And do not enter into judgment with Your servant, For no person living is righteous in Your sight.
Parallel translations
- WEB Don’t enter into judgment with your servant, for in your sight no man living is righteous.
- KJV And enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified.
- BSB Do not bring Your servant into judgment, for no one alive is righteous before You.
- NKJV Do not enter into judgment with Your servant, For in Your sight no one living is righteous.
- NLT Don’t put your servant on trial, for no one is innocent before you.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Quick answer
David asks God not to enter into judgment with him, for no living person is righteous before God. It confesses universal human sinfulness and need for grace.
Overview
David acknowledges that if God judged by strict justice, no one, including himself, could stand. This is a key Old Testament statement of human inability to be righteous before God. Paul builds on it to teach justification by faith, for righteousness comes not by law-keeping but through faith in Christ (Romans 3:20; Galatians 2:16).
Cross-references & the web
Cross-references · 12
- Eccl 7:20Surely there is not a righteous man on earth, who does good and doesn’t sin.
- Job 25:4How then can man be just with God? Or how can he who is born of a woman be clean?
- Rom 3:20Because by the works of the law, no flesh will be justified in his sight. For through the law comes the knowledge of sin.
- Ps 130:3If you, Yah, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand?
- 1 Jn 1:10If we say that we haven’t sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
- Job 14:3Do you open your eyes on such a one, and bring me into judgment with you?
- Gal 2:16yet knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by the works of the law, because no flesh will be justified by the works of the law.
- Job 15:14What is man, that he should be clean? What is he who is born of a woman, that he should be righteous?
- Job 4:17‘Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall a man be more pure than his Maker?
- Exod 34:7keeping loving kindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and disobedience and sin; and that will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the children’s children, on the third and on the fourth generation.”
- 1 Kgs 8:46If they sin against you (for there is no man who doesn’t sin), and you are angry with them, and deliver them to the enemy, so that they carry them away captive to the land of the enemy, far off or near;
- Job 9:2–3“Truly I know that it is so, but how can man be just with God?
Themes, concepts, people & topics
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Christ at the center
The Psalms are Christ's own prayer book and a gallery of his portraits — the suffering one of Psalm 22, the risen Lord of Psalm 16, the priest-king of Psalm 110, the Son to whom the nations are given.
How Psalms 143:2 points to him is part of the one story that runs through all Scripture — meet Jesus at the heart of the web, or follow a trail that traces him from Genesis to Revelation.
Original language
Each word below is tagged with its Strong’s number — tap one to see the underlying Hebrew word, its meaning, and every verse that uses it.