Psalms 143
Psalm 143 is the seventh and last of the psalms the church has long prayed together as songs of repentance - the company that includes the great cry of Psalm 51 and the De Profundis of Psalm 130. It is headed simply as a psalm of David, and it has the texture of a prayer prayed from the bottom of something: enemies in pursuit, the spirit failing, the heart gone dark. What sets it apart is not the trouble - many psalms have that - but the ground on which David decides to stand.
He will not argue that he deserves to be heard. He stakes everything on the character of God.
That decision is made in the first two verses, and it changes everything that follows. Hear my prayer, O LORD, give ear to my supplications: in thy faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteousness (v. 1). The appeal is not to David's faithfulness or David's righteousness, but to God's. And then comes the line that the New Testament will carry to its furthest reach: And enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified (v. 2).
David asks God not to bring him to trial - because he knows the outcome. If a person's standing before God depended on weighing that person's own record, no one alive would come through it justified. He is not minimising his sin; he is naming, plainly, the impossibility every honest soul eventually faces, and laying down the one weapon he has never been able to use: his own goodness.
From that bottom the psalm moves through despair toward longing. The enemy hath persecuted my soul… therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my heart within me is desolate (vv. 3-4). And then a turn: David reaches back into memory - I remember the days of old; I meditate on all thy works (v. 5) - and the remembering kindles thirst: I stretch forth my hands unto thee: my soul thirsteth after thee, as a thirsty land (v. 6).
The closing petitions are the prayers of a failing soul that has decided to wait on God anyway: Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee do I trust… Teach me to do thy will; for thou art my God… Quicken me, O LORD, for thy name's sake (vv. 8, 10, 11). Every one of those requests is grounded in something about God, never in something about David - and that is the whole instinct the gospel will one day vindicate.
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Psalm 143:1-6 · A Psalm of DavidNo Man Living Be Justified
1Hear my prayer, O LORD, give ear to my supplications: in thy faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteousness. 2And enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified. 3For the enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath smitten my life down to the ground; he hath made me to dwell in darkness, as those that have been long dead. 4Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my heart within me is desolate. 5I remember the days of old; I meditate on all thy works; I muse on the work of thy hands. 6I stretch forth my hands unto thee: my soul thirsteth after thee, as a thirsty land. Selah.
The psalm opens the way the penitential psalms tend to - with a plea to be heard: Hear my prayer, O LORD, give ear to my supplications. But listen to the ground David gives for expecting an answer: in thy faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteousness (v. 1). Not in my faithfulness, not because I have kept faith with thee - but in thy faithfulness, thy righteousness. The appeal reaches past the one praying to the One prayed to.
This is the deliberate move of the whole psalm, made in its very first sentence. David has decided not to build his case on himself. He knows that a prayer is only as strong as the character of the God it leans on, so he leans the entire weight of his asking on two things that are true of God and have nothing to do with him: that God is faithful - He keeps His word, He does not abandon those who are His - and that God is righteous - He does what is right, always.
To pray in thy righteousness answer me is to ask God to be true to Himself. And that turns out to be the surest footing a desperate soul can find.
Not the king, not the priest, not the most upright soul alive. This is not despair; it is clear sight. And the apostle Paul takes hold of this exact verse and presses it to its conclusion. Arguing that the whole world stands accountable before God, he writes that by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight (Rom. 3:20) - David's line, carried into the heart of the gospel.
Paul says it again to Peter's face: a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ… for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified (Gal. 2:16). What David could only name as a problem from the bottom of the pit - that no one can be justified before God by their own standing - the gospel names as the very door it opens.
For the answer Paul announces is the answer David was already groping toward in verse 1: a righteousness that is not the sinner's own. But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested… even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe (Rom. 3:21-22). David fled to thy righteousness because his own could not stand; and the gospel announces that the righteousness of God has been made manifest, and given.
Having laid down his own righteousness, David now lays out his trouble, and he does not soften it: For the enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath smitten my life down to the ground; he hath made me to dwell in darkness, as those that have been long dead (v. 3). The verbs fall like blows - persecuted, smitten, made me to dwell in darkness. The enemy has not merely troubled him; he has knocked his life flat down to the ground and shut him into a darkness like the grave, like those that have been long dead - not the freshly buried, but the long-forgotten, those out of all memory.
