Psalms 40

The psalm begins on the far side of a rescue, looking back. I waited patiently for the LORD; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. Notice that the waiting comes first, and that it was not a quick thing - the verb is doubled in the Hebrew, “waiting I waited,” the language of a long holding-on. But the waiting was not wasted and it was not ignored; in the end God inclined unto him - literally bent down, stooped low, the way you lean down to catch the voice of someone small. Then come the images that have given this psalm its power. David had been in an horrible pit - a pit of tumult, of roaring confusion - and in the miry clay, that particular horror of mud that pulls the feet down and offers nothing solid to push against. The harder you struggle, the deeper you sink. And against that he sets two quiet miracles of stability: God set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. First the standing, then the walking. The One who lifts us out does not leave us trembling on the bank; He gives us back our footing and sets us moving again.

Out of the rescue comes music: he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God. The song is given, not generated - he hath put it there - and it is new because the old song belonged to the pit, and the man who climbs out of the mud is not the same man who fell in. A new mercy calls for a new music. But watch where the new song travels: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the LORD. One man's deliverance, sung honestly, becomes a doorway for others. They see what God did for him; a healthy fear - reverence, awakened wonder - falls on them; and that awe turns into trust, the very trust the next verse pronounces blessed: Blessed is that man that maketh the LORD his trust. This is how testimony works in the family of God. Your rescue was never only about you. The song God puts in your mouth is meant to be overheard, so that someone still in the clay can lift their eyes and begin, against all the evidence of their own pit, to hope.

Before the psalm turns to its great center, David widens the frame from his own story to God's whole way of working: Many, O LORD my God, are thy wonderful works which thou hast done, and thy thoughts which are to us-ward: they cannot be reckoned up in order unto thee. His single rescue, he realizes, is one bead on an endless string. God's works toward His people are past counting, and behind the works are His thoughts - His intentions, His designs to us-ward, bent in our direction. There is something deeply steadying in this. The same God who reached into one man's pit has a countless history of such reaching, and a mind full of plans tilted toward the good of His people. If I would declare and speak of them, they are more than can be numbered. The right response to one mercy is to remember that it stands in a flood of mercies - and that the God who has done so much, and thinks so constantly toward us, is not likely to stop now.

Now the psalm says the thing that turns the whole temple on its head: Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire… burnt offering and sin offering hast thou not required. To an Israelite this is almost vertigo. The altar, the priesthood, the daily smoke of the offerings - the entire visible machinery of approaching God ran on sacrifice. How can the psalmist say God did not desire it? The answer is not that the sacrifices were a mistake, but that they were never the destination. They were God's own appointed pictures, given to teach a people what sin costs and what nearness requires - and like all pictures, they pointed beyond themselves. The prophets had been saying it for centuries: to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams (1 Sam. 15:22); I desired mercy, and not sacrifice (Hos. 6:6). What God always wanted, underneath the smoke, was not a substitute offered instead of the worshipper, but the worshipper himself - heart, ears, hands, the whole obedient person. The danger the verse exposes is timeless: it is fatally possible to keep the religious motions running flawlessly while withholding the one thing they were meant to draw out of us.

The obedience of the opened ear does not stay shut up inside; it opens the mouth too. I have preached righteousness in the great congregation: lo, I have not refrained my lips… I have not concealed thy lovingkindness and thy truth from the great congregation. Four times over the psalmist insists on what he has not done - not refrained, not hid, not concealed - piling up the negatives to make a single positive point: he could not keep quiet. The same heart that delights to do God's will cannot help but declare God's character. And notice the place: the great congregation, out in the open, before the gathered people, not whispered in a corner. Real love for God is finally unhideable. When His righteousness, His faithfulness, His salvation, His lovingkindness, and His truth have actually reached a person, silence becomes the harder thing. The progression of the psalm is worth tracing: God opened the ear (v. 6), the opened ear led to a willing heart (v. 8), and the willing heart opens the lips (vv. 9-10). Hearing, obeying, and proclaiming turn out to be one continuous life.

The psalm now makes a turn that can feel abrupt, and is in fact one of its truest notes. The voice that just sang I delight to do thy will drops, in the same breath, to a plea: Withhold not thou thy tender mercies from me, O LORD: let thy lovingkindness and thy truth continually preserve me. And look at what he asks to be preserved by - the very things he has just been preaching: God's lovingkindness and truth were what he declared in the great congregation (v. 10), and now they are what he begs to keep him alive. This is no contradiction; it is the wholeness of real faith. The one who proclaims God's mercy to others is the same one who, an hour later, desperately needs that mercy himself. He does not pretend the obedience of verses 6 through 8 has lifted him above need. He turns the truth he preaches into the prayer he prays - and that is exactly how it is meant to be used.

Then comes the honest weight of it: innumerable evils have compassed me about: mine iniquities have taken hold upon me, so that I am not able to look up; they are more than the hairs of mine head: therefore my heart faileth me. Two kinds of trouble close in at once - evils from without, pressing on every side, and iniquities from within, his own failings catching up with him. Earlier the psalm rejoiced that God's mercies were more than can be numbered (v. 5); now, with terrible symmetry, his sins are more than the hairs of mine head. He cannot even lift his eyes; his courage drains away. It is striking, and deliberate, that the same song which holds the perfect Lo, I come also holds this - a man undone by his own sin and unable to look up. The two are not rivals; they are the whole truth about us. We are people made to delight in God's will and people whose iniquities take hold of us, and the gap between the two is precisely why the willing obedience at the center of this psalm had to be supplied, at last, by Another. The honest confession of verse 12 is the very thing that the Lo, I come of verse 7 came to answer.

Out of that low place rise the most undefended prayers in the psalm: Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me: O LORD, make haste to help me. There is no eloquence left here, only urgency - make haste, hurry, the prayer of someone who cannot hold on much longer. These verses (13-17) are nearly word for word the whole of Psalm 70, as if this cry were so needed it had to be lifted out and given a song of its own. The psalmist asks for two things: that those who seek after my soul to destroy it would be turned back, and - far more warmly - that all those that seek thee would rejoice and be glad in thee. Notice the contrast he draws: there are those who seek his soul, and those who seek God, and he longs for the second company to be filled with gladness, continually saying, The LORD be magnified. Even flat on the ground, unable to look up, his desire is not merely for his own rescue but for God to be made great among all who love Him. The pit has not narrowed his heart to himself.