Psalm 7 is the first time we run up against the word, “shiggaion”. If you are like me, your mind went directly to shenanigans…which this word’s meaning is nothing like. It actually means an emotionally intense song. And let me tell you this…growing up in the 1980s, I listened to my share of emotionally intense songs. I mean, who can forget, Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, Foreigner’s “I Want Know What Love Is”, Journey’s “Faithfully”, and of course, Aha’s “Take on Me”, where in the video, a guy is trapped in a comic book and falls in love with the reader. He does everything he can to break out of the printed pages and into her life. Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the video…he does escape the print and gets to join the girl in real life. Yes indeed, the 80s were filled with shiggaions…and if you are like me…shenanigans.
Ok, now that I got that out of my system, on to the real reason you are reading this…the emotionally intense Psalm 7. David is in his early 20s and is on the run from King Saul. Here is what you need to know about David at this stage of his life. It has been 5-10 years since he slung a stone into Goliath’s head, marking him as a larger-than-life hero. The guy will eventually make some poor life choices, but at this moment, he is quite innocent of the reason Saul is hunting him down. The king is angry at the attention David has gotten for killing the giant whom no one else dared to face, including Saul himself. That is what unchecked jealousy will do to a person. So now, David is forced to leave the king’s court and hide away in caves. Honestly, you can feel the angst in David’s voice as he cries out to the Lord, “If I have done this, if there is wrong in my hands; If I have repaid my friend with evil or plundered my enemy without cause, let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it, and let him trample my life to the ground and lay my glory to the dust.”
Let me pause here and say this…no one in their right mind makes a statement like David did here, without fully knowing they are innocent. In other words, it is not normal for someone to say, crush me into oblivion if I have wronged someone, if they are unsure if they have in fact wronged someone. Quite the opposite. Words like this are only spoken by someone who knows they are innocent of the charges brought against them. That is why David can make that statement with certainty, and this one: “Judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness and according to the integrity that is in me.” That word integrity has been special to me for decades. It comes from the Latin root word integer, meaning whole, or undivided. Later it morphed into describing someone with undivided moral standards or wholeness of upright character. It also is one of the core values of the Air Force. When I used to talk to groups of Airmen, I stressed the importance of integrity as the foundation for everything else in their lives. I am reminded of Jesus’ words concerning building your house on the solid rock versus the shifting sand. Integrity works the same way. If you have weak integrity, your life will fall apart at the slightest of challenges. Alternatively, if you have strong integrity, you can weather big storms.
I absolutely love the way this psalm ends. A lot of people would just sit in their misery, but not David. He says he will praise the Lord according to His righteousness. I hope that you did not miss that. David is not praising God because of anything other than the fact that God is perfect in His goodness and justice. Everything is on the line, David is running for his life, his enemies stalking him like a lion…and yet, none of that matters. David will not be silent as he sings a shiggaion of praise to the name of the Lord Most High.
