In the final verses of the psalm, David returns to the problem of his enemies, asking God to silence or destroy them so that he might continue to live and serve God. This sounds like another of those imprecatory passages that bother contemporary people so much, but it is not quite that, for there is an order here. The important matters (in order of importance) are: 1) preserve my life; 2) bring me out of trouble; and 3) silence my enemies. Then, if this is what is required in order that David might live and continue to be God's servant, “destroy all my foes” (v. 12).
In the third stanza David puts himself under an important spiritual discipline: to remember God's acts on his behalf and for other godly people in past days. He uses three verbs to describe what he does: “I remember,” “I meditate," and I “consider.”
It is no small matter to acknowledge that no human being, however moral or upright by our fallible human standards, will be justified by God on the basis of his or her own righteousness. We think we are righteous. But in God's sight, “All our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isa. 64:6). So if we are to be saved by God, it must be on the basis of a righteousness that is not our own, an "alien righteousness,” which is what Luther called it. It is made available to us by the life and death of Jesus Christ.
An understanding of repentance as affecting all of life needs to be recovered by evangelical churches today, and a better understanding of Psalm 143 may be one way to begin to go about it. In April 1996, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals held a conference of key evangelical leaders in Cambridge, Massachusetts, out of which came "The Cambridge Declaration.” One of the papers presented at this conference was by Sinclair B. Ferguson on the matter we are considering, the nature of repentance.
Psalm 143 is the last of the psalms that have been called penitential in the liturgical tradition of the church. The others are Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102 and 130, making seven in all. It is easy to see why the other psalms are called penitential. In each of them the writer confesses his sin and asks God for mercy and forgiveness.
