Psalms 144

The psalm opens with a word that quietly governs everything after it: Blessed be the LORD my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight. David is a soldier-king, a man whose survival has depended on what his hands could do - and the striking thing is that he does not claim the skill. He says it was taught to him. Not merely that God gave him strength, but that God instructed his very fingers, drilled the reflexes, shaped the competence he has spent his life relying on. The phrasing keeps God close to the smallest, most practical thing about him. It would have been easy to thank God in general terms and keep the credit for the craft itself; David does the opposite, tracing even his hard-won expertise back to its real source. This is not a celebration of violence for its own sake - the rest of the psalm yearns openly for peace and flourishing. It is the confession of a man who has noticed that nothing he is good at originated with him. The strength to stand, and the skill to use it, were both received.

After the cascade of titles - strength, fortress, high tower, deliverer, shield - the psalm wheels around to look at the one doing the praising, and the contrast is stark: Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away (v. 4). The word rendered vanity means a breath, a vapour, the thing you cannot hold; and a shadow that passeth away is not even the solid object but the moving shade it throws, here and gone as the sun shifts. David is not being morbid. He is setting his own fleetingness against the permanence of the God he has just named, and feeling the full weight of the question in verse 3. If man is this brief, this insubstantial, why would the eternal God take knowledge of him, account of him? The wonder of the psalm lives exactly in that gap - between a creature like a passing shadow and a God who bends the heavens to notice him. It is a thought that could crush a person; in David's hands it becomes a reason to pray, because the same God who sees how small we are is the God who has chosen, astonishingly, to care.

The prayer for rescue is vivid and physical: Send thine hand from above; rid me, and deliver me out of great waters, from the hand of strange children (v. 7). Two pictures of danger stand side by side. There are the great waters - the deep, the flood, the chaos that swallows and drowns, the oldest image in Scripture for being utterly overwhelmed and beyond self-rescue. And there are the strange children, described in the next breath as those whose mouth speaketh vanity, and their right hand is a right hand of falsehood (v. 8). The danger is not only the impersonal flood; it is people who lie - whose words are empty and whose solemn gestures, the lifted right hand of an oath, are perjury. David is hemmed in by both the overwhelming and the deceitful, and his prayer reaches above both: send thine hand from above. The hand he asks for is the only one strong enough to reach down into deep water and pull a drowning man out. He has run out of the resources of his own hand, skilled as it is; what he needs now is the hand of God lowered into the flood.

Before the rescue has even come, David is already tuning his instrument: I will sing a new song unto thee, O God: upon a psaltery and an instrument of ten strings will I sing praises unto thee (v. 9). The vow of a new song is one of the recurring movements of the Psalms - a fresh deliverance calls for a fresh praise, because the God who rescues is never merely repeating Himself. And notice that the song is promised in the middle of the danger, not after it. David is so sure of the God he has been naming - the rock, the deliverer, the goodness, the hand from above - that he prepares the music while the strange children are still pressing in. Verse 10 names the ground of that confidence plainly: It is he that giveth salvation unto kings: who delivereth David his servant from the hurtful sword. David has been delivered before; the sword that should have killed him did not, and he knows whose doing that was. So the new song is not wishful thinking. It is the considered response of a man who has a long memory of being saved, and who reaches for his harp in the confidence that he will have reason to play it again.

The psalm that began on a battlefield ends with a picture of peace so domestic it is almost startling. The prayer is no longer for the scattering of enemies but for the quiet flourishing of a whole people, and it is built out of images of growth and beauty: That our sons may be as plants grown up in their youth; that our daughters may be as corner stones, polished after the similitude of a palace (v. 12). The sons are plants - living, green, growing tall and strong, full of vigour and promise. The daughters are corner stones, and the comparison is high praise: the corner stone is the most carefully shaped and load-bearing stone in a building, here polished after the similitude of a palace, cut and finished with the elegance of a royal house. Both images carry dignity. The next two verses widen the picture - garners… full, flocks multiplying by the thousand, oxen strong to labour, and then the hush of true security: no breaking in, nor going out, no raiders at the wall, no exile from the gate, no complaining in our streets. This is what the warrior was fighting for all along. Not conquest, but a settled, fruitful, peaceful common life - the kind of ordinary flourishing that only the deliverance of God can finally secure.