1 In Thee, Jehovah, have I taken refuge: let me never be ashamed;
In Thy righteousness deliver me.
2 Bend down Thine ear to me: speedily extricate me;
Be to me for a refuge-rock, for a fortress-house, to save me.
3 For my rock and my fortress art Thou,
And for Thy name's sake wilt guide me and lead me.
4 Thou wilt bring me from the net which they have hidden for me,
For Thou art my defence.
5 Into Thy hand I commend my spirit;
Thou hast redeemed me, Jehovah, God of faithfulness.
6 I hate the worshippers of empty nothingnesses;
And I--to Jehovah do I cling.
7 I will exult and be joyful in Thy loving-kindness,
Who hast beheld my affliction,
[And] hast taken note of the distresses of my soul,
8 And hast not enclosed me in the hand of the enemy;
Thou hast set my feet at large.
9 Be merciful to me, Jehovah, for I am in straits;
Wasted away in grief is my eye,--my soul and my body.
10 For my life is consumed with sorrow,
And my years with sighing;
My strength reels because of mine iniquity,
And my bones are wasted.
11 Because of all my adversaries I am become a reproach
And to my neighbours exceedingly, and a fear to my acquaintances;
They who see me without flee from me.
12 I am forgotten, out of mind, like a dead man;
I am like a broken vessel.
13 For I hear the whispering of many,
Terror on every side;
In their consulting together against me,
To take away my life do they scheme.
14 And I--on Thee I trust, Jehovah;
I say, My God art Thou.
15 In Thy hand are my times;
Rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from my pursuers.
16 Make Thy face to shine upon Thy servant;
Save me in Thy loving-kindness.
17 Jehovah, I shall not be shamed, for I cry to Thee;
The wicked shall be shamed, shall be silent in Sheol.
18 Dumb shall the lying lips be made,
That speak arrogance against the righteous,
In pride and contempt.
19 How great is Thy goodness which Thou dost keep in secret for them
who fear Thee,
Dost work before the sons of men for them who take refuge in Thee.
20 Thou dost shelter them in the shelter of Thy face from the plots
of men;
Thou keepest them in secret in an arbour from the strife of
tongues.
21 Blessed be Jehovah,
For He has done marvels of loving-kindness for me in a strong
city!
22 And I--I said in my agitation, I am cut off from before Thine
eyes,
But truly Thou didst hear the voice of my supplication in my
crying aloud to Thee.
23 Love Jehovah, all His beloved;
Jehovah keeps faithfulness,
And repays overflowingly him that practises pride.
24 Be strong, and let your heart take courage,
All ye that wait on Jehovah.
The swift transitions of feeling in this psalm may seem strange to
colder natures whose lives run smoothly, but reveal a brother-soul to
those who have known what it is to ride on the top of the wave and then
to go down into its trough. What is peculiar to the psalm is not only
the inclusion of the whole gamut of feeling, but the force with which
each key is struck and the persistence through all of the one ground
tone of cleaving to Jehovah. The poetic temperament passes quickly from
hope to fear. The devout man in sorrow can sometimes look away from a
darkened earth to a bright sky, but the stern realities of pain and loss
again force themselves in upon him. The psalm is like an April day, in
which sunshine and rain chase each other across the plain.
"The beautiful uncertain weather,
Where gloom and glory meet together,"
makes the landscape live, and is the precursor of fruitfulness.
The stream of the psalmist's thoughts now runs in shadow of grim
cliffs and vexed by opposing rocks, and now opens out in sunny
stretches of smoothness; but its source is "In Thee, Jehovah, do I
take refuge" (ver. 1): and its end is "Be strong, and let your heart
take courage, all ye that wait for Jehovah" (ver. 24).
The first turn of the stream is in vv. 1-4, which consist of petitions
and their grounds. The prayers reveal the suppliant's state. They are
the familiar cries of an afflicted soul common to many psalms, and
presenting no special features. The needs of the human heart are
uniform, and the cry of distress is much alike on all lips. This
sufferer asks, as his fellows have done and will do, for deliverance, a
swift answer, shelter and defence, guidance and leading, escape from the
net spread for him. These are the commonplaces of prayer, which God is
not wearied of hearing, and which fit us all. The last place to look for
originality is in the "sighing of such as be sorrowful." The pleas on
which the petitions rest are also familiar. The man who trusts in
Jehovah has a right to expect that his trust will not be put to shame,
since God is faithful. Therefore the first plea is the psalmist's faith,
expressed in ver. 1 by the word which literally means to flee to a
refuge. The fact that he has done so makes his deliverance a work of
God's "righteousness." The metaphor latent in "flee for refuge" comes
into full sight in that beautiful plea in ver. 3, which unsympathetic
critics would call illogical, "_Be_ for me a refuge-rock, for ... Thou
_art_ my rock." Be what Thou art; manifest Thyself in act to be what
Thou art in nature: be what I, Thy poor servant, have taken Thee to be.
