Psalms 38
Psalm 383 is one of the seven psalms the church has long called the Penitential Psalms - the prayers a person reaches for when the weight of their own wrong has finally caught up with them. Its superscription, A Psalm of David, to bring to remembrance, marks it as a song meant to call something to mind, to keep a hard lesson from being forgotten. And the song itself is unflinching. The sufferer is in real agony, body and soul at once: thine arrows stick fast in me… There is no soundness in my flesh… I am feeble and sore broken. But he never once pretends to be a victim of circumstance. He traces the trouble straight back to its root in himself: neither is there any rest in my bones because of my sin.
This is what sets the psalm apart, and what makes it so bracing to read. It is not the cry of an innocent man hemmed in by enemies, though enemies are circling. It is the cry of a man who knows the deepest source of his misery is not out there but in here - in his own iniquity. He does not minimize it, explain it away, or shift the blame: mine iniquities are gone over mine head: as an heavy burden they are too heavy for me. He names the weight, feels its full crushing force, and refuses every comfortable lie that might lighten it dishonestly. Few passages in Scripture describe so plainly what it is to be flattened by the knowledge of one's own sin.
And yet the psalm is not despair, because the sufferer keeps doing one thing: he keeps talking to God. Even at his lowest - abandoned by friends, mocked by foes, silent as a deaf and dumb man before those who lie about him - he refuses to let go of the One he most needs. For in thee, O LORD, do I hope: thou wilt hear, O Lord my God. The path from crushing guilt to mercy runs through the narrow gate of honest confession, and the psalm walks it all the way: I will declare mine iniquity; I will be sorry for my sin. Hidden in its silences and its forsakenness, too, lie patterns that the Gospel will one day gather up in a greater Sufferer - one whose friends fled and whose mouth stayed shut, yet who carried a burden that was never His own.
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Psalm 38:1-8 · A Psalm of David, to bring to remembranceThine Arrows Stick Fast in Me
1O LORD, rebuke me not in thy wrath: neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure. 2For thine arrows stick fast in me, and thy hand presseth me sore. 3There is no soundness in my flesh because of thine anger; neither is there any rest in my bones because of my sin. 4For mine iniquities are gone over mine head: as an heavy burden they are too heavy for me. 5My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness. 6I am troubled; I am bowed down greatly; I go mourning all the day long. 7For my loins are filled with a loathsome disease: and there is no soundness in my flesh. 8I am feeble and sore broken: I have roared by reason of the disquietness of my heart.
The psalm opens not with a protest of innocence but with a plea about the manner of God's dealing: O LORD, rebuke me not in thy wrath: neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure. Notice that the singer does not ask to escape correction altogether. He knows he has it coming, and he does not pretend otherwise. What he begs for is the difference between two kinds of dealing - between the chastening of a father who corrects because he loves, and the wrath of a judge who strikes to destroy. The verbs are deliberately paired and contrasted: rebuke and chasten he can survive, even welcome, if they come in mercy; what he dreads is the same blows delivered in hot displeasure, with no love behind them. It is the prayer of a man who has stopped arguing about whether he deserves the discipline and is now pleading only about the spirit in which it comes. He is not asking to be let off. He is asking to be corrected as a son and not condemned as an enemy - and that single distinction will keep him, through all the agony that follows, from ever despairing of the God who wounds him.3
The suffering is described with two images that land like blows: For thine arrows stick fast in me, and thy hand presseth me sore. The arrows are not glancing wounds; they stick fast, lodged and embedded, the kind of injury that does not heal on its own and cannot simply be shaken off. And over the wounded man lies a pressing weight - thy hand presseth me sore - as though a great hand were holding him down so that he cannot rise or escape. What is striking is whose arrows and whose hand the singer names. He does not say his enemies have shot him, though enemies will appear later; he says thine arrows, thy hand. He reads his suffering as coming, in some real sense, from God Himself - not because God is cruel, but because the singer is honest enough to see his own sin and its consequences as something he must finally answer to God for. This is the opposite of the modern instinct to locate all our pain in other people or in bad luck. The penitent traces the line all the way back, and finds at the end of it not a faceless misfortune but the hand of the God he has wronged - and that, paradoxically, is where his hope will turn out to lie.
Twice in this opening movement the singer repeats the same desolate phrase - There is no soundness in my flesh (vv. 3, 7) - and the repetition is the point. Whether the sickness is literal or a vivid figure for inward ruin, the psalm insists that sin is never a tidy matter sealed off in the soul. It works its way out into the whole person: into the flesh, the bones, the wounds that stink and are corrupt, the loins filled with disease, the body bowed down greatly and going mourning all the day long. And the singer names the cause without flinching, four times over in eight verses: because of thine anger… because of my sin… because of my foolishness. He will not let himself off the hook by calling it mere misfortune. The roaring he describes - I have roared by reason of the disquietness of my heart - is the sound of a man whose inner turmoil has grown too large to keep inside, breaking out of him in groans he cannot suppress. It is an unsparing portrait of what unaddressed guilt does to a life: it does not stay quiet, and it does not stay contained. It spreads, until a person feels there is no soundness anywhere in him.
