Psalms 34

The psalm opens not with the story of the rescue but with a vow about what the singer will do with the rest of his life: I will bless the LORD at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth. Mark the two words that govern it - at all times and continually. This is not praise reserved for the good days, the thank-you that comes easily when the sun is out and the danger has passed. It is praise set on a schedule that never closes: in trouble and in rescue, in fear and in relief, the blessing of God is to be the steady background music of a life. The singer has just come through something that taught him how fragile his days are, and the lesson did not make him cautious - it made him grateful, permanently. He has decided that whatever else changes, this will not: his praise shall continually be in my mouth. There is a kind of freedom in that decision. The person whose praise depends on circumstances is at the mercy of circumstances; the person who blesses God at all times has found a joy that the next bad day cannot reach.

The gladness cannot stay private. My soul shall make her boast in the LORD: the humble shall hear thereof, and be glad. O magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together. Notice who is invited in - the humble, the lowly, the ones who know their own need - and notice that the singer's testimony does them good: they hear thereof, and be glad. One man's rescue becomes another man's hope. And then the summons: magnify the LORD with me. To magnify is to make large, to enlarge the sight of God in someone's eyes - not because God can be made any greater than He is, but because our small view of Him can be stretched until it matches the truth. The singer knows he cannot do this alone; he wants company. Let us exalt his name together. This is how thanksgiving works at its healthiest. It refuses to be a solitary thing. The one who has tasted God's goodness turns at once to the people around him and says, in effect, come and see what I have seen; let us make Him large together.

Now the heart of the testimony, told in two parallel lines: I sought the LORD, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears (v. 4), and again, This poor man cried, and the LORD heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles (v. 6). The pattern is the same both times - a cry that goes up, a God who hears, a rescue that comes down - and the repetition is the point: this is not a fluke but the way God works. Mark what the singer was delivered from. Not, in the first instance, from the danger itself, but from his fears. The trouble was real, but the fear was its own kind of prison, and the LORD broke that prison first. And mark how the singer names himself: this poor man. He does not come as a hero who earned his rescue; he comes as the lowly, the needy, the one who had nothing to offer but a cry. That is exactly the kind of person God hears. The line refuses every version of religion that says you must clean yourself up before you may call out. The poor man cried - just cried - and was saved out of all his troubles.

Out of his own rescue the singer turns and issues the most sensory invitation in the Psalter: O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him. He could have said consider that the LORD is good, or be told, or believe - but he reaches instead for the language of the table. Taste. You cannot taste a thing at a distance; you cannot taste by reading about it or hearing it described. Tasting requires that you bring the thing close, take it in, let it become part of you. The singer is insisting that the goodness of God is not a doctrine to be examined from across the room but a reality to be experienced - and that the experiment is open to anyone willing to trust. Note how taste and trust are bound together: the man who is blessed is the one who trusteth in him. You do not first taste and then decide whether to trust; you trust, and in the trusting you taste. The invitation is bold precisely because it is so confident. The singer has eaten, and found it good, and now he sets a place at the table for you.

Having fed others from his own experience, the singer now turns teacher: Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach you the fear of the LORD. The address is gentle - ye children - the voice of one who has been further down the road calling the younger forward. And the subject he proposes to teach is striking: not how to get rich, not how to avoid all hardship, but the fear of the LORD. In the Scriptures this fear is not terror or cringing dread; it is reverence, the awe that rightly sizes God and rightly sizes ourselves before Him. It is, the wisdom books insist, the beginning of knowledge (Prov. 1:7) - the doorway through which all true understanding comes. And the singer treats it as something teachable, a posture that can be learned and handed on. He has noticed, too, where real security lies: the young lions do lack, and suffer hunger: but they that seek the LORD shall not want any good thing. Even the strongest predators, at the peak of their power, go hungry; but the one who seeks the LORD is provided for. The lesson is humbling and freeing at once. Strength does not guarantee provision; seeking God does.

The lesson turns wonderfully practical. The singer asks a question everyone answers the same way - What man is he that desireth life, and loveth many days, that he may see good? Who does not want that? - and then, having gathered every hand in the room, he tells them where such a life begins: Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking guile. Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it. It is a striking place to start. Asked for the secret of a good life, the teacher points first at the mouth. Guard your speech; refuse deceit; let no poison or falsehood pass your lips. Then the body: depart from evil, and do good - not merely avoiding wrong but actively doing right, the two halves of a single turning. And then, most active of all, peace: it is not enough to wish for it or wait for it; one must seek it and pursue it, chase it down like something that might otherwise get away. There is nothing abstract here. The fear of the LORD, it turns out, comes to ground in the most ordinary places - what we say, what we do, how hard we work for peace. Reverence for God shows up first in a guarded tongue and a peaceable life.

The closing movement opens with a portrait of a God who is wholly attentive: The eyes of the LORD are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry. The picture is intimate - eyes fixed, ears open, the whole face of God turned toward His people. He is not a distant deity who set the world spinning and walked away; He watches, and He listens. And the listening is specific: his ears are open unto their cry. The cry of the righteous does not echo in an empty heaven; it lands on ears already inclined to hear. The next verse sets the dark contrast: The face of the LORD is against them that do evil. The same face that turns toward the righteous in favour turns against persistent evil in judgment - for a God who is genuinely good cannot be indifferent to genuine wickedness. But the weight of the passage falls on mercy, not menace, and it lands at once on the reassurance the troubled most need to hear: The righteous cry, and the LORD heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles. The eyes that watch and the ears that listen are not idle; they move God to deliver.

Then a verse of unflinching realism: Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the LORD delivereth him out of them all. Notice that the psalm does not promise the righteous a life without trouble. Quite the opposite - it says their afflictions are many. This is the honesty that keeps Psalm 34 from being a shallow song; it knows that being right with God is no shield against suffering, that the faithful weep and ache and stand at gravesides like everyone else. What it promises is not exemption but deliverance - and deliverance that is finally total: out of them all. The afflictions are many; the rescue is complete. Sometimes that rescue comes within this life, as it came to the singer; sometimes, the rest of Scripture will make clear, the final deliverance lies beyond it, in a redemption that reaches even past death. But the trajectory is fixed and unbroken. However many the troubles, they do not get the last word over the one who belongs to the LORD. The verse refuses both lies at once - the lie that the faithful are spared all suffering, and the lie that their suffering is the end of the story.

The acrostic closes with a word that gathers up everything before it: The LORD redeemeth the soul of his servants: and none of them that trust in him shall be desolate. The verb is redeem - to buy back, to ransom, to pay the price that sets a captive free - and it lifts the whole psalm from rescue-in-the-moment to something larger and more final. The singer began with a deliverance from particular fears; he ends with the redemption of the very soul, the rescue of the whole person at the deepest level there is. And mark the closing contrast, which deliberately echoes the fate of the wicked two verses earlier. Of those who hate the righteous it was said, they… shall be desolate (v. 21) - left ruined, abandoned, alone. But of the LORD's servants the last word is the reverse: none of them that trust in him shall be desolate. The same word, opposite endings, and the dividing line is trust. The psalm that opened with a vow to bless God at all times ends by guaranteeing that the trusting soul will never finally be abandoned. Whatever the afflictions, however many, the servant of the LORD has a redeemer - and a redeemed soul is never left desolate.