My heart has clasped Thy revelation of Thyself and fled to this strong
tower. Let me not be deceived and find it incapable of sheltering me
from my foes. "Therefore for Thy name's sake," or because of that
revelation and for its glory as true in men's sight, deliver me. God's
nature as revealed is the strongest plea with Him, and surely that
cannot but be potent and acceptable prayer which says, Be what Thou art,
and what Thou hast taught me to believe Thee.
Vv. 5-8 prolong the tone of the preceding, with some difference,
inasmuch as God's past acts are more specifically dwelt on as the
ground of confidence. In this turn of the stream, faith does not so
much supplicate as meditate, plucking the flower of confidence from
the nettle of past dangers and deliverances, and renewing its acts of
surrender. The sacred words which Jesus made His own on the cross, and
which have been the last utterance of so many saints, were meant by
the psalmist to apply to life, not to death. He laid his spirit as a
precious deposit in God's hand, assured that He was able to keep that
which was committed to Him. Often had he done this before, and now he
does it once more. Petitions pass into surrender. Resignation as well
as confidence speaks. To lay one's life in God's hand is to leave the
disposal of it to Him, and such absolute submission must come as the
calm close and incipient reward of every cry for deliverance. Trust
should not be hard to those who can remember. So Jehovah's past
redemptions--_i.e._, deliverances from temporal dangers--are its
ground here; and these avail as pledges for the future, since He is
"the God of truth," who can never falsify His past. The more
nestlingly a soul clings to God, the more vehemently will it recoil
from other trust. Attraction and repulsion are equal and contrary. The
more clearly it sees God's faithfulness and living power as a reality
operating in its life, the more penetrating will be its detection of
the falseness of other helpers. "Nothingnesses of emptiness" are they
all to one who has felt the clasp of that great, tender hand; and
unless the soul feels them to be such, it will never strongly clutch
or firmly hold its true stay. Such trust has its crown in joyful
experience of God's mercy even before the actual deliverance comes to
pass, as wind-borne fragrance meets the traveller before he sees the
spice gardens from which it comes. The cohortative verbs in ver. 7 may
be petition ("Let me exult"), or they may be anticipation of future
gladness, but in either case some waft of joy has already reached the
singer, as how could it fail to do, when his faith was thus renewing
itself, and his eyes gazing on God's deeds of old? The past tenses in
vv. 7, 8, refer to former experiences. God's sight of the psalmist's
affliction was not idle contemplation, but implied active
intervention. To "take note of the distresses of my soul" (or
possibly, "of my soul in distresses") is the same as to care for it.
It is enough to know that God sees the secret sorrows, the obscure
trials which can be told to none. He loves as well as knows, and looks
on no griefs which He will not comfort nor on any wounds which He is
not ready to bind up. The psalmist was sure that God had seen, because
he had experienced His delivering power, as he goes on joyfully to
tell. The figure in ver. 8 _a_ points back to the act of trust in ver.
5. How should God let the hand of the enemy close round and crush the
spirit which had been entrusted to His own hand? One sees the greedy
fingers of the foe drawing themselves together on their prey as on a
fly, but they close on nothing. Instead of suffering constraint the
delivered spirit walks at liberty. They who are enclosed in God's hand
have ample room there; and unhindered activity, with the ennobling
consciousness of freedom, is the reward of trust.
Is it inconceivable that such sunny confidence should be suddenly
clouded and followed, as in the third turn of thought (vv. 9-13), by
plaintive absorption in the sad realities of present distress? The
very remembrance of a brighter past may have sharpened the sense of
present trouble. But it is to be noted that these complaints are
prayer, not aimless, self-pitying wailing. The enumeration of miseries
which begins with "Have mercy upon me, for----," has a hidden hope
tinging its darkness, like the faint flush of sunrise on clouds. There
is no such violent change of tone as is sometimes conceived; but the
pleas of the former parts are continued in this section, which adds
the psalmist's sore need to God's past and the suppliant's faith, as
another reason for Jehovah's help. He begins with the effects of his
trouble on himself in body and soul; thence he passes to its
consequences on those around him, and finally he spreads before God
its cause: plots against his life. The resemblances to Psalm vi. and
to several parts of Jeremiah are unmistakable. In vv. 9, 10, the
physical and mental effects of anxiety are graphically described.
Sunken eyes, enfeebled soul, wasted body, are gaunt witnesses of his
distress. Cares seem to him to have gnawed his very bones, so weak is
he. All that he can do is to sigh. And worse than all, conscience
tells him that his own sin underlies his trouble, and so he is without
inward stay. The picture seems exaggerated to easy-going, prosperous
people; but many a sufferer has since recognised himself in it as in a
mirror, and been thankful for words which gave voice to his pained
heart and cheered him with the sense of companionship in the gloom.
