Psalm LXIX

To the chief Musician. Upon Shoshannim. A Psalm of David.

1 Save me, O God! for the waters are come in unto my soul.

2 I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing:

I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.

3 I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait

for my God.

4 They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of mine head: They that would destroy me, being mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty: Then I restored that which I took not away.

5 O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee.

6 Let not them that wait on thee, O Lord God of hosts, be ashamed for my sake: Let not those that seek thee be confounded for my sake, O God of Israel.

7 Because for thy sake I have boine reproach: shame hath covered my face.

8 I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother’s

children.

9 For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up;

And the reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me. 10 When I wept, and chastened my soul with fasting, that was to my reproach. Ill made sackcloth also my garment; and I became a proverb to them.

12 They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song of the

drunkards.

13 But as for me, my prayer is unto thee, O Lord, in an acceptable time:

O God, in the multitude of thy mercy hear me, in the truth of thy salvation.

14 Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink:

Let me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters.

15 Let not the waterflood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up. And let not the pit shut her mouth upon me.

16 Hear me, O Lord; for thy loviugkindness is good:

Turn unto me according to the multitude of thy tender mercies.

17 And hide not thy face from thy servant; for I am in trouble: hear me

speedily.

18 Draw nigh unto my soul, and redeem it: deliver me because of mine

enemies.

19 Thou hast known my reproach, and my shame, and my dishonour: Mine adversaries are all before thee.

20 Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness: And I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; And for comforters, but I found none.

21 They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me

vinegar to drink.

22 Let their table become a snare before them:

And that which should have been for their welfare, let it become a trap.

23 Let their eyes be darkened, that they see not; and make their loins continually to shake.

24 Pour out thine indignation upon them, and let thy wrathful anger take

hold of them.

25 Let their habitation be desolate; and let none dwell in their tents.

26 For they persecute him whom thou hast smitten;

And they talk to the grief of those whom thou hast woitnded

27 Add iniquity unto their iniquity:

And let them not come into thy righteousness.

28 Let them be blotted out of the book of the living, and not be written with

the righteous.

29 But I am poor and sorrowful: let thy salvation, O God, set me up on high.

30 I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify him with

thanksgiving.

31 This also shall please the Lord better than an ox, or bullock that hath

horns and hoofs.

32 The humble shall see this, and be glad: and your heart shall live that

seek God.

33 For the Lord heareth the poor, and dcspisctli not his prisoners.

34 Let the heaven and earth praise him, the seas, and every thing that

moveth therein.

35 For God will save Zion, and will build the cities of Jndah: That they may dwell there, and have it in possession.

36 The seed also of his servants shall inherit it:
And they that love his name shall dwell therein.

A deeply plaintive song. It is seven times quoted (and no The titu-. other Psalm is so often quoted) in the New Testament as the utterance of Messiah. Why it is said to be “On Shoshannim” we cannot tell, till we know more of what that instrument was. It seems to speak of joy; and if so, it suits this Psalm so far that in it sorrow ends in joy.

The plan of it is very simple. There are three parts.

I. From verse 1-21, Messiah’s sufferings are related by him- Theconte self. What an embodiment of “prodigious passion” in the cry “Save me” (ver. 1), from the lips of the Saviour! Under the sea of wrath, sinking in the slime at the very bottom of this prisoner’s dungeon (see Jer. xxxviii. 6), Messiah’s voice is heard ascending to the Father. The “slime and mire” represent the loathing he felt toward sin. He is weary with crying, for in his true, real humanity he has all the experience of one in pain, who, during the slow, heavy hours of darkness and suffering, feels as if it were never to end. He is spent with calling on his God; he is unsympathised with, for foes are on every side, and all this at the very time when he is not taking from them, but restoring the blessings which they had forfeited. (Ver. 4.) As to the folly and the trespass imputed to him, he lays it before God —

“Lord, tJiou knowest as to my folly” (ThM^b)

Thou knowest the history of the folly and sin laid to my charge, and why I stand charged therewith. He appeals to him as able to help, for he is “God of hosts,” and proved to be willing, for he is “God of Israel” (ver. 6). While it is out of love to man that he suffers, it is also to glorify God (ver. 7), “for thy sake.” He “weeps away his soul with fasting” (ver. 1 0), for the good of men, and yet they mock at him. He pours his sorrows into the bosom of his God (ver. 13), at a time when (perhaps in Nazareth) he was ‘’ the song of the drunkard,” i. e., the iyly’^y satire (Ges,), as Job xxx. 9, Lam. iii. 14, “They who sat in the gate talk at me; Aiidthe songs of drunkards (do the same).” “As for me, I pray to thee, O Jehovah.” And then he adds (though the punctuation in our version gives the sense differently), in a passage which Isaiah xlix. 8 seems to refer to —

“O God, in an acceptable time {i. e., a time when thou art favourable), In the multitude of thy mercy, in tJte truth of thy salvation, Answer me!”

Hear and answer me when thou seest fit, when thou art well-pleased. Let there be a time of acceptance. Jehovah, in Isa. xlix. 8, replies to this cry — “In an acceptable time I have heard thee” — well pleased with thy work, I give thee all thy desire. The cry at verses 14-16 is parallel to Heb. v. 7, and the complaiut of want of sympathy (ver. 20) reminds us how even his three favoured disciples fell asleep during his agony; for here he seeks comforters with the cross in view (ver. 21). True, his whole life might be said to be a life in which he fed on gall, and drank vinegar, grief and bitterness being the every-day portion of the Man of Sorrows — still, the chief reference is to his life’s closing scene, the scene of Calvary. And hence, immediately after this, the strain changes, and we find ourselves in another scene. He has finished his work; and they who crucified Him have gone away unmoved.

II. From ver. 22-28, the theme is, how these sufferings of Messiah become the “savour of death” to the unbelieving. It resembles Prov, i. 22, 23. He gives them up, saying, “Let their table become a snare to them,” since they give the Beloved Son only gall and vinegar, “and for a recommence and for a trap.” — (So Mendelssohn apud Phillips, and many others; and so Rom. xL 9). Ruin overtakes them at unthought-of moments, like 1 Kings xiii. 20, in the case of the disobedient prophet; and their “habitation is desolate,” as Matt, xxiii. 88 emphatically threatens.* The cup of iniquity is filling up, drojD by drop, and Messiah does not interfere, but on the contrary, says to Him who records it in his book,” Add iniquity to

* It has been proposed to understand “their Table” as the altar (Mai. i. 7), and then the sentence is, “Let the letter kill them, since they refuse the spirit let their ceremonial institutions become a trap to them!” Their “habitation” is the word in 2 Chron. vi. 54, for the enclosures fenced off for the sons of Aaron.

iniquity, and let them never be justified.” Such is the “savour of death.” Instead of “Come to me I” it is now, “Let them not come!”

III. From ver. 29-36, the theme is, “the savour of life” from Messiah’s sufferings. Himself is delivered and glorified, accepted of Jehovah as full type of, or fulfiller of every sacrifice of clean animals, “ox, and horned bullock with cloven hoof,” (ver. 81). The sinner who ceases from self, “the humble,” finds herein his source of joy, his acceptance with God. Men everywhere over all the earth may thus be blessed in him; and heaven and earth rejoice over the consummation. Israel, who once rejected him, shall then be his, proving that he can soften the most hardened, and pardon the most guilty. Such, then, is this Psalm —

Messiah’s manifold sufferings a savour of death to the Unbelieving, and of life to the Believing.