It is a portrait of a soul that feels not just attacked but already half-erased. And verse 4 names the inward effect with terrible economy: Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my heart within me is desolate. The outward siege has produced an inward collapse. Overwhelmed is the picture of being buried, swept under; desolate is the word for a wasteland, a ruin, a place gone empty. This is the honesty the penitential psalms are prized for.
David does not arrive at God already composed. He comes overwhelmed and desolate, the enemy at his back and the darkness closing in - and he prays from exactly there. The psalm does not require him to feel better before he speaks.
At the lowest point, David does something the desolate rarely manage on their own - he turns his mind deliberately backward: I remember the days of old; I meditate on all thy works; I muse on the work of thy hands (v. 5). Notice it is an act of will, not a change of feeling. Nothing in his circumstances has improved; the enemy is still there, the heart is still desolate. But he chooses to remember, to meditate, to muse - three words for turning the attention, slowly and on purpose, toward what God has done.
The days of old are the long record of God's faithfulness - the deliverances, the rescues, the works of thy hands that fill Israel's memory. When the present is unbearable and the future is dark, the one place left to look is the past, at what God has already proven Himself to be. And the remembering does its work. It does not erase the trouble, but it reawakens longing: the very next verse is no longer about the darkness but about thirst for God.
This is the quiet hinge of the psalm - despair turning, by way of memory, into desire. To meditate on what God has done is how the desolate soul finds its way back to wanting Him.
That is what David says his soul is like before God - parched, at the end of itself, longing the way dry earth longs for water. The image of thirst for God runs all through the Psalms, and the New Testament gives it an astonishing answer. In the temple, on the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink (John 7:37). The thirst David could only stretch his hands toward, the One who is the answer now invites home: come to Me, and drink.
To the woman at the well He said it another way - whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life (John 4:14). The parched ground of verse 6, reaching out with empty hands, is exactly the soul the gospel is for. The thirst is not the problem; it is the qualification.
If any man thirst, let him come.
And the project never finishes, because some part of us always knows the case would not hold. David lays that whole burden down in two verses. He simply admits it: if it came to a weighing of my record, I could not stand - and then he stops trying to stand on it, and leans instead on who God is. That is not despair; it is freedom. You can stop pretending the case is winnable on your own merits and lean your whole weight, as David did, on the faithfulness and righteousness of God.
And when the desolation comes - as it did to him - do what he did in verse 5: remember the days of old. Turn your attention, on purpose, to what God has already done, until the remembering rekindles the thirst. You do not have to feel composed to pray this psalm. Come with empty hands, like dry ground waiting for rain.
Psalm 143:7-12Teach Me to Do Thy Will
7Hear me speedily, O LORD: my spirit faileth: hide not thy face from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into the pit. 8Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee do I trust: cause me to know the way wherein I should walk; for I lift up my soul unto thee. 9Deliver me, O LORD, from mine enemies: I flee unto thee to hide me. 10Teach me to do thy will; for thou art my God: thy spirit is good; lead me into the land of uprightness. 11Quicken me, O LORD, for thy name’s sake: for thy righteousness’ sake bring my soul out of trouble. 12And of thy mercy cut off mine enemies, and destroy all them that afflict my soul: for I am thy servant.
The second half opens with urgency, because time has run short: Hear me speedily, O LORD: my spirit faileth (v. 7). This is not a leisurely prayer; the man praying it is running out. My spirit faileth - the inner strength is giving way, the will to go on is flickering. And the thing he dreads most is not the enemy but the silence of God: hide not thy face from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into the pit. To have God's face turned away - to pray and sense no answer, no presence - would, for David, be indistinguishable from death itself; he would become like those who go down into the pit, the grave.
Notice what this reveals about him. The enemies are real and pressing, but they are not his deepest fear. His deepest fear is the absence of God. A soul that can bear almost anything except God's hiddenness is a soul that has understood where its life actually comes from. The cry hide not thy face is the prayer of someone for whom the presence of God is not a comfort added to life but the very ground of it.
Take away everything else and he can survive; take away the face of God, and he is already in the pit.
