Psalms 49

A psalm usually addresses Israel, or speaks directly to God. This one does something rarer: it turns outward and hails the entire human race. Hear this, all ye people; give ear, all ye inhabitants of the world: Both low and high, rich and poor together. The summons is universal because the subject is universal. The wisdom about to be offered is not for one nation, one class, one kind of person - it is for everyone who will one day die, which is to say, everyone. Notice how carefully the psalm gathers in the whole spread of humanity: low and high, the obscure and the famous; rich and poor, those with everything and those with nothing. The very pairings that ordinarily divide people - status and wealth - are precisely the things this psalm is about to flatten. For there is one fact that makes the rich man and the poor man, the celebrated and the forgotten, exactly equal, and the singer is about to name it. Before he does, he simply insists that all of them stand and listen together, side by side, because the truth he carries levels the ground beneath every listener's feet.³

The singer announces the kind of speech he is about to give: My mouth shall speak of wisdom; and the meditation of my heart shall be of understanding. I will incline mine ear to a parable: I will open my dark saying upon the harp. This is the language of the wisdom tradition - the world of Proverbs and Job, where life's deepest puzzles are turned over and examined. A parable here is not a story so much as a weighty, compressed saying that rewards long thought; and a dark saying is a riddle, an enigma, a truth that does not lie on the surface but must be drawn up from the depths. Strikingly, the psalmist says he will incline mine ear to it - he listens before he teaches, leaning in to catch the riddle himself before he passes it on. And he will open it upon the harp: this hard wisdom about death and money will be set to music, sung, made beautiful. There is something fitting in that. The most sobering truth a person can hear - that wealth cannot ransom a soul, that everyone dies - is not handed over as a cold lecture but carried on a melody, the way you would sing a truth you wanted someone to remember for the rest of their life.

The riddle opens with a question that runs underneath the whole psalm: Wherefore should I fear in the days of evil, when the iniquity of my heels shall compass me about? The days of evil are the times when wickedness seems to prosper and the powerful press in; the difficult phrase the iniquity of my heels pictures trouble dogging a person's steps, the wrongdoing of enemies closing in at his very feet, hemming him about. And the question the psalmist asks is not how do I escape? but why should I be afraid at all? It is the same instinct that runs through so much of the Psalter: when the arrogant and the rich seem to be winning, the temptation is to envy them or to fear them. This psalm means to cure both. And it does so not by promising that the wicked will be struck down tomorrow, but by quietly pointing to the end that waits for every person, however rich - the leveller that makes the boasting of the powerful, in the long view, nothing to dread. The answer to fear, here, is a clear-eyed look at what wealth cannot do.

Now the psalm names the people it has been circling: They that trust in their wealth, and boast themselves in the multitude of their riches. Read the two verbs carefully, because they describe a whole posture toward life. To trust in wealth is to make it your security, the thing you lean on, the foundation you assume will hold; to boast in the multitude of riches is to make it your glory, the source of your standing and your sense of worth. These are not people who merely have money - the psalm is not against possessions - they are people who have placed in money the weight that belongs to God alone. They trust it the way a soul ought to trust its Maker; they boast in it the way a heart ought to glory in its Redeemer. And the psalm is about to show, gently and devastatingly, that the thing they have trusted is precisely the thing that cannot do the one job that matters most. The wealthiest man alive comes to a wall his riches cannot scale.

Here is the wall: None of them can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him: (For the redemption of their soul is precious, and it ceaseth for ever:) That he should still live for ever, and not see corruption. Slow down over the impossibility the verse insists on - by any means. Not by some means, with effort. Not by enough means, if only the man were rich enough. By no means whatever. There is no sum, no fortune, no treasury on earth that can purchase one soul out of death. A man cannot ransom his brother - and the logic runs straight to himself: if all his wealth cannot buy back the one he loves, neither can it buy back his own life when his hour comes. And the reason is stated with quiet finality: the redemption of their soul is precious - the word means costly, too dear, priced beyond every human reach - and it ceaseth for ever. The attempt to pay it fails, and fails permanently; the bidding is closed; no offer will ever be high enough. What the rich man most needs is the one thing his riches were never able to buy. This is the lack the whole rest of Scripture will move to answer.³

Having shown that wealth cannot ransom a soul, the psalm turns to drive the lesson home with the plainest fact in the world: For he seeth that wise men die, likewise the fool and the brutish person perish, and leave their wealth to others. Three kinds of people are named - the wise, the fool, and the brutish person (the dull, animal-minded man who never thinks beyond his appetites) - and the great equaliser sweeps them all into the same end. The wise man, for all his understanding, dies. The fool dies. The brute dies. And every one of them does the same thing with his wealth at the last: he leaves it to others. There is no exception, no escape clause for the clever or the careful. And then the psalm reaches the most human detail of all: Their inward thought is, that their houses shall continue for ever… they call their lands after their own names. Here is the secret hope of the self-made man laid bare - the quiet inner conviction that his estate will outlast him, that by stamping his name on his property he can purchase a kind of permanence, a little immortality of stone and land. It is a beautiful, doomed instinct. The names carved on the gates do not keep their owners alive.