Vv. 11, 12, are mainly the description of the often-repeated
experience of friends forsaking the troubled. "Because of all my
adversaries" somewhat anticipates ver. 13 in assigning the reason for
the cowardly desertion. The three phrases "neighbours,"
"acquaintance," and "those who see me without" indicate concentric
circles of increasing diameter. The psalmist is in the middle; and
round him are, first, neighbours, who pour reproach on him, because of
his enemies, then the wider range of "acquaintances," afraid to have
anything to do with one who has such strong and numerous foes, and
remotest of all, the chance people met on the way who fly from Him, as
infected and dangerous. "They all forsook Him and fled." That bitter
ingredient mingles in every cup of sorrow. The meanness of human
nature and the selfishness of much apparent friendship are
commonplaces, but the experience of them is always as painful and
astonishing, as if nobody besides had ever suffered therefrom. The
roughness of structure in ver. 11 _b_, "and unto my neighbours
exceedingly," seems to fit the psalmist's emotion, and does not need
the emendation of "exceedingly" into "burden" (Delitzsch) or "shaking
of the head" (Cheyne).
In ver. 12 the desertion is bitterly summed up, as like the oblivion
that waits for the dead. The unsympathising world goes on its way, and
friends find new interests and forget the broken man, who used to be
so much to them, as completely as if he were in his grave, or as they
do the damaged cup, flung on the rubbish heap. Ver. 13 discloses the
nature of the calamity which has had these effects. Whispering
slanders buzz round him; he is ringed about with causes for fear,
since enemies are plotting his death. The use of the first part of the
verse by Jeremiah does not require the hypothesis of his authorship of
the psalm, nor of the prophet's priority to the psalmist. It is always
a difficult problem to settle which of two cases of the employment of
the same phrase is original and which quotation. The criteria are
elastic, and the conclusion is very often arrived at in deference to
preconceived ideas. But Jeremiah uses the phrase as if it were a
proverb or familiar expression, and the psalmist as if it were the
freshly struck coinage of his own experience.
Again the key changes, and the minor is modulated into confident
petition. It is the test of true trust that it is deepened by the
fullest recognition of dangers and enemies. The same facts may feed
despair and be the fuel of faith. This man's eyes took in all
surrounding evils, and these drove him to avert his gaze from them and
fix it on Jehovah. That is the best thing that troubles can do for us.
If they, on the contrary, monopolise our sight, they turn our hearts
to stone; but if we can wrench our stare from them, they clear our
vision to see our Helper. In vv. 14-18 we have the recoil of the
devout soul to God, occasioned by its recognition of need and
helplessness. This turn of the psalm begins with a strong emphatic
adversative: "But I--I trust in Jehovah." We see the man flinging
himself into the arms of God. The word for "trust" is the same as in
ver. 6, and means to _hang_ or _lean upon_, or, as we say, to _depend
on_. He utters his trust in his prayer, which occupies the rest of
this part of the psalm. A prayer, which is the voice of trust, does
not begin with petition, but with renewed adherence to God and happy
consciousness of the soul's relation to Him, and thence melts into
supplication for the blessings which are consequences of that
relation. To feel, on occasion of the very dreariness of
circumstances, that God is mine, makes miraculous sunrise at midnight.
Built on that act of trust claiming its portion in God, is the
recognition of God's all-regulating hand, as shaping the psalmist's
"times," the changing periods, each of which has its definite
character, responsibilities, and opportunities. Every man's life is a
series of crises, in each of which there is some special work to be
done or lesson to be learned, some particular virtue to be cultivated
or sacrifice made. The opportunity does not return. "It might have
been once; and we missed it, lost it for ever."
But the psalmist is thinking rather of the varying complexion of his
days as bright or dark; and looking beyond circumstances, he sees God.
The "hand of mine enemies" seems shrivelled into impotence when
contrasted with that great hand, to which he has committed his spirit,
and in which are his "times"; and the psalmist's recognition that it
holds his destiny is the ground of his prayer for deliverance from the
foes' paralysed grasp. They who feel the tender clasp of an almighty
hand need not doubt their security from hostile assaults. The
petitions proper are three in number: for deliverance, for the light
of God's face, and for "salvation." The central petition recalls the
priestly blessing (Num. vi. 25). It asks for consciousness of God's
friendship and for the manifestation thereof in safety from present
dangers. That face, turned in love to a man, can "make a sunshine in a
shady place," and brings healing on its beams. It seems best to take
the verbs in vv. 17, 18, as futures and not optatives. The prayer
passes into assurance of its answer, and what was petition in ver. 1
is now trustful prediction: "I shall not be ashamed, for I cry to
Thee." With like elevation of faith, the psalmist foresees the end of
the whispering defamers round him: shame for their vain plots and
their silent descent to the silent land. The loudest outcry against
God's lovers will be hushed some day, and the hands that threatened
them will be laid motionless and stiff across motionless breasts. He
who stands by God and looks forward, can, by the light of that face,
see the end of much transient bluster, "with pride and contempt,"
against the righteous. Lying lips fall dumb; praying lips, like the
psalmist's, are opened to show forth God's praise. His prayer is
audible still across the centuries; the mutterings of his enemies only
live in his mention of them.
