Psalms 10

The psalm begins with a question so honest it can be startling to find it in a hymnbook: Why standest thou afar off, O LORD? why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble? Notice that the complaint is not that God is absent in general, but that He seems absent at the one moment His nearness is needed most - in times of trouble. Anyone can believe in a God who is near when the sun is out; the ache here is the felt distance of God precisely when the dark closes in. And observe how the trouble is framed: God is pictured as standing afar off and hiding, as though He had deliberately stepped back and pulled a veil across His face. The psalmist does not soften this or excuse it. He does not say “surely God has a good reason” - not yet. He simply asks why, and he asks it of God Himself, to His face. This is the first lesson of the psalm and one of the hardest to learn: that the place to take the question “where are you?” is not away from God but straight to Him. The cry of the hidden face is still a prayer, and a prayer is still faith with its eyes open.

Having cried out the question, the psalmist turns to describe the trouble itself, and the portrait begins with a single root: pride. The wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor (v. 2), and again, he through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God (v. 4). The Hebrew of verse 4 is vivid - it is the haughtiness of his face, the lift of the nose and the look down it, that keeps him from seeking God. Pride is not pictured here as one sin among many but as the doorway to all the rest. Because he is high in his own eyes, he will not seek after God; and because he will not seek God, God is not in all his thoughts. That last phrase is the quiet center of the whole portrait. It does not say he denies God outright; it says God simply never comes up - He is absent from the man's reckoning, factored out of every calculation. This is practical godlessness, far more common than the theoretical kind: not a fist raised against heaven, but a life lived as if heaven were not there. And from that emptied-out mind flows everything else - the boasting, the cursing, the hunting of the helpless. Pride does not merely break one commandment; it evicts God from the house and then does as it pleases in the empty rooms.

The first movement closes on the wicked man's own words, and they are chilling in their calm: He hath said in his heart, I shall not be moved: for I shall never be in adversity (v. 6). Here is the inner monologue of unchecked success. He has prospered so long that he has mistaken a season for a guarantee; he reads his own security as a law of nature. I shall not be moved - the very phrase the godly use of their trust in the LORD (I shall not be moved, Ps. 16:8) - is here turned into a boast about himself, grounded in nothing but his own untroubled run of luck. There is a terrible irony built into it. The righteous are not moved because they are anchored to God; the wicked says he will not be moved precisely because he has cut himself loose from God. He has confused having no anchor with being unsinkable. And his confidence rests on the same lie that the rest of the psalm will name: that the judgments of God are far above out of his sight (v. 5) - so high, so distant, so irrelevant that he need never give them a thought. A man can feel most invincible at the exact moment he is most exposed.

The second movement opens at the mouth: His mouth is full of cursing and deceit and fraud: under his tongue is mischief and vanity (v. 7). It is a portrait drawn in three layers. What comes out of his mouth is cursing, deceit, and fraud - speech weaponized to wound, to mislead, and to swindle. But the psalmist looks deeper still, under his tongue, where a thing is held and savored before it is spoken, and there he finds mischief and vanity stored up like poison under a serpent's fang. The picture is of evil that is not occasional but cultivated; the man keeps his cruelty close, ready, almost lovingly maintained. So central is this line to the Bible's diagnosis of the human heart that the apostle Paul lifts it straight into his great indictment of all mankind: whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness (Rom. 3:14)². What Psalm 10 sees in the wicked man, Scripture insists is a sickness latent in every fallen heart - which is why the portrait, for all its horror, is meant to be read with humility rather than mere outrage. It is a mirror before it is a window.

The middle of this movement (vv. 8-10) is one of the most unsettling pieces of writing in the Psalter, because it refuses to let us look away from how predation actually works. The wicked man does not rampage; he waits. He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages, his eyes privily set - secretly fixed - against the poor. He is patient as a lion in its den, and his violence is calculated: he draws the helpless into his net, and then comes the strangest line of all - He croucheth, and humbleth himself, that the poor may fall by his strong ones (v. 10). The predator stoops. He makes himself small, unthreatening, even meek, the better to spring. It is a portrait of cruelty wearing the mask of harmlessness - the smile before the betrayal, the soft word that sets the trap. And notice who the prey always is: not the powerful, never an equal, but the poor, the innocent, the one with no defender. This is what evil looks like when it is competent and unafraid. It does not announce itself. It crouches, it waits, it picks the weakest, and it tells itself the whole time that there will be no reckoning. The psalm forces us to see it plainly, because a God who is the helper of the fatherless (v. 14) is good news only to those who have first admitted how real the danger to the fatherless is.

