The Noonday Is the Resurrection

The promise is spoken to a man who is told to wait. "He will bring forth your righteousness as the light And your judgment as the noonday" (Psalm 37:6). The shining belongs to the future of the sentence. The bringing forth belongs to God. Both verbs have the same subject, and it is not the righteous man. He brings forth. The man does not manufacture his own light, and he does not schedule his own noonday.

His part is named, and it is not striving. "Be still in Yahweh and wait patiently for Him" (Psalm 37:7). "Hope for Yahweh and keep His way" (Psalm 37:34). Stillness and hope are not idleness. They are the posture of a man whose case rests in another's hands. Even his walking is established from above: "The footsteps of a man are established by Yahweh, And He delights in his way" (Psalm 37:23). And the end of the psalm is not the man's endurance but God's action toward the many: "Yahweh helps them and protects them" (Psalm 37:40). The psalm opens with a promise God performs and closes with a people God keeps. The waiting stands between them.

But whose righteousness shines? The psalm does not leave its own words floating. Another psalm takes up the very language of Psalm 37 and puts it on the lips of mockers. Psalm 37 commands the committing: commit your way to Yahweh, trust in Him (Psalm 37:5). Psalm 22 records the taunt built on that command: "Commit yourself to Yahweh; let Him rescue him; Let Him deliver him, because He delights in him" (Psalm 22:8). The gospel tells us where that taunt was spoken. It was spoken at a cross, by men watching a righteous man die unrescued, to all appearances unvindicated (Matt 27:43). The promise of Psalm 37 was thrown at the Sufferer as proof that it had failed.

The taunt quotes the psalm against itself. For Psalm 22 itself remembers the fathers: "In You our fathers trusted; They trusted and You rescued them" (Psalm 22:4). "In You they trusted and were not disappointed" (Psalm 22:5). The pattern of the fathers is trust answered by rescue, trust that does not end in shame. The mockers assume the pattern has broken, because no rescue is visible. The psalm they quote assumes the opposite. It measures the rescue by God's faithfulness, not by the hour on the clock. The cross looked like the one case where trusting ended in disappointment. Psalm 22 was written to say that appearances are not the verdict.

Between the taunt and the shining stands the Servant's court. Isaiah 50 gives the righteous sufferer his own words, and they are not the words of a man vindicated before men. "I gave My back to those who strike Me" and "I did not hide My face from dishonor and spitting" (Isaiah 50:6). Dishonor is real. Spitting is real. Nothing in the passage pretends the shame away. What the Servant denies is the shame's authority: "Even now Lord Yahweh helps Me, Therefore, I am not dishonored" (Isaiah 50:7). "I know that I will not be ashamed" (Isaiah 50:7). The ground is stated twice, and it is a person, not an outcome already visible: Lord Yahweh helps Me.

Then the court is called to order. "He who vindicates Me is near; Who will contend with Me?" (Isaiah 50:8). "Behold, Lord Yahweh helps Me; Who is he who condemns Me?" (Isaiah 50:9). Note where the vindication stands while the dishonor is still fresh. It stands in nearness. The Vindicator is near before the vindication is seen. No accuser is answered with evidence. The accuser is answered with a presence. This is the order of Psalm 37 kept intact: God brings forth, in His hour, what His nearness has already secured. The noonday is not the moment the righteous man becomes righteous. It is the moment his righteousness, hidden under dishonor, is brought into the light where all can see it.

Peter takes this pattern up and sets it where it belongs. "Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in His steps" (1 Peter 2:21). The example is real, and Peter does not soften it. But the example does not stand alone, and it must never be preached as though suffering itself sanctifies the sufferer. The same apostle anchors the pattern in a finished act: "Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, so that He might bring you to God" (1 Peter 3:18). Once for all. The righteous for the unrighteous. His suffering is not the first instance of a general rule that the good suffer well. It is the substitution that brings others to God. The steps we follow are the steps of the One who carried us in His own steps.

And Peter states the vindication in the same breath as the death. He was "put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit" (1 Peter 3:18). God "raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God" (1 Peter 1:21). Here is the noonday of Psalm 37, arrived. The Righteous One was committed to Yahweh. He was taunted with the committing. He was struck, spat upon, counted an evildoer, and put to death. And God brought forth His righteousness as the light — not by repairing His reputation among the men who condemned Him, but by raising Him from the dead and giving Him glory. The resurrection is the bringing forth. Faith and hope rest there, Peter says, not in the prospect that the world will one day agree with us.

From that resurrection the promise travels outward to the many of Psalm 37:40. God "has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" (1 Peter 1:3). The new birth is not an improvement of the old life. It is a birth, and its instrument is a resurrection already accomplished. What God did in Christ's body He pledges to do in ours: "if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies" (Romans 8:11). The shining of the righteous is therefore bodily, or it is nothing. Carried by the same Spirit, on the same pattern, by the same act of God.

Then the last word of the chain can be heard. "Then THE RIGHTEOUS WILL SHINE FORTH AS THE SUN in the kingdom of their Father" (Matthew 13:43). Then. Not when men finally render a fair judgment. Not when the slander is corrected in this age — though God may grant that, and Psalm 37 does not forbid hoping for it. Then, when the resurrection brings forth in the children what the resurrection of the Son has already declared. The light of Psalm 37:6 was a morning word, spoken to a waiting man in a dark field. Matthew names its full blaze: as the sun, in the kingdom. And the kingdom has an owner, which is why the waiting of Psalm 37 is not a wager. The chain closes where Psalm 22 closes: "the kingdom is Yahweh's" (Psalm 22:28).

So the answer to the psalm's open question stands in order. The righteousness that shines is first His. He committed His way perfectly, trusted, was dishonored, and was brought forth by resurrection. It is then theirs — the many whom Yahweh helps and protects — but only in Him, only by the Spirit who raised Him, only on the day when mortal bodies are given life. No man brings forth his own noonday. No man needs to. The footsteps are established by Yahweh. The Vindicator is near. The kingdom is Yahweh's.

One thread in these texts is left hanging, and it is left hanging on purpose. Delight runs through both psalms. Yahweh delights in the way of the righteous man (Psalm 37:23). The mockers' taunt turns on the same word: let Him deliver him, "because He delights in him" (Psalm 22:8). The taunt assumed that delight, if real, must show itself in immediate rescue. The resurrection answered otherwise — the delight was real, and the rescue came through death, not around it. When the righteous finally shine forth as the sun, will the noonday be, at last, the Father's delight in His children made visible to every eye? The texts are set side by side. The question stands open.