And so the section lands on the verse that will become the psalm's refrain: Nevertheless man being in honour abideth not: he is like the beasts that perish. The word nevertheless stands against every illusion that came before it - against the trusting, the boasting, the lands named after their owners, the inward thought of houses that last for ever. For all of it, nevertheless - the man in his honour does not abide, does not remain, does not stay. He passes. And then the sharpest line in the psalm: he is like the beasts that perish. It is a deliberately humbling comparison. The man who built a great name, who lived as though he were the master of his fate, shares the bare biological end of the animals in his own fields - the same dust, the same silence. This is not said to mock the dead but to wake the living. A life that has trusted in wealth and boasted in riches, and never reckoned with the one thing money cannot buy, ends no differently from the beasts. The psalm is not finished - there is a but God coming - but first it makes sure the reader has felt the full weight of life lived as if death could be bought off. It cannot. And the man who never faced that truth dies having missed the only wisdom worth having.

The psalm turns to the end of those who never learned its wisdom, and the imagery is unforgettable: This their way is their folly… Like sheep they are laid in the grave; death shall feed on them. First, the verdict - their whole way, the entire shape of a life built on wealth and self, is their folly. And the bitter irony: yet their posterity approve their sayings - the next generation, far from learning the lesson, admires the words of the rich and sets out to copy them, walking the same doomed road with applause. Then the picture itself. They are like sheep - helpless, herded, unable to resist - and they are laid in the grave, driven down into sheol, where death shall feed on them. Death is cast as a shepherd here, but a monstrous one: instead of leading its flock to pasture, it leads them down to be devoured. The men who imagined their houses would last for ever (v. 11) are gathered like livestock to the slaughter of the grave. And yet even in this dark verse a thread of hope is woven: the upright shall have dominion over them in the morning. A morning is coming - an awakening after the long night - in which the values of this present darkness are reversed, and those who feared God, not riches, are vindicated at last.

And now the verse the entire psalm has been building toward - the single line that breaks like sunrise over all the preceding gloom: But God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave: for he shall receive me. Selah. Everything turns on that first word, But. Against the whole weight of what came before - the unpayable ransom, the certain death, the sheep devoured in the grave - stands this one defiant conjunction. But God. What no brother could do (v. 7), God will do. The very verb that was impossible for man - redeem, padah - is here the confident action of God: God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave. The power of the grave is the grip of sheol, the hand that holds every other person fast; and the psalmist declares, with no hint of doubt, that God will pluck him out of that grip. And then the most tender phrase of all: for he shall receive me. It is not merely rescue from something but reception into Someone - the word carries the sense of being taken up, gathered, welcomed home. The same God who could not be paid a ransom by any man freely receives the soul that trusts Him. And the psalm marks the moment with Selah - pause here; let this one stand; weigh it against everything else.

Having seen both ends - the grave that feeds on the self-made man, and the God who redeems the trusting soul - the psalm draws its practical conclusion, and it is the very thing the riddle set out to teach back in verse 5: Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased. Here is the cure for the fear and the envy that the prosperity of the wicked stirs up. When you watch someone grow rich, when the glory of his house swells and his name climbs and his estate expands - do not be afraid of him, and do not covet what he has. The psalm has already shown you the end of the story he is living. His increasing glory is a sandcastle against an incoming tide. To fear the rich and powerful, or to ache with envy at their abundance, is to forget what you now know: that all of it stops at a wall they cannot pass, the same wall that stops the poorest beggar. The believer who has grasped this psalm walks through a world of dazzling wealth and worldly power strangely unafraid - not because those things are not real, but because he has seen how the story ends, and he has set his hope on the one thing that outlasts the grave.

The reason not to fear is stated with crushing simplicity: For when he dieth he shall carry nothing away: his glory shall not descend after him. Nothing. Not a coin of it follows him through the door of death. The hearse, as the saying goes, pulls no trailer. All the glory he amassed - the wealth, the reputation, the influence - stays entirely on this side; it shall not descend after him into the grave. And the psalm presses on into the saddest irony of the self-made life: Though while he lived he blessed his soul: and men will praise thee, when thou doest well to thyself. While he lived, he congratulated himself - he blessed his soul, counted himself fortunate, well-provided, secure - and the world cheered him on, for the world always will praise thee, when thou doest well to thyself. Look after number one, and you will never lack for applause. But the applause does not follow him either. He shall go to the generation of his fathers; they shall never see light. He joins the long line of the dead who came before him, into a place where the light of the living never reaches. The self-congratulation, the praise of the crowd, the glory of the house - all of it ends at the same dark threshold, and none of it crosses over.

The psalm closes by sounding its refrain one final time - with one piercing word added: Man that is in honour, and understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish. Set it beside verse 12 and notice the difference. There the line read simply, man being in honour abideth not. Here it is man… in honour, and understandeth not. The whole tragedy is concentrated in that added phrase - understandeth not. It is not honour itself that drags a man down to the level of the perishing beasts; it is honour without understanding, glory paired with a refusal to grasp the one thing this psalm has been singing from the start. The beasts perish because they cannot understand - they live by appetite, with no thought of God or eternity. And the tragedy of the man who is in honour but understandeth not is that, for all his wealth and standing, he has lived exactly like them: by appetite, for this world, with no reckoning of the soul or its Redeemer. The difference between the two ends of this psalm - the grave that feeds, and the God who receives - is, finally, understanding. Not cleverness, not wealth, not even length of years - but the wisdom to know that no ransom of silver can buy a soul, and that God Himself will redeem the one who trusts in Him. The psalm has set the riddle before all the inhabitants of the world. Whether a person dies like the beasts or is received by God turns on whether he understood it.