Psalms 38

1. O LORD, rebuke me not in thy wrath: Neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure. 2 For thine arrows stick fast in me, And thy hand presseth me sore. 3 There is no soundness in my flesh because of thine indignation; Neither is there any health [rest] in my bones because of my sin. 4 For mine iniquities are gone over mine head: As an heavy burden they are too heavy for me. 5 My wounds stink and are corrupt, Because of my foolishness. 6 I am pained and bowed down greatly; I go mourning all the day long. 7 For my loins are filled with burning; And there is no soundness in my flesh. 8 I am faint and sore bruised: I have groaned by reason of the disquietness of my heart. 9 LORD, all my desire is before thee And my groaning is not hid from thee. 10 My heart throbeth, my strength faileth me: As for the light of mine eyes, it also is gone from me. 11 My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my plague; And my kinsmen stand afar off.

THIS Psalm tells the story of a bitter suffering. The suffering is both in body and in mind. The body is wasted by a cruel and loathsome disease, and the mind is full of anguish, arising partly from a deep sense of sin, and partly from the fear of relentless and now rejoicing enemies. Body and mind, in such circumstances, act and react upon one another. Mental anguish impairs the strength of the body; and bodily suffering and weakness make us less able to face with steady and resolute courage the horrors which crowd upon the mind. To add to his distress, the sufferer is deserted even of his friends. They to whose

12. They also that seek after my life lay snares for me; And they that seek my hurt speak mischievous things, And imagine deceits all the day long. 13 But I, as a deaf man, hear not; And I am as a dumb man that openeth not his mouth. 14 Yea, I am as a man that heareth not, And in whose mouth are no arguments. 15 For in thee, O LORD, do I hope: Thou wilt answer, O LORD my God. 16 For I said, Lest they rejoice over me: When my foot slippeth, they magnify themselves against me. 17 For I am ready to fall, And my sorrow is continually before me. 18 For I will declare mine iniquity; I will be sorry for my sin. 19 But mine enemies are lively, and are strong: And they that hate me wrongfully are multiplied. 20 They also that render evil for good Are adversaries unto me, because I follow the thing that is good. 21 Forsake me not, O LORD: O my God, be not far from me. 22 Make haste to help me, O LORD my salvation.

kind offices he might naturally have looked at such a time; they who had been his friends in his health and prosperity, and who might now have watched by his sick-bed, and spoken words of comfort to him in his sorrow, turned coldly away, and left him alone with his grief. A burning fever consumed him (v. 7), his heart beat hotly, his eyes failed him, the bitter remembrance of his sin was with him; there was the consciousness and the fear of God’s displeasure, and, as if this were not enough, there was, besides all this, the utter loneliness, never so hard to bear as in such a season of bodily and mental prostration; the weary couch, never so weary as when no hand is there to smooth it; the pain of the disease far more acutely felt, because none offered sympathy; the terrors of conscience and of the imagination aggravated, because they had to be endured in solitude. Suffering seems here to have reached its height. But out of the very midst of the furnace the sufferer can say, “Lord, before Thee is all my desire—in Thee, O Jehovah, have I hoped;” can cry with all the earnestness of a faith purified by affliction, “Leave me not, be not far from me, O Lord, my salvation.” The Psalm may be said to consist of three principal parts, each of which opens with an address to God. Each of these contains an appeal to God’s mercy—each rests it on different grounds. P.

Among the penitential Psalms none bear deeper marks of a season of utter prostration of heart and spirit, of a combination of the most cruel trials, mental and bodily; the strain is continued without intermission to the end of the forty-first Psalm, which closes the first book of Psalms. The history of David leaves us no doubt as to the time and circumstances under which it was composed. It must have been some time after the complete awakening of his conscience to the deadly guilt contracted by Uriah’s death, when the results of that act were manifested in the fearful disorders of his family, polluted by incest and murder; in the estrangement of his dearest friends and nearest kinsmen; in the triumph of malicious and slanderous enemies; in agonies of mind, accompanied and exaggerated by a terrible malady, of which the symptoms, elsewhere noted, are described most vividly in this Psalm, the flesh diseased, the bones racked, the loins filled with fierce pain, the heart panting, strength failing, the eye darkened as with the shadow of death; all attributed by the Psalmist himself to his own sin. Yet withal there is a sense of inward communion. David knows that the hand which presses on him is for chastisement, and that the Lord hears his groaning; his confession and contrition are combined with hope; he desires to be nearer God, and sums up all with calling upon the Lord as his salvation. All these things point to the period just preceding the revolt of Absalom. At that time there are indications that David was prostrate by disease, which gave full scope to the machinations of his son and his abettors; from which he recovered only to witness their success.

The Psalm is frequently referred to in the New Testament. Its application to the Saviour, of whom David was a type in so many points, in none more so than in suffering, is natural; but though prophetical in the sense that the words came from David’s heart under the influence which made them true exponents of feelings which reached their highest intensity in the representative of fallen man, the Psalm is not predictive, it speaks of the present and actual, not of the future and ideal; it belongs to a man not only of sorrow but of sin; of sin not merely imputed but committed; and as such is adopted without modification by conscience-smitten sinners, even while they feel that Christ’s acceptance of the burden and participation of the agonies assures them of the help which David sought, and gives them a certainty of deliverance. Cook.

