Psalms 55

The psalm opens with a prayer that has given up on being dignified. Give ear to my prayer, O God; and hide not thyself from my supplication. Attend unto me, and hear me: I mourn in my complaint, and make a noise. That last phrase is striking - I make a noise. This is not the measured language of a man in control of himself; it is groaning, restlessness, the inarticulate sound of someone in real pain. And David does not apologize for it or clean it up before bringing it to God. He simply asks God not to hide - the deepest fear of the suffering heart is not the trouble itself but the silence of heaven on top of it. Notice the freedom in this. We often imagine we must compose ourselves before we pray, arrange our feelings into something presentable, wait until we can speak calmly. The psalm does the opposite. It brings the noise itself to God - the groan, the complaint, the mess - and trusts that He gives ear to exactly that. The God of the Psalms is not embarrassed by His people's raw cries; He bends down to hear them.³

Then David describes the inner experience of dread with a candor that is almost clinical: My heart is sore pained within me: and the terrors of death are fallen upon me. Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me. Read the words slowly and you can feel each one - the sore pained heart, the terrors of death falling like a weight, the fearfulness and trembling in the body, and finally horror washing over him like a wave that hath overwhelmed him entirely. This is panic named honestly, and it matters enormously that it sits here in Scripture, in the prayer book of God's people. The Bible does not present faith as the absence of fear, or treat the believer who trembles as having failed. Here is a man after God's own heart, drowning in dread, and his trembling is not edited out of the inspired record. If you have ever felt the physical grip of terror - the racing heart, the trembling hands, the sense of being swallowed - this verse tells you that you are not outside the experience of the faithful, and not outside the reach of this prayer. David felt it too, and he prayed straight through it.

David turns from his own heart to the city around him, and what he sees is a society coming apart at the seams: Destroy, O Lord, and divide their tongues: for I have seen violence and strife in the city. Day and night they go about it upon the walls thereof: mischief also and sorrow are in the midst of it. Wickedness is in the midst thereof: deceit and guile depart not from her streets. His prayer to divide their tongues deliberately echoes Babel, where God confused the language of the proud and scattered them (Gen. 11:7-9). David asks God to do to this conspiracy of evil what He once did to that one - to break its unity, to confound the plotters so their schemes collapse. And look at how he portrays the city: violence and strife patrol the walls like sentries, day and night; mischief, sorrow, wickedness, deceit and guile have taken up permanent residence and depart not from the streets. It is the picture of a place where corruption has become the very air people breathe. The honesty here is bracing. The psalm does not pretend the world is better than it is; it looks hard at entrenched evil and names it. And it does the one right thing a believer can do in the face of organized wickedness too big to fix - it takes the whole rotten scene to God in prayer, rather than either ignoring it or trying to answer violence with violence.

Now the psalm reaches its true wound, and the writing slows down to dwell on it: For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him. David is doing something we all do when we are hurt - he is reckoning with what he could have endured. An enemy's attack he could have borne. A known hater's contempt he could have hidden from. There is a kind of pain we are braced for: we expect our enemies to wound us, and we have defenses ready. But there is another kind of pain that gets past every defense precisely because it comes from the one place we never armored - from someone we trusted, someone we loved, someone we never thought to guard against. David is saying: I could have survived an enemy. What is killing me is that it was not an enemy. The blow landed from inside the circle of trust, and that is why it has gone so deep. Anyone who has been betrayed by a friend, a spouse, a confidant, knows the exact arithmetic of these verses - the wounds we cannot brace for are the ones delivered by the people we let close.

Verse 15 is hard, and it should not be smoothed over: Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell: for wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them. This is one of the psalms' imprecations - a cry for God to bring judgment on the wicked. The phrase go down quick into hell means go down alive into the grave, and it deliberately recalls the rebellion of Korah, when the earth opened and the rebels went down alive into the pit (Num. 16:30-33). David is asking God to deal with entrenched, treacherous evil as decisively as He once did. It is important to see what this prayer is and is not. It is not David taking vengeance into his own hands; it is the opposite - he hands the matter entirely to God, refusing to repay betrayal with betrayal, and asks the righteous Judge to do what only He has the right to do. The cry for justice against evil is not, in itself, ungodly; the longing that wickedness not have the last word runs all through Scripture, up to the martyrs under the altar crying How long, O Lord? (Rev. 6:10). Yet the psalm is also not the final word. The same kind of betrayal that David suffered, the Lord Jesus suffered - and from the cross He prayed, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34). The believer holds both: the honest cry that God would judge what is evil, and the call, in Christ, to leave vengeance to God (Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord, Rom. 12:19) and to bless rather than curse. David brings the raw cry to God. Christ shows where, in the end, that road is meant to lead.

Against the panic of the first movement and the betrayal of the second, the psalm now plants its feet: As for me, I will call upon God; and the LORD shall save me. Evening, and morning, and at noon, will I pray, and cry aloud: and he shall hear my voice. Hear the deliberate turn in As for me. Whatever the wicked do, whatever the betrayer has done - as for me, here is my course: I will pray. And notice that David, who longed in verse 6 to fly away, now does the very opposite. He does not escape; he stays, and he prays, and he sets a rhythm to it: evening, and morning, and at noon. Three fixed times a day he will bring his crisis to God - not a single desperate cry and then silence, but a steady, repeated turning Godward that frames the whole day. This is one of the wisest things the psalm teaches. In a long trouble, feelings will not carry you; a single burst of prayer will not hold. What holds is a rhythm - a returning to God again and again, morning and noon and night, whether or not the crisis has changed. David anchors himself not in his mood but in the discipline of prayer, and on the confident certainty that closes the verse: he shall hear my voice. The God who would not hide (v. 1) does hear; and the praying man, however shaken, is not abandoned.

The psalm circles back one last time to the betrayer, and the portrait it paints is unforgettable in its picture of two-facedness: He hath put forth his hands against such as be at peace with him: he hath broken his covenant. The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart: his words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords. Look at the awful contrast in each line - the mouth and the heart pulling in opposite directions. The words were smoother than butter, the speech softer than oil; everything on the surface was warm, kind, reassuring. But underneath, war was in his heart, and the soft words were drawn swords. This is the special cruelty of the false friend: the betrayal is dressed in the language of love right up to the moment it strikes. He put forth his hands against such as be at peace with him - he attacked the very people who held no quarrel with him - and broke his covenant, violating the bond of trust itself. The psalm refuses to let us imagine betrayal as something honest or open. It names the hypocrisy at its heart: the smiling face over the warring heart, the gentle voice concealing the drawn sword. And the only safe response to a world that contains such people is the one the very next verse will give - not endless suspicion, but a burden cast on a God who cannot be deceived and will not be moved.

The psalm ends by setting the two destinies side by side and then planting itself firmly on one of them: But thou, O God, shalt bring them down into the pit of destruction: bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days; but I will trust in thee. First, the end of the treacherous: the bloody and deceitful men - the violent and the two-faced - will not flourish forever; their schemes will not carry them through; God will deal with them in His justice. David leaves their fate where it belongs, in God's hands, not his own. And then, in the final four words of the psalm, everything resolves: but I will trust in thee. After all the trembling, the longing to escape, the bitterness of betrayal, the cry against the wicked - the psalm comes to rest not on a change in David's circumstances (nothing in the situation has visibly improved) but on a settled decision of David's will. But I will trust. It is the same posture the psalm has been moving toward from the start: not the absence of trouble, but trust held steady in the middle of it. The man who opened the psalm making a noise in his distