Psalms 7

Even death and judgment, awful as they are, derive all their terrors from a greater fear: they are only expressions of the wrath of God. This wrath it is which is enkindled by our sin, and which like an infinite fire inflames the rage of Tophet. When we trace up our fears to their principle, we find them fixing on one august but dread object—the Lord God Almighty, considered as a God of infinite holiness and infinite justice. It is not more clearly revealed that there is a God, or that there is a Christ, than that the justice of Jehovah goes forth toward the destruction of the guilty. J. W. A.—While God is preparing His instruments of death, He gives the sinners timely warning of their danger, and space to repent and prevent it. He is slow to punish, and long-suffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish. The longer the destruction is delayed to give time for repentance, the sorer will it be, and the heavier will it fall, and lie forever, if that time be not so improved, while God is waiting; the sword is in the whetting, and the bow in the drawing. The destruction of impenitent sinners, though it come slowly, yet comes surely. Of all sinners, persecutors are set up as the fairest marks of Divine wrath; against them, more than any other, God has ordained His arrows. They set God at defiance, but cannot set themselves out of the reach of His judgments. H.

14-16. Not only the justice of God punishes, but the wickedness of the wicked effects his own destruction. P.—The sinner is here described as taking a great deal of pains to ruin himself, more pains to damn his soul than if directed aright, would save it. H.—As if dictating a judicial sentence, he prophesies to the enemy of God what awaits him. Man brings forth what he has conceived, he reaps what he has sown. Under these figures the punishment that sin naturally and inevitably involves is frequently represented, first in this the primary passage, and then in Job 15:35; the act of sin, its guilt and punishment appear in general as notions that pass over into one another. David sees in the sin of his enemies their self-destruction. D.

With that solemn picture flaming before his inward eye, the Prophet-Psalmist turns to gaze on the evil-doer who has to bear the brunt of these weapons of light. Summoning us to look with him by a “Behold!” he tells his fate in an image of frequent occurrence in the Psalms of this period, and very natural in the lips of a man wandering in the desert among wild creatures and stumbling sometimes into the traps dug for them. A. M.

17. We conclude with the joyful contrast. In this all these Psalms are agreed; they all exhibit the blessedness of the righteous, and make its colors the more glowing by contrast with the miseries of the wicked. Praise is the occupation of the godly, their eternal work, and their present pleasure. Singing is the fitting embodiment for praise, and therefore do the saints make melody before the Lord Most High. The slandered one is now a singer; his harp was unstrung for a very little season, and now we leave him sweeping its harmonious chords in adoring praise. S.

SHIGGAION OF DAVID, WHICH HE SANG UNTO THE LORD, CONCERNING THE WORDS OF CUSH A BENJAMITE.

1. O LORD my God, in thee do I put my trust: Save me from all them that pursue me, and deliver me:

2. Lest he tear my soul like a lion, Rending it in pieces, while there is none to deliver.

3. O LORD my God, if I have done this; If there be iniquity in my hands;

4. If I have rewarded evil unto him that was at peace with me;

(Yea, I have delivered him that without cause was mine adversary:) [if I have spoiled him as an enemy without cause;]

5. Let the enemy pursue my soul, and over- take it;

Yea, let him tread my life down to the earth, And lay my glory in the dust. [Selah

6. Arise, O LORD, in thine anger, Lift up thyself against the rage of mine adversaries : And awake for me ; thou hast commanded judgment. 7 And let the congregation of the peoples compass thee about : And over them return thou on high. 8 The LORD ministereth judgment to the peoples : Judge me, O LORD, according to my righteousness, and to mine integrity that is in me. 9 Oh let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end, but establish thou the righteous : For the righteous God trieth the hearts and reins. 10 My shield is with God, Which saveth the upright in heart.

“SHALL not the Judge of all the earth do right?” might stand as the motto of this Psalm. In full reliance on God’s righteousness David appeals to Him to judge his cause. The righteous God cannot but save the righteous, and punish the wicked. This David believes to be the law of his moral government, and he applies it to his own case. His heart bears him witness that he has done no wrong to any man (vs. 3, 4), whereas his enemies have plotted unceasingly to take away his life. He therefore confidently anticipates his own deliverance and their overthrow (vs. 17, 18) as the manifestation of the righteous judgment of God.

According to the inscription, this Psalm was written by David, and was occasioned by the words of Cush, a Benjamite. There can be very little doubt that the inscription, in this instance, preserves an ancient tradition. It is accepted by the majority of critics, and the Psalm unquestionably bears every internal evidence of having been written by David. The solemn appeal to God’s righteous judgment, the deep consciousness of his own integrity, which was so fully admitted by Saul, are but the echo in the Psalm, only expressed in a lofty strain of poetry, of the same thought which is repeated with so much emphasis as he speaks to Saul on the hill-side : “Jehovah judge between me and thee, and Jehovah avenge me of thee ; but mine hand shall not be upon thee. . . . Jehovah therefore be Judge, and judge between me and thee, and see and plead my cause, and do me justice at thy hand.” We must look, then, to circumstances like

11. God is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every day. 12 If a man turn not, he will whet his sword ; He hath bent his bow, and made it ready. 13 He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death ; He maketh his arrows fiery shafts. 14 Behold, he travaileth with iniquity ; Yea, he hath conceived mischief, and brought forth falsehood. 15 He hath made a pit, and digged it, And is fallen into the ditch which he made. 16 His mischief shall return upon his own head, And his violence shall come down upon his own pate. 17 I will give thanks unto the LORD according to his righteousness : And will sing praise to the name of the LORD Most High.

those recorded in the twenty-fourth and twenty-sixth chapters of the first book of Samuel, and to the reproaches of a Benjamite named Cush, a leading and unscrupulous partisan of Saul’s, as having given occasion to the Psalm. P.

