the absolute bar. Trent is as insistent on that as any Reformed catechism — Session VI, chapter 9 is titled "Against the vain confidence of Heretics," and teaches that each man, "when he regards himself, and his own weakness and indisposition, may have fear and apprehension touching his own grace." Psalm 142:2 (Douay) / 143:2 (Hebrew) stands unrepealed. That is why the psalm asks for a search and not for a verdict of acquittal.

Say it out loud: "The justice is really mine, and it never stopped being His."