For Whose Sake?

“Save me for the sake of your steadfast love” Psalm 6:4

Would not this sentence be more appropriate if it read, “Save me for my own sake“? It seems odd to me that David, the psalm writer, would ask God to save him, for the sake of God’s steadfast love. In other words, how does David’s saving lead to a lifting up of God’s steadfast love?

It seems that for some reason, the saving of David leads to a magnifying of God’s steadfast love. I think precisely because God’s love is magnified when God gives to David what is ultimately best for him and that is God. So when God saves David, he saves David to Himself, giving David the greatest thing he could ever want or desire.

As somewhat of an aside, I was at a conference last night at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, featuring some top notch thinkers of the Evangelical Faith. At the conference, echoing statements made by both Dr. Jack Davis of GCTS, and Dr. Miroslav Volf of Yale Divinity, struck me. They echoed similarly that the Church lacked the concrete reality of God in its life. Meaning, the Church has lost any sense of who God really is and that He is the ultimate reality, more real than the chair we comfortably sit in as we listen to our favorite preacher. Volf proposed that the only way to combat the increasingly sensational thirst & desire of our present age, or what he terms, ‘The Empire of Desire’, “we need to make plausible that the love of God is the key to human flourishing (or satisfaction).” All this to say, David’s salvation is for the sake of God’s steadfast love, because it shows that God saves David, not only to give him more of the earthly things he desires, but he saves David to give him more of God, who is the ultimate reality and, as Volf might say, the only hope for human flourishing.