“Though the Lord is exalted, He takes note of the humble; but He knows the haughty from a distance.” — Psalm 138:6 (HCSB)
David writes this Psalm from a familiar place. If you’ve spent any time in the Psalms, you know the rhythm – danger on one side, gratitude on the other. Enemies surrounding him, yet an unshakeable confidence that God sees him and will come through. It’s this constant back and forth between what his eyes are telling him and what his spirit knows to be true. That tension runs through almost everything David wrote, and it’s part of what makes his writing feel so honest and so human.
What stands out in this particular Psalm is something David says almost in passing. He’s a king. He has power, status, and authority that most people in his world could not truly imagine. And yet he talks about the humbling of kings before God as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. A lot of powerful people throughout history have spent their energy thinking about their own greatness. David spends his thinking about God’s.
I had a conversation recently with someone I care about, where I shared something very personal. It was all leading to a significant and positive decision in my life. The first response out of that person’s mouth was about how it might affect them. It felt like the things I was sharing were only really about that other person, and not me. But as I thought about it, I do a version of that same thing more than I’d like to admit. Not always in such an obvious way, at least I hope that I never respond to someone in that way. But I naturally tend to filter everything through the lens of how it relates to me. I put myself at the center without even trying. It just happens.
That’s exactly what verse 6 is pushing back against. Following God means placing proper perspective on things, not thinking of myself more highly than I ought to, and not making myself the main character of every situation. It means shifting the focus to where it actually belongs, which is on God and what he is doing in the middle of all of it.
The antidote is gratitude, and not just the surface level kind where I count my blessings and feel good about my circumstances. The deepest gratitude I can have is actually about something much bigger than any of that. The God who created the universe, the one who breathed life into humanity and specifically into me, the same God who sits above all of human history and knows all billions of people on this planet, from kings to slaves, that same God actually loves me. That is not a small thing. His glory is incomprehensible, and yet he takes note of me. When I actually sit with that, everything else finds its right place pretty quickly. My needs feel smaller. My pride feels sillier. And the humility that David is describing in this Psalm starts to feel less like some religious discipline and more like the only reasonable response.