Psalm 38:9-14A Dumb Man That Openeth Not His Mouth
9Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee. 10My heart panteth, my strength faileth me: as for the light of mine eyes, it also is gone from me. 11My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my kinsmen stand afar off. 12They also that seek after my life lay snares for me: and they that seek my hurt speak mischievous things, and imagine deceits all the day long. 13But I, as a deaf man, heard not; and I was as a dumb man that openeth not his mouth. 14Thus I was as a man that heareth not, and in whose mouth are no reproofs.
In the depth of his misery the singer says something quietly remarkable: Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee. He has run out of strength to explain himself - his heart panteth, his strength faileth, even the light of mine eyes, the brightness of life itself, is gone. And in that exhaustion he finds a strange comfort: he does not have to make God understand, because God already does. All my desire is before thee. Every longing he cannot articulate, every groan too deep for words, lies open and visible to God already. My groaning is not hid from thee. There is rest in that for a person too worn out to pray well. When you are reduced to wordless groaning, the psalm says, you are not therefore cut off from God; your groaning is your prayer, and it is fully heard. The One to whom you cry is not waiting for you to compose yourself and state your case clearly. He reads the desire beneath the words, and the ache beneath the silence. Nothing in you is hidden from Him - and for the penitent, that is not a threat but a mercy.
To the inward agony is now added a second and very human grief: the singer is alone. My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my kinsmen stand afar off. Those who should have drawn near in his suffering have instead drawn back. His lovers - those who claimed to love him - keep their distance from his sore, his open wound; even his kinsmen, his own family, stand afar off. There is a particular loneliness in being abandoned precisely when you are at your worst, deserted by the very people whose nearness you most needed. And the desertion is not only passive. Into the empty space where friends should have been, enemies move: they that seek after my life lay snares for me… speak mischievous things, and imagine deceits all the day long. So the singer is doubly exposed - abandoned by those who should have stood with him, and actively hunted by those who wish him harm. It is the lowest point of the psalm: a man crushed by his own guilt, racked in body, and now stripped even of human company, left to face the circling accusers with no one beside him. The picture is bleak - and it is precisely this picture of the forsaken sufferer that the Gospel will one day take up and fill to its furthest depth.
Psalm 38:15-22For In Thee, O LORD, Do I Hope
15For in thee, O LORD, do I hope: thou wilt hear, O Lord my God. 16For I said, Hear me, lest otherwise they should rejoice over me: when my foot slippeth, they magnify themselves against me. 17For I am ready to halt, and my sorrow is continually before me. 18For I will declare mine iniquity; I will be sorry for my sin. 19But mine enemies are lively, and they are strong: and they that hate me wrongfully are multiplied. 20They also that render evil for good are mine adversaries; because I follow the thing that good is. 21Forsake me not, O LORD: O my God, be not far from me. 22Make haste to help me, O Lord my salvation.
After the long descent into pain, abandonment, and silence, the psalm pivots on a single word: For in thee, O LORD, do I hope: thou wilt hear, O Lord my God. Everything has been stripped away - his health, his strength, the light of his eyes, his friends, his good name - and what remains, the one thing he still has, is the LORD. In thee… do I hope. It is a deliberate act, not a feeling that happened to him; in the wreckage of everything else he sets his hope on God. And he grounds that hope in a confidence about God's character: thou wilt hear. The God he hopes in is a God who listens. Notice, too, the tenderness of the double address - O LORD… O Lord my God. He names God by the covenant name, and then folds it close with my God, claiming the relationship even now, even as one being chastened. This is the hinge of the whole psalm. A person crushed by sin and suffering has two doors before him: despair, which concludes that the wound is final and turns inward to rot; or hope, which turns the same wound toward God and waits. The singer chooses the second. He has nothing left to lean on but God - and discovers that God is enough to lean on.
The singer's prayer grows specific and urgent: For I said, Hear me, lest otherwise they should rejoice over me: when my foot slippeth, they magnify themselves against me. He is keenly aware that his enemies are watching for him to fall - that the moment my foot slippeth, the instant he stumbles, they will magnify themselves, puffing up their own importance at his expense and gloating over his ruin. There is real danger here, and the singer feels it: I am ready to halt - ready to fall, to collapse, like a man limping on the edge of going down - and my sorrow is continually before me. His grief never lets up; it sits in front of his eyes day and night, with no relief in sight. And his enemies are not few or weak: mine enemies are lively, and they are strong: and they that hate me wrongfully are multiplied. They flourish while he fails; they grow in number while he grows feeble. Most painful of all, they render evil for good - he has done them no wrong, has indeed pursued the thing that good is, and they repay his goodness with hatred. The honesty of the psalm is total: it does not pretend the danger is past or the enemies imagined. It simply holds all of it - the slipping foot, the gloating foes, the unrelenting sorrow - up to the God in whom the singer has just declared his hope.