That assurance prepares the way for the noble burst of thanksgiving, as
for accomplished deliverance, which ends the psalm, springing up in a
joyous outpouring of melody, like a lark from a bare furrow. But there
is no such change of tone as to warrant the supposition that these last
verses (19-24) are either the psalmist's later addition or the work of
another, nor do they oblige us to suppose that the whole psalm was
written after the peril which it commemorates had passed. Rather the
same voice which triumphantly rings out in these last verses has been
sounding in the preceding, even in their saddest strains. The ear
catches a twitter hushed again and renewed more than once before the
full song breaks out. The psalmist has been absorbed with his own
troubles till now, but thankfulness expands his vision, and suddenly
there is with him a multitude of fellow-dependants on God's goodness. He
hungers alone, but he feasts in company. The abundance of God's
"goodness" is conceived of as a treasure stored, and in part openly
displayed, before the sons of men. The antithesis suggests manifold
applications of the contrast, such as the inexhaustibleness of the mercy
which, after all revelation, remains unrevealed, and, after all
expenditure, has not perceptibly diminished in its shining mass, as of
bullion in some vault; or the varying dealings of God, who sometimes,
while sorrow is allowed to have its scope, seems to keep His riches of
help under lock and key, and then again flashes them forth in deeds of
deliverance; or the difference between the partial unfolding of these on
earth and the full endowment of His servants with "riches in glory"
hereafter. All these carry the one lesson that there is more in God than
any creature or all creatures have ever drawn from Him or can ever draw.
The repetition of the idea of hiding in ver. 20 is a true touch of
devout poetry. The same word is used for laying up the treasure and for
sheltering in a pavilion from the jangle of tongues. The wealth and the
poor men who need it are stored together, as it were; and the place
where they both lie safe is God Himself. How can they be poor who are
dwelling close beside infinite riches? The psalmist has just prayed that
God would make His face to shine upon him; and now he rejoices in the
assurance of the answer, and knows himself and all like-minded men to be
hidden in that "glorious privacy of light," where evil things cannot
live. As if caught up to and "clothed with the sun," he and they are
beyond the reach of hostile conspiracies, and have "outsoared the shadow
of" earth's antagonisms. The great thought of security in God has never
been more nobly expressed than by that magnificent metaphor of the light
inaccessible streaming from God's face to be the bulwark of a poor man.
The personal tone recurs for a moment in vv. 21, 22, in which it is
doubtful whether we hear thankfulness for deliverance anticipated as
certain and so spoken of as past, since it is as good as done, or for
some recently experienced marvel of loving-kindness, which heartens the
psalmist in present trouble. If this psalm is David's, the reference may
be to his finding a city of refuge, at the time when his fortunes were
very low, in Ziklag, a strange place for a Jewish fugitive to be
sheltered. One can scarcely help feeling that the allusion is so
specific as to suggest historical fact as its basis. At the same time it
must be admitted that the expression may be the carrying on of the
metaphor of the hiding in a pavilion. The "strong city" is worthily
interpreted as being God Himself, though the historical explanation is
tempting. God's mercy makes a true man ashamed of his doubts, and
therefore the thanksgiving of ver. 21 leads to the confession of ver.
22. Agitated into despair, the psalmist had thought that he was "cut off
from God's eyes"--_i.e._, hidden so as not to be helped--but the event
has showed that God both heard and saw him. If alarm does not so make us
think that God is blind to our need and deaf to our cry as to make us
dumb, we shall be taught the folly of our fears by His answers to our
prayers. These will have a voice of gentle rebuke, and ask us, "O thou
of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?" He delivers first, and
lets the deliverance stand in place of chiding.
The whole closes with a summons to all whom Jehovah loves to love Him
for His mercy's sake. The joyful singer longs for a chorus to join his
single voice, as all devout hearts do. He generalises his own
experience, as all who have for themselves experienced deliverance are
entitled and bound to do, and discerns that in his single case the
broad law is attested that the faithful are guarded whatever dangers
assail, and "the proud doer" abundantly repaid for all his contempt
and hatred of the just. Therefore the last result of contemplating
God's ways with His servants is an incentive to courage, strength, and
patient waiting for the Lord.