The Psalms discover to us the inner man of David, and in the inner man of David they discover to us in some sort the inner man of all the prophets of God. He composes his Psalms, or a great part of them, in the midst of the most cruel sufferings. Imagine, then, bowed down by suffering, physical, moral, and spiritual, you were called upon to compose a Psalm, and that from the bosom of all these sufferings, and at the very moment when they were such as those which he describes in this Psalm, should issue hymns to the glory of God and for the instruction of the Church. What a triumph David gains over himself, and what a humiliation it is for us, who in our weakness are mostly obliged to wait till our sufferings are passed, in order to reap the fruit of them ourselves or to impart the benefit to others. But David, in the midst of his sufferings, writes his Psalms. He writes his thirty-eighth Psalm while he undergoes those persecutions, those inward torments, that bitterness of sin. It is in the furnace that he writes these lines, which are intended to be the encouragement of the Church in all ages. A. Monod.

2. It is not merely as a complaint but as an appeal to the mercy of God that he tells all his woe. There is a yet further appeal in the recognition of God’s hand. “Thine arrows . . . Thy hand.” It is this conviction that God has inflicted the chastisement, that leads him to seek the remedy from the same source.

3. No soundness. No health; or “whole-ness.” Such is the proper and original meaning of the word shālom, integritas, “peace” being the derived meaning, peace only there properly existing where all is complete and entire, nothing wanting. P.—All the miseries are referred to their proper end. The sin is not bewailed merely on account of its ill effect on the guilty one, but on account of the despite done to God. It is not the “arrows”

that afflict him so much as that they are God’s. The reason why there is no health in his flesh is because of God’s displeasure. Such is true contrition, “not the sorrow of the world which worketh death, but the sorrow that worketh repentance not to be repented of.” Anon.

4. For my iniquities are gone over my head; as a heavy burden, they are too heavy for me. This is an amplification of the last words of the verse preceding. “The sense of my iniquities has now become intolerable.” Gone over, literally, passed, i.e., surpassed, exceeded, or transcended. Too heavy for me, or heavier than I, i.e., heavier than I can bear. The reference is not merely to the effects of sin, but to the sense of sin itself, the consciousness of guilt, which he now associates with all his sufferings. A.—It is of singular use to us that the backslidings of the holy men of God are recorded in Holy Writ. Spots appear nowhere more disagreeable than when seen in a most beautiful face or on the cleanest garment. We also learn from them to think humbly of ourselves, to depend on the grace of God, to keep a stricter eye upon ourselves, lest perhaps we fall into the same or more grievous sins. H. Witsius.

8. The prayers of the saint are set forth in Scripture by calls and cries; and sometimes by “strong cries with tears;” sometimes again by “groanings not to be uttered.” He who truly and sensibly knows the invaluable happiness of being delivered from temptation, and the unspeakable misery of sinking under it, will pray against it, as a man ready to starve would beg for bread, or a man sentenced to die would entreat for life. Every period, every word, every tittle of such a prayer is all spirit and life, flame and ecstasy; it shoots from one heart into another, from the heart of him who utters to the heart of Him who hears it. South.

9. Lord, before Thee (is) all my desire, and my sighing (or groaning) from Thee is not hid. This is at once an asseveration that his account of his own sufferings was not exaggerated or fictitious, and a reason why it need not be continued. “Thou knowest, O Lord, what I ask and what I need, the depth of my necessities and the intensity of my desires.” A.—The spirit of prayer has been produced and has been expressed in supplication; and now that there is no restraint in prayer, give to me, work for me, respond according to Thy promise to the thirstings and to the longings of this heart. S. Martin.—The one gleam of comfort and refreshment in his misery; the one bright ray which lights up the darkness; the one thought which sustains him, that he may “unburden himself of all his griefs in the bosom of God.” We have but to read the first fourteen verses without this verse, to see how much blacker the night of suffering grows.

11. Up to this point he has spoken of his suffering as arising from his own state both of body and mind. He describes now its aggravation from the conduct of others; first of friends who deserted him, and next of enemies who plotted against him. And this aggravation of his misery is again a fresh argument with God. P.

13. And I, as a deaf (man), will not hear, and as a dumb (man) will not open his mouth. This is at the same time an aggravation of his sufferings and a declaration of his patience under them. He is obliged to hear their calumnies and blasphemies as though he heard them not, being neither able to silence them nor willing to dispute them. A.

14. In the consciousness of his guilt he must be silent, and, refraining from all self-help, commit his cause to God. Consciousness of guilt and resignation close his mouth, so that he cannot and will not refute the false accusations of his enemies; he has no rejoinders whereby to justify himself. D.—No replies, not here “reproofs” or “rebukes,” but answers, in self-vindication, to the calumnies of his enemies. It was not that David could not, but that he would not, answer. In this, he was the type of a greater sufferer in a more august agony. P.

15. Because for Thee I waited; Thou wilt answer, Lord, my God! His silence and forbearance, though a part of his sore trial, did not spring from weakness, but from faith in God, and submission to His precept. “I retorted not their calumnies and taunts, because I waited for Thee to vindicate my cause, and so Thou wilt, Thou wilt certainly answer.” A.—David committed himself to Him that judgeth righteously, and so in patience was able to possess his soul. Hope in God’s intervention and belief in the power of prayer are two most blessed stays to the soul in time of adversity. Turning away from the creature to the sovereign Lord of all, and to Him as our own covenant God, we shall find the richest solace in waiting upon Him. S.

18. In view of these afflictions I publicly confess my iniquity; I deplore my sin—a vitally important part of true prayer in a case like this. C.

19. But mine enemies are lively, and they are strong.** Neither the world, the flesh, nor the devil are ever afflicted with

debility or inertness; this trinity of evils labor with mighty, unremitting energy to overthrow us. If the devil were sick, or our lusts feeble, or Madam Bubble infirm, we might slacken prayer; but with such lively and vigorous enemies we must not cease to cry mightily unto our God. S.