Verse of the day · August 27
Does Psalm 37:25 promise that righteous people will never be poor?
David begged his bread from a priest, and it was while Saul was hunting him.
I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.
Psalm 37:25
The man speaking has come to the end of a long life and is giving evidence. He looked at the world once with the feelings of the young, and looks at it now with the impartial judgment of a man about to leave it. There is something solemn in being made to say I am old. The conviction he leaves behind is that God protects his people and provides for them, and that they do not often come to want. The wording he chose has no often in it.
Among those in the record who asked others for bread is the psalmist. He asked it of Ahimelech at Nob and of Nabal after that; Elijah asked it of the widow of Sarepta. Matthew Henry's reading of the psalm keeps the occasion with it: David begged his bread of the priest, and it was when Saul hunted him. Asking bread in a few instances, John Gill notes, is not the act of constantly begging it from door to door, and the psalmist means the constant kind.
Men who wrote on the verse set it against their own lives. Albert Barnes dated his note as he wrote it — the first of December 1859, the day he reached his sixty-first year — and said he could now write I have been young. As a great law, he reports, the children of the pious are not vagrants and beggars; here and there is one who is, reduced by sickness or misfortune. Charles Spurgeon, who says of himself that he is not old, had a different report. It is not my observation just as it stands, he writes, for I have relieved the children of undoubtedly good men who came to me as common beggars. He casts no doubt on David for it, putting him under a dispensation more outward, and more of this world, than the rule of personal faith he lived under himself. Adam Clarke, one of the writers Spurgeon assembled in the Treasury, is grey-headed himself and has travelled in different countries among religious people of every station. He believes the verse literally true in all cases and, to his knowledge, has never seen one instance to the contrary.
Never are the righteous forsaken: Spurgeon calls that a rule without exception. Seldom indeed do their seed beg bread — it does occur, through dissipation or idleness or some other cause in the sons, and rarely enough that many alive have never once seen it. One clause is a law; the next is a count of what one man saw in one lifetime. Gill reports a reading that carries the word forsaken forward over the second clause too: nor his seed begging bread, forsaken. Taken that way it does not claim they never begged, but that they never begged in vain. An old Jewish exposition leaves nothing to infer: although his seed and his sons are begging bread, yet I have not seen the righteous man, their father, forsaken, because of his fear of the blessed God.
Joseph Caryl, in a note collected in Spurgeon's Treasury, hears the care in it: the psalmist does not say he never saw the righteous afflicted, but that he never saw him left or forsaken in his affliction. A good man may fall into such wants. David's own hunger belongs to a case Henry says Christ excepted out of all the temporal promises: persecution for righteousness' sake, which carries honours and comforts enough to make it a gift rather than a grievance.
What is no longer universally true, Barnes says plainly, is the wide reading of it: that the righteous never want, or that their children are never constrained to beg bread. What he keeps is smaller and holds. Religion tends to make people industrious, economical and prudent, he writes, and it impoverishes nobody. It does not alter the constitution of the mind, he adds, or impart the skill or talent on which so much of success depends. The Geneva Notes cover the case where the lack is real: God may suffer a just man to lack temporal benefits, and recompenses him with spiritual treasures.
The righteous can be poor and needy and often in necessitous circumstances, afflicted by God and persecuted by men, forsaken by their dearest friends and their own relations. There are hours when they think the Lord has gone too, and their enemies are certain of it, and it is not the case. They may be forsaken by him for a while; he will not leave them and forsake them for ever. A man reading this over an empty cupboard is not reading a verdict on himself. Across a lifetime the old man never caught either sight, and only one of them is a promise: their children beg bread seldom; their father is never forsaken.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, Adam Clarke, Albert Barnes, the Geneva Bible notes and Charles Spurgeon.
THNK GOD reads this passage with you — a verse each day, taught, with the commentary behind it. For iPhone and Android.