Everything in the portrait now resolves into a single sentence - the lie at the root of it all: He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten: he hideth his face; he will never see it (v. 11). Here is the engine of the wicked man's whole life. He is not, in his own mind, a fool gambling against the odds; he is a calculator who has done the math and concluded that there is no one above to see. God hath forgotten. And note the cruel symmetry: the very thing the godly psalmist fears in verse 1 - that God hides his face - the wicked man twists into a license. The psalmist sees the hidden face and is troubled; the wicked sees the same silence and is emboldened. The identical fact reads as terror to faith and as opportunity to unbelief. This is the lie underneath every “no one will ever know,” every secret cruelty, every quiet exploitation of someone too weak to fight back. It is the practical creed of all oppression: he will never see it. And the entire turn of the psalm, when it comes, will be aimed at exactly this one sentence. Not at his pride, not even at his violence first, but at his theology - because his violence is only the fruit, and this lie is the root.

The turn begins with a cry that is half-command, half-plea: Arise, O LORD; O God, lift up thine hand: forget not the humble (v. 12). Arise is ancient battle language - the word raised whenever the ark of God set out for war: Rise up, LORD, and let thine enemies be scattered (Num. 10:35). The wicked man had said God hideth his face and sits still; the psalmist answers, in effect, by daring God to stand up and act. And the verb lift up thine hand is the deliberate mirror of the whole problem. The wicked has lifted his hand against the poor; the psalmist asks God to lift His. Notice, too, the careful balance of the petition: it asks God both to act against the wicked and to not forget the humble. These are the two halves of justice as the Bible understands it - the breaking of the oppressor and the remembering of the oppressed, always together. The prayer is not bloodthirsty; its heart is in that last clause. The whole reason to ask God to rise is so that the humble, the bowed-down, the ones with no other helper, will not be left forgotten in the secret places where the lion waits.

And now the hinge of the entire psalm, the sentence the whole song has been moving toward: Thou hast seen it (v. 14). It lands as a flat contradiction of verse 11. The wicked said in his heart, God… will never see it. The psalmist answers, three words: Thou hast seen it. The hidden face was never a blind one. Everything the predator did in the secret places - every ambush, every fraud, every quiet cruelty he was so sure went unobserved - God beheld. And He beheld it not as an idle spectator but with intent: thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand. God's seeing is not passive; it is the seeing of a judge who is gathering the case. Then comes one of the most tender lines in all the Psalms: the poor committeth himself unto thee; thou art the helper of the fatherless. The helpless man, who has no strong ones of his own to fight the wicked man's strong ones, simply hands himself over - “commits himself” - into the keeping of God, and discovers that the God who seemed afar off in verse 1 is in fact the one helper the fatherless has. The whole emotional weight of the psalm rests here. The answer to “why are you hidden?” is not an explanation. It is a Person who sees, and who has appointed Himself the defender of exactly those no one else defends.

The prayer grows bold in verse 15: Break thou the arm of the wicked and the evil man: seek out his wickedness till thou find none. The arm in Hebrew is the symbol of strength and power to act; to break the arm is to disarm the oppressor, to take from him the very capacity to hunt the poor. It is a vivid, physical petition - but it is important to see what it is and is not. The psalmist does not take up the sword himself; he asks God to act. This is the great difference between vengeance and the prayer for justice. The wronged man here does not avenge himself; he commits his cause to the only Judge with the right and the wisdom to requite it, and then he leaves it in those hands. And the second half of the verse - seek out his wickedness till thou find none - reaches toward something larger than punishment. It asks God to search out evil so thoroughly that, at the last, there is none left to find. That is not merely the removal of one wicked man; it is a longing for the day when wickedness itself is hunted down to extinction, when the lurking places are emptied for good and there is no more prey to catch. The cry for justice, at its deepest, is a cry for a world finally cleansed.

The psalm ends not where it began. It opened with a God who seemed afar off and hidden; it closes with a God enthroned, attentive, and bent low toward the lowest: LORD, thou hast heard the desire of the humble: thou wilt prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thine ear to hear: to judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the earth may no more oppress (vv. 17-18). Trace the movement and the whole arc of faith is in it. The hidden face (v. 1) has become the listening ear (v. 17). The God who seemed not to see has seen (v. 14) and heard (v. 17). And notice the gentle, almost surprising line: thou wilt prepare their heart. Before God answers the prayer of the humble, He shapes it - He readies the heart that cries to Him, so that the very longing for justice turns out to be something God Himself has planted and is tending. The psalm closes on the great hope toward which all of Scripture leans: a day when the man of the earth - frail, mortal man, the dust-creature who fancied himself unmovable in verse 6 - can no more oppress. The bully's reign is temporary; the King's is forever. The psalm that started in the dark of the hidden face ends in the certainty that the last word does not belong to the lion in the grass, but to the King upon the throne who is the helper of the fatherless.