Out of the failing spirit and the dread of God's hidden face rises a string of requests, and they are quietly remarkable: Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee do I trust: cause me to know the way wherein I should walk; for I lift up my soul unto thee (v. 8). Notice the shape of them. Each petition is paired with a reason, and every reason points back to God.
Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness… for in thee do I trust. Cause me to know the way… for I lift up my soul unto thee. David is not bargaining; he is leaning. And notice what he asks for. Not first for rescue, not first for the enemies gone - but to hear God's lovingkindness, and to know the way wherein I should walk. In the middle of mortal danger, his requests are for assurance and for guidance: tell me again that You love me; show me where to put my feet.
In the morning matters too - it is the prayer of a man who has been through a long, dark night and is asking that the dawn bring with it the sound of God's steadfast love. And the closing phrase, for I lift up my soul unto thee, is the posture of the whole psalm: the soul raised up and offered, like the empty hands of verse 6, with nothing held back and nothing held in reserve.
And the reason he gives is simple and total: for thou art my God. This is the instinct of a soul whose loyalties are settled; the deepest thing it wants, even under threat, is to do the will of the One it belongs to. The New Testament gives that prayer a face. There was One who could say, without qualification, what David could only ask to be taught: I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me (John 6:38).
His whole life was the answer to verse 10 - I do always those things that please him (John 8:29). And when the doing of that will led into the darkest hour, in a garden where His own spirit was overwhelmed to the point of death, He prayed the prayer of Psalm 143 in its purest form: Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done (Luke 22:42).
David asked, from the pit, to be taught to do God's will; the One who came taught it by doing it all the way to the end - and so opened, for those who could not, the very land of uprightness David was asking to be led into.
And mark the grounds once again: not for my sake, not because I deserve it, but for thy name's sake… for thy righteousness' sake. To the very end, David stakes everything on God's character and nothing on his own. The New Testament takes this very word - to make alive - and lifts it to its furthest height. For the deepest deadness is not a failing spirit but the death of sin, and into exactly that the gospel speaks: And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins… Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ (Eph. 2:1, 5).
The prayer quicken me, offered from the edge of the pit, is answered beyond anything David could have asked: the dead made alive together with the risen One. And it is done, exactly as the psalm pleaded, for the sake of God's own name: by grace ye are saved (Eph. 2:5). The God whose righteousness David could only borrow makes alive those who had no life of their own.
Fix it. Those are not wrong prayers - David prays them too, in verse 9. But notice they are not the centre. The centre is teach me to do thy will, because David wants, more than he wants relief, to belong wholly to God and walk His way through whatever comes. There is freedom in praying that way. It takes the unbearable weight off the outcome - which you cannot control - and puts the focus on the next faithful step, which you can take.
And the other thing to carry is the grounds David keeps returning to: for thy name's sake… for thy righteousness' sake. When you cannot find one good reason in yourself why God should help you, you can pray exactly as David did - not because I deserve it, but for thy name's sake. That prayer has never once failed, because it rests on the only thing that never fails.
Where this echoes in Scripture
No Man Living Be Justified
- Romans 3:20-22by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight... even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ.Verse 2 taken up word for word and answered - the righteousness no one has of their own, made manifest.
- Galatians 2:16a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ... for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.David's “no man living be justified” (v. 2) carried into the heart of the gospel.
- John 7:37If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.The soul that thirsts like a dry land (v. 6) given its answer and its invitation.
- Psalm 130:3If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?Another penitential psalm asking the same question verse 2 answers - no one could stand if God kept the account.
- Job 9:2how should man be just with God?The same impossibility David names - that no person can be justified before God on their own standing.
Teach Me to Do Thy Will
- John 6:38I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me.The prayer of verse 10 - “teach me to do thy will” - lived out perfectly by the One who came.
- Luke 22:42Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.Verse 10 prayed in its purest form, in a garden, by a soul overwhelmed to the point of death.
- Ephesians 2:4-5Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ.The plea “quicken me” (v. 11) answered beyond asking - the dead made alive with the risen One.
- Psalm 25:4-5Shew me thy ways, O LORD; teach me thy paths. Lead me in thy truth, and teach me.The same plea as verse 8 and 10 - to be shown the way and taught to walk in it.
- John 4:14whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst.The thirst and the longing of this prayer met by the One who gives the water that ends it.