TRUST
The Foundation
Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness!
You have relieved me in my distress;
Be gracious to me and hear my prayer.
(Psalm 4:1, bolding mine)
David is in trouble. He has been ruling in Jerusalem for many years, and now his son Absalom has initiated a coup to take over the kingship. All of Jerusalem is in an uproar, with many Israelites taking Absalom’s side. David is in retreat, fleeing from his palace into the wilderness east of the Jordan River.
Is David in distress?
Absolutely.
Had God given David relief in the past when he was in distressing situations?
Beyond a shadow of a doubt. David’s life is rich with stories of God rescuing him from dangerous, life-threatening situations.
But this is not what the Hebrew actually says in Psalm 4. A literal translation of this verse would be:
Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness!
You have enlarged me in my narrowness;
Be gracious to me and hear my prayer.
And to me, that is a huge difference.
Enlarge Me in My Narrowness
Distress is a state of extreme emotion. When we are in distress, we are experiencing deep anxiety, sorrow, anger or despair. It is an emotional response to a tough, potentially dangerous situation in our lives.
But the Hebrew word used here is tzar, meaning “narrow.” It is not an emotion, although the situation it describes does evoke strong emotions in us. It is a spacial word, signifying a place where we are squeezed on all sides, a place where we are hemmed in, where there is seemingly no way out.
Was David in a narrow place?
Without a doubt. His kingship was being threatened, and David had become aware of it too late. After four years of cultivating support among the Israelites, Absalom had convinced many of them to switch their allegiance to himself, and they had crowned him as the new king at Hebron.
David was blindsided.
He should not have been. He had seen Absalom’s wicked ways, and had chosen love over consequences. Absalom was a thunderbolt ready to strike, but David had turned a blind eye toward him, refusing to see Absalom as he really was.
In many ways, David was responsible for the mess he was in. He lacked perspective in the situation. His thinking was warped. And with Absalom’s treachery, he found himself in a very narrow place.
But over the course of his life, David had come to know the God of Tight Places.
And David chose to remember.
Hemmed in on every side, David chose to look back on his journey with God, and remember how the tight places in his life had stretched and transformed him.
He savoured the fact that his righteousness is found in God, not in his own actions—some of which had resulted in his current predicament.
He savoured the fact that it was in the narrow places of his life that God enlarged him.
God did not “relieve” his distress, as many translations suggest. God did not lessen the emotional impact of his current situation, making the stress of Absalom’s actions more bearable. Nor did God incinerate Absalom and thus solve the problem.
Rather, the Hebrew word used here is rachav, meaning “to enlarge” or “to widen.” In the midst of Absalom’s treachery and debauchery, God chose to enlarge David.
And that is what David savoured.
When David was a young lad alone with his father’s sheep up in the hill country, he had to face a lion and a bear, and God did not merely take away his fear. God enlarged David by showing him that he had the resources and the skills to kill the wild animals that were threatening the sheep.
When David was running for his life from Saul, God purposefully placed David in difficult situations with only the riffraff of society as his team.
Why?
Because God wanted to grow David.
The shepherd boy had it within himself to be a king, but he didn’t know it. The strengths and giftings that God had placed within David had not yet been revealed.
So God purposefully created a series of circumstances for David to discover his strengths, hone his skills, gather around himself a community of loyal followers, and be ready for kingship at God’s appointed time.
Even after being crowned as king, David had much to learn. God walked with him through narrow places time and time again in order to transform David into the man he needed to become in order to shepherd an entire nation of God’s people.
The narrow places of David’s life were God-ordained, God-initiated, God-strategized, and God-executed.
It is easy to see some of the narrow places in David’s life, but you and I are not kings, nor has God worked to transform us to become great military leaders. We have not fought lions and bears, faced battles, or been hunted down by deluded kings.
Nonetheless, God sees the narrowness of our lives, and in His grace, He chooses not to allow us to remain small. Instead, He strategically enlarges us, drawing out the unique potential of character and skills that He has placed within us.
It is His choice to enlarge us, and it is our responsibility to see His hand at work in our tight places, and partner with Him as He stretches us.
Since we are not very often in danger the way David was, what does our narrowness look like?
Our perspective is often narrow.
We wear blinders, seeing only what is in front of us and missing the bigger picture.
We see through the eyes of what we already know and have experienced—a very limited point of view.
Despite living in the information age, we seldom internalize the pain and suffering of those far removed from us. We skim the headlines of their tight places, and move on with our lives.
We are surrounded by an ungodly, self-serving culture that valiantly attempts to warp our perspectives.
And, if we are honest with ourselves, every Christian church has its own belief system and culture that we seldom question. We chose comfort over conflict, and we become followers of human perspectives, rather than followers of God’s perspective.
We forfeit our responsibility to allow our perspective to be stretched and transformed by the God Who Enlarges Us.
Our thinking can be narrow.
In tight situations, our thinking tends to be focused and convergent.
We cling to the truths we know and love. In the midst of our distress, we fail to look to God to reveal new truths to us. Instead, we remain entrenched in the old and the familiar.
We fear change. And even more, we fear being wrong, and failing.
We envision possibilities based on our past experiences, and miss the creative possibilities that God desires for us.
We are afraid to embrace the new paradigms that God desires us to step into.
We cling to our narrow-mindedness, embracing the comfort of it rather than risking the adventure of discovery that God has before us.
Our trust is too small.
There are times when God puts us in a narrow place to enlarge our trust in Him.
Like David or Job or countless other faith-filled characters in the Bible, we are suddenly between a rock and a hard place, and the trust we have walked in previously is no longer enough for the situation we find ourselves in today.
We fear and cry out to God. And nothing happens.
When faced with an untenable situation that God does not seem to be committed to relieving, what does He call us to do?
Open our eyes. Enlarge our perspective. Embrace new truths.
And trust Him through the process.
Will we see our desired outcome?
Maybe.
Or maybe not.
But we will see our God through new eyes. And we will have the chance to trust Him at a deeper level than we have done in the past.
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1 ESV).
Hoped for. But not seen.
Perhaps never seen in this life.
Sometimes we walk a narrow path that ends up in a crevice in a rock wall, and the way forward, if it exists, is either treacherous or impossible to scale.
But the Everlasting God is with us.
He will enlarge us in that extremely narrow place.
© Christine Fisher
March 2026