“Those Who Look to Him Are Radiant”

Lately I’ve been thinking about Psalm 34:5: “Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.” And I’ve been wrestling with the verses on either side of it: “I sought the Lord, and he answered me; he delivered me from all my fears” (v.4) and “This poor man called, and the Lord heard him; he saved him out of all his troubles” (v.6).¹

Almost daily, I fear that I am not saved. These verses feel like salt on my wounds. I have sought the Lord; I have called out to him. But he has not answered my prayers for relief. He has not delivered me from anxiety, granted me the experience of assurance, or saved me from the trouble of a scrupulous mind.

But I’ve begun to think about this verse in another way—not as an affirmation that God has removed all suffering, but as an affirmation that the Lord hears, and he is doing something. As I have cried out for the Lord to save me (in fact, hundreds of times when I’ve done it compulsively), I feel no sense of assurance. But that does not mean that God has not listened to me. Part of doing the opposite for me today is to press on, doing as a Christian would do, with the belief that when I cried out to Jesus to save my soul, he heard me and acted. This belief is hard—we’ll get back to this in a moment.

So what about verse 5? “Those who look to him are radiant.”

I don’t fully know what is meant by “radiant,” but it makes me think of beauty. Those who look to Jesus are made beautiful by the very act of beholding his beauty; they are made righteous by his righteousness. Whatever it means, it’s clear that you get that radiance by looking to Jesus. Not by looking at your heart, not by trying to discern your faith (or lack thereof), not by engaging in rumination to try to figure everything out or make yourself right with God. But by simply looking to Jesus.

And what is the result of looking to Jesus? “Their faces are never covered with shame.” I think of Jesus’s promises in the Gospels: “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry” (John 6:35); “Whoever comes to me I will never cast out” (John 6:37). This message is consistent throughout all of Scripture. Those who cry out to Jesus will never be ashamed for doing so. They will never be turned away. They will never be denied the bread of life, even if, for seasons, they don’t experience the assurance of that.

God has not delivered me out of my fears of hell and death. He has not saved me from scrupulosity that tells me such lies. But I am fighting to believe that he has delivered me from the thing that I fear, even if the fear remains. He has delivered me from the worst-case scenario my scrupulosity can imagine, even if he has not delivered me from the imagining itself.

So back to believing God’s promises. This is hard to do! Choosing to act as if this is true of me—that I really am a Christian—is not easy. It is risky, because “What if I’m not saved?” But I’m banking my hope on Jesus’s character to be true to his promises. If God is not true to his promises, then I am lost; so are you, and so is every single person on this planet who cries out to him. Moving forward with the belief that God has heard me is believing that he is true to his promises.

It’s okay if you don’t quite believe this yet. It’s okay if that belief is the smallest seed of hoping that maybe all your fears are wrong. You need only look to Jesus—he’s strong enough to save, so your strength is irrelevant. You can press forward into battling scrupulosity. You can step into the uncertainty, choosing not to listen to your scrupulous thoughts, because Jesus is strong enough to save, and merciful in your weakness. Your most distressing thoughts and your greatest anxieties cannot keep you from his promises.

Those who look to him are radiant, because he has promised it will be so.

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1. This song (Psalm 34:4–6 put to music by Scripture Hymnal) has been the impetus for my thinking about these verses. It’s beautiful and I’ve been playing it on repeat. ↩︎