Psalm 3:3 and Confidence in God

Psalm 3:3 reads, "But you, LORD, are a shield around me, my glory, the One who lifts my head high."

This was written by King David during a time of intense trouble when being pursued by his son Absalom in a complex set of circumstances. The overall context of this Psalm is that David has a lot of enemies, they are chasing him, and they want him dead. The normal human reaction here would be to be scared silly. The Bible gives no indication here that David is not afraid, in fact he most likely is very much scared! However, we see his first response is to cry out to the Lord and confess to the Lord a realistic scenario of his reality. In this case, he is not denying the reality.

Next, David essentially says that his confidence comes from the Lord, in verse 3 above. This is in direct contrast to the modern pop-psychology and self-help movement which says that you have to hold your own head high. Essentially, the self-help philosophy is that you help yourself, and develop your own resources to get confidence, or something else, in a situation where you lack it.

Relying on self for self-confidence doesn't sound like what David is doing here, in that David is acting on faith that God will intervene in the circumstances and will be his help. We see how he puts this faith in action by his response in verse 5:

"I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the LORD sustains me."

So in other words he goes to sleep and enjoys a time of rest when he is surrounded by enemies who want to kill him. Besides the fact that David is showing trust in God in difficult times, this verse also shows how God has ordained sleep and rest.

I wish I had a dollar for every person I knew who basically cut back on sleep at some point in order to accomplish more. This happens all the time where I work, in that the students will say they only slept for 3 hours in order to cram for a test at the last minute, or to do their university applications, and so forth.

In these days, we are so damn busy, and there is never enough time to do all we've set out to. And so we rush more, and sleep is the first thing to be sacrificed. This fits into the context of self-reliance and doing life by ourselves, and also in a world that runs 24/7.

If only we could be like David, trust in God, and get a full sleep.