At the heart of this closing movement comes the decisive turn of the whole psalm: For I will declare mine iniquity; I will be sorry for my sin. Mark the verbs. He does not say I will hide my iniquity, or I will explain it, or I will defend myself; he says I will declare it - speak it out, bring it into the open, lay it before God without disguise. And he does not say I will get over my sin, or I will move past it; he says I will be sorry for it - he will let it grieve him, will feel the godly sorrow that does not excuse the wrong but mourns it. This is the narrow gate the whole psalm has been moving toward. For as long as sin is hidden, it festers, exactly as the earlier verses described - the wounds that stink and are corrupt, the bones with no rest, the burden too heavy to bear. But the moment it is declared, the door to healing swings open. Confession does not earn forgiveness as a wage; it simply stops the lie, ends the hiding, and turns the whole crushing weight toward the only One who can lift it. The singer has reached the place every penitent must reach: he stops managing his sin and starts naming it. I will declare mine iniquity. Those four words are where the long agony finally begins to turn toward mercy.
The psalm ends not with resolution but with a cry - three short, urgent pleas fired off one after another: Forsake me not, O LORD: O my God, be not far from me. Make haste to help me, O Lord my salvation. Each one answers a wound the psalm has named. Forsake me not answers the abandonment of verse 11, where his friends stood aloof and his kinsmen afar off; if everyone else has left, let not God leave. Be not far from me answers the felt distance of his suffering, the sense that God's help is slow in coming; let the LORD draw near. And make haste to help me answers the urgency of a man ready to halt, on the verge of falling; there is no time to spare. But the most important word is the last one: O Lord my salvation. After all the agony, the singer names God not as his judge, not as his accuser, but as his salvation - the very rescue he needs, claimed as his own. The psalm does not end with the rescue in hand; the enemies are still strong, the sorrow still present, the help not yet arrived. It ends, rather, with the penitent's whole weight thrown onto God: hoping in Him, confessing to Him, and crying out to Him as the only salvation there is. That is where true repentance always lands - not in the cleverness of self-rescue, but in the bare, urgent prayer of a soul that has run out of every other hope and found that the LORD is enough.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Psalm 38 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for 'avon (vv. 4, 18, “iniquity, the bent weight of guilt”), for the burden too heavy of verse 4, and for the language of the deaf-and-dumb sufferer who openeth not his mouth in verses 13-14.
- Psalm 38 ↔ Isaiah 53 · Luke 23 · the Passion narrativesIntertextual BibleTraces the verbal threads tying Psalm 38's silent sufferer - as a dumb man that openeth not his mouth (v. 13) - to Isaiah's suffering servant and to the One who held his peace before His accusers, and its abandoned-by-friends motif (v. 11) to the acquaintance who stood afar off at the cross.
- Psalm 38 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Psalm 38 - the penitential shape of the psalm, the imagery of God's arrows and pressing hand, the sense of no soundness in my flesh, and the way the sufferer ties his bodily anguish directly to his own sin.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Thine Arrows Stick Fast in Me
- Psalm 32:3-5When I kept silence, my bones waxed old... I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid.The same penitent ache in the bones - and the relief that comes only when iniquity is confessed, not hidden.
- Isaiah 53:4-6Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows... the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.The burden too heavy for the psalmist (v. 4) laid at last on the One willing to bear it.
- Matthew 11:28-30Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest... my burden is light.The answer to the crushing load of verse 4 - the Burden-Bearer who takes what is too heavy for us.
- Hebrews 12:6For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.The chastening of a father, not the wrath of a judge - the very distinction the singer pleads for in verse 1.
A Dumb Man That Openeth Not His Mouth
- Isaiah 53:7He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth... as a sheep before her shearers is dumb.The silent sufferer of verses 13-14 foreseen - the Lamb who answers His accusers with stillness.
- Luke 23:49And all his acquaintance, and the women that followed him from Galilee, stood afar off.The abandonment of verse 11 at the cross - friends and acquaintance standing far from the dying One.
- Matthew 27:12-14And when he was accused... he answered nothing... he answered him to never a word.The chosen silence of verse 13 fulfilled before Pilate - the wronged One who would not defend Himself.
- 1 Peter 2:22-23Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth... when he was reviled, reviled not again.The pattern of the silent sufferer perfected - kept not out of guilt but out of a love that would not retaliate.
For In Thee, O LORD, Do I Hope
- Proverbs 28:13He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.The principle behind verse 18 - hidden sin festers, declared sin opens the door to mercy.
- 1 John 1:9If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.The declaration of iniquity in verse 18 met with the sure promise of cleansing and forgiveness.
- Psalm 38:21-22Forsake me not, O LORD: O my God, be not far from me. Make haste to help me, O Lord my salvation.The psalm’s closing cry - every wound it named answered by a plea for God to stay near and help fast.
- Psalm 130:1-4Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O LORD... But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.The same cry from the depths and the same hope - a penitent waiting on the LORD in whom there is forgiveness.