1,2. David rests his appeal to God for help on these grounds : that he is in peril and cannot live without help ; that he has made the Lord God his refuge ; that he had long before accepted Jehovah as his Friend and Helper, and therefore comes to Him now in his time of need. That he should speak of his enemies at one time as many and at other times as one need occasion no difficulty, since the one may be a chief—the leader of the rest. C.

3. With a quick turn he protests passionately his innocence, his soul surging with emotion, his words broken by the vehemence of his feelings, as he thinks how unjustly he has been assailed. Again, as in v. 1, “my God,” If I have done this thing, with which I am charged. P.

3-5. The passage, with all its lyrical abruptness and lofty imagery, is the expression of the very same thought which we find so prominent in his words to Saul concerning God’s judging between them and delivering David out of Saul’s hand. A. M.

4. If I have repaid my friend, one at peace with me, evil, and spoiled, plundered (one), distressing me, acting as my enemy, without a cause. This construction is moreover much more natural, and agrees better with the grammatical dependence of the second verb upon the first. A.—The more exact translation would be, “If I have requited evil for good to one who was my friend, if I have even spoiled him as an enemy without provocation, then let my enemy pursue my soul and overtake and tread down my life to the ground,” etc. C.—To do evil for good is human corruption; to do good for good is civil retribution; but to do good for evil is Christian perfection. Though this be not the grace of nature, yet it is the nature of grace. W. Secker.

6-8. The rapid utterance of feeling has here again somewhat broken the poet’s words. Hitherto he has protested his innocence; now, in the full consciousness of that innocence, he comes before the very judgment-seat of God, and demands the fullest and most public vindication. Then he sees, as it were in a vision, the judgment set: “Thou hast commanded judgment.” Next, that sentence may be pronounced with due solemnity, he calls upon God to gather the nations round Him, and to seat Himself upon His judgment-throne. Lastly, he prays God, as the Judge of all nations, to judge himself. P.—His field of vision is enlarged, and embraces not only the enemies that are in his immediate neighborhood, but also the world at large in its hostility to Jehovah and His anointed one. Here the language takes the highest and most majestic flight conceivable. D.

Each smaller act of God’s judgment is connected with the final world-judgment, is a prophecy of it, is one in principle therewith; and He who at the last will be known as the universal Judge of all certainly cannot leave His servants’ cause unredressed nor their cry unheard till then. The Psalmist is led by his own history to realize more intensely that truth of a Divine manifestation for judicial purposes to the whole world, and his prophetic lip paints its solemnities as the surest pledge of his own deliverance. He sees the gathered nations standing hushed before the Judge, and the Victor God at the close of the solemn act ascending up on high where He was before, above the heads of the mighty crowd (Psalm 68: 19). In the faith of this vision, and because God will judge the nations, he invokes for himself the anticipation of that final triumph of good over evil, and asks to be dealt with according to his righteousness. The righteous integrity which he calls God to vindicate is not general sinlessness nor inward conformity with the law of God, but his blamelessness in all his conduct to his gratuitous foe. A. M.

5. As a further reason for his rescue, he now urges that without it God will lose the honor, and himself the happiness, of his praises and thanksgivings. For there is not in death, or the state of the dead, Thy remembrance, any remembrance of Thee. In Sheol, the grave, as a general receptacle, here parallel to death, and like it meaning the unseen world or state of the dead, who will acknowledge, or give thanks, to Thee? The Hebrew verb denotes that kind of praise called forth by the experience of goodness. This verse only proves that David in this emergency looks no further than the close of life as the appointed term of thanksgiving and praise. A.—Sheol is the name given to the subterranean land of the dead, whose gate is the grave, the yawning abyss, into which everything that is mortal descends. All the Psalmists know only of one single gathering-place of the dead in the depths of the earth, where they indeed live, but their life is only a quasi life. D.

Exactly parallel to this is Hezekiah’s language (Isa. 38: 18), “For the grave cannot praise Thee; death cannot celebrate Thee. The living, the living, he shall praise Thee.” The argument here employed is no doubt characteristic of the old dispensation. They who then feared and loved God, nevertheless walked in shadows, and their hope was not yet full of immortality. And further, the desire to continue in life is always connected with the desire to praise God. The Old Testament saint pleaded with God for life, in order that that life might be consecrated to His service. And it is very touching to see how, with the weakness of man’s heart trembling at dissolution, there mingles the child-like confidence which fears not to advance the plea that God’s glory is concerned in granting its request. P.

The Psalmist is not asserting the cessation of memory, gratitude, or any other conscious activity of soul as the consequence of death. This would cut very short the hope of the future, leave a very meagre argument for pleading with God to return, make the lot of the good and the bad very much alike, and be contrary to the doctrine of the Psalmist concerning the future state of the soul. M.—His prayer would be, Let me live; let me find mercy of Thee, so that I may go again before the great congregation in Thy house of praise and there render my thanksgivings for delivering mercy. Death would cut me off from this greatest joy of my heart. The same sentiment appears again in Psalm 30: 9, and 88: 10-12, and 115: 17, 18; also Isa. 38: 18. C.

6,7. A further description of his distress. The heart can make all known to God.

Thoughts and feelings and acts that we should be ashamed to confess to our fellow-men, we fear not to confess to Him. P.—The feeling that he was suffering God’s rebuke, smarting under God’s correction, was at once a comfort and a grief to the Psalmist: a comfort when he remembered the loving wisdom that corrected him; a grief when he called to mind the sinful ingratitude that needed correction. It is by the depth and reality, yea, the passion and abandon with which he utters the profoundest feelings of the pious heart, that David has moved so mightily the soul and spirit of the world. Bishop Moorhouse.

7. That explanation which regards the “enemies” as spiritual foes has a large measure of truth. It commended itself to a mind so far removed from mysticism as Arnold’s. It is most valuable for devout private use of the Psalter. For, though we are come to Mount Zion, crested with the eternal calm, the opened ear can hear the thunder rolling along the peaks of Sinai. In the Gospel the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness. Sin is utterly hateful to God. The broad gates are flung wide open of the city that lies foursquare toward all the winds of heaven; for its ruler is divinely tolerant. But there shall in nowise enter it anything that defileth, neither whatever worketh abomination; for he is divinely intolerant too. And thus when, in public or private, we read these Psalms of imprecation, there is a lesson that comes home to us. We must read them, or dishonor God’s Word. Reading them, we must depart from sin, or pronounce judgment upon ourselves. Impurity, hatred, every known sin of flesh or spirit—these, and not mistaken men, are the worst enemies of God and of His Christ. These were the dark hosts which swept through the Psalmist’s vision when he cried, “Let all mine enemies be ashamed and sore vexed.” Bishop Alexander.

8-10. Mark the sudden change, as of sunrise upon night. Already the prayer and the weeping have been heard. Already faith has triumphed. Already he can defy the enemies who have been maliciously anticipating his end, and tell them they shall be disappointed with a suddenness which only makes the disappointment more bitter. P.—Even while he is still pouring forth his mournful prayer, God’s light and comfort fall suddenly into his heart. Enemies mock him as one whom God has forsaken, but even in the presence of his enemies he becomes conscious that such is not his case. In vs. 8 and 9 he thrice repeats, with upflashing confidence, that God hears him: He hears his tearful sobbing that cries aloud to heaven, He hears his supplication, He graciously receives his prayer. D.—Despondency gives place to exultant hope and even confidence in God. “Depart from me,” says he, “all ye workers of iniquity;” what more have I to do with you? Is not my God almighty to save? He has heard the voice of my weeping; it is enough! And he turns the sweet thought over and over: “The Lord hath heard the voice of my weeping;” “the Lord hath heard my supplication;” the Lord not only hath in the nearer present, but will in the future receive my prayer. All will be well! C.

8. God stood looking on Hezekiah’s tears (Isa. 38: 5), “I have seen thy tears.” David’s tears made music in God’s ears, “The Lord hath heard the voice of my weeping.” It is a sight fit for angels to behold, tears as pearls dropping from a penitent eye. T. Watson.—When Antipater had written a large letter against Alexander’s mother unto Alexander, the king answered him, “One tear from my mother will wash away all her faults.” So it is with God. A penitent tear is an undeniable ambassador, and never returns from the throne of grace unsatisfied. Spencer.

9. The Lord hath heard my supplication. The Holy Spirit had wrought into the Psalmist’s mind the confidence that his prayer was heard. We read of Luther that, having on one occasion wrestled hard with God in prayer, he came leaping out of his closet crying, “We have conquered, we have prevailed with God.” Assured confidence is no idle dream, for when the Holy Ghost bestows it upon us we know its reality, and could not doubt it even though all men should deride our boldness. “The Lord will receive my prayer.” Here is past experience used for future encouragement. He hath, He will. Note this, O believer, and imitate its reasoning. S.

When thou prayest for spiritual graces, let thy prayer be absolute; when for temporal blessings, add a clause of God’s pleasure; in both, with faith and humility. So shalt thou undoubtedly receive what thou desirest, or more, or better; never prayer rightly made was made unheard, or heard, ungranted. Quarles.

To pray for rain or sunshine, for health or food, is just as reasonable as to pray for gifts which the soul only can receive, for increased love, joy, peace, faith. All such prayers presuppose the truth that God is not the slave of