Psalms 3

The psalm opens without a breath of preamble - straight into the cry: LORD, how are they increased that trouble me! The first word out of David's mouth is the name of God; before he describes a single enemy he has already turned his face toward heaven. And then the trouble pours out, and notice its shape: it is not one foe but a rising tide. Increased… many… many are they that rise up. The threat is multiplying. We know the scene behind it: Absalom's revolt had swept up the hearts of Israel, and a messenger came to David with the sentence that hollowed him out - the hearts of the men of Israel are after Absalom (2 Sam. 15:13). The man who had been the people's champion is suddenly the people's quarry. What makes the wound so deep is not only the number of the enemies but who they are: his own son leads them, and his own people follow. David does not pretend the math is anything other than what it is. He simply insists on saying it to God.

The second verse sharpens the trouble to a point, and the point is aimed at David's faith itself: Many there be which say of my soul, There is no help for him in God. This is the cruelest thing the enemies say - crueler than any threat of the sword. They do not merely want him dead; they want him to believe that God has already abandoned him, that his flight is the proof of it. It is a theology weaponized: look at him, fallen and running - clearly heaven has written him off. And it is a whisper that does not only come from outside. Anyone who has been kicked while down knows how the accusation slips past the ears and into the chest, until you half-say it of yourself: maybe there really is no help for me in God. David lets the taunt stand in the open - he writes it down, he does not flinch from it - and then he answers it, not by arguing the math, but by turning to the One the taunt denies.

Now the hinge of the whole psalm swings on the smallest of words: But. But thou, O LORD, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head. Everything the enemies said in verses 1-2 may be true at the level of fact - David is outnumbered, he is in flight - but their conclusion is false, and the whole weight of the falsehood is broken by that one conjunction. Against many are they stands but thou. And the three things David says of God are precisely the three things the crisis had stripped from him. He has lost his guard, so he says God is his shield. He has lost his honor as king, so he says God is his glory. His head has been bowed in shame and grief - Scripture pictures him climbing the mountain with his head covered, weeping (2 Sam. 15:30) - so he says God is the lifter up of mine head. Point for point, where the world had taken something away, David finds it returned to him in God. He does not deny the loss. He relocates everything he lost into the keeping of the One who cannot be taken from him.

The first movement ends where the trouble could not reach: I cried unto the LORD with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill. There is something almost stubborn in the plainness of it. David cried - out loud, with my voice, not a polished prayer but a raw shout - and the line answers itself in the same breath: and he heard me. The taunt was that there is no help for him in God; the experience is that God heard. And He heard out of his holy hill - that is, from Zion, the very place David had just been driven from. The enemy holds the city; but the God who answers from that holy hill is not bound to its walls, and His hearing reaches the fugitive in the wilderness as surely as it would have reached the king on his throne. The hill David lost is exactly the hill from which his prayer is answered. He is exiled from the place; he is not exiled from the Presence.

The second half of the psalm opens with a line so quiet it is easy to miss how astonishing it is: I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the LORD sustained me. Set it back into its setting. David is a hunted man; an army led by his own son is somewhere in the dark behind him; by every reasonable measure this is a night for keeping watch with a drawn sword. And instead he sleeps. Sleep is the most defenseless thing a body does - eyes closed, guard down, wholly at the mercy of the night. To be able to sleep on the run is not carelessness; it is a confession. It says that the watching has been handed to Someone else. David lies down precisely because he believes he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep (Ps. 121:4). And then the morning comes: I awaked - three of the most undramatic words in Scripture, and three of the most eloquent. He woke up. He made it through. And he does not credit his own luck or vigilance; he credits the LORD: for the LORD sustained me. The simple fact of a new morning is received as a gift held in the open hand of God.

Out of that night's rest comes the morning's courage: I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people, that have set themselves against me round about. Look closely and you see this is not the bravado of a man who has talked himself out of seeing the threat. He counts it honestly - ten thousands… round about - he is encircled, and he knows it. Courage in the Bible is rarely the absence of fear; it is the refusal to let fear have the final say. David has done his accounting in verses 1-2; he knows the odds are crushing. What has changed is not the number of his enemies but the size of his God. Having slept under the keeping of the One who sustained him through the night, he can look at the ten thousand by daylight and find that they no longer set the terms. The enemies surround him on every side; but a shield (v. 3) surrounds him more closely still. Fear is answered not by minimizing the danger but by maximizing the God who stands between him and it.

Now the prayer turns active and bold: Arise, O LORD; save me, O my God. Arise is old battle language - the cry raised whenever the ark of God set out, Rise up, LORD, and let thine enemies be scattered (Num. 10:35). David is asking God to take the field. But notice the strange tense of what follows: for thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone; thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly. He prays for rescue, and in the same breath speaks of the enemy as already defeated - already struck, already toothless. To smite upon the cheek bone is the gesture of utter humiliation; to break the teeth is to disarm a beast, to pull the fangs from what was snarling. And David sets these as accomplished things - not because the battle is visibly over, but because he is so sure of God's purpose that he can pray from the far side of the victory. This is faith's peculiar grammar: it asks God to do what it already trusts Him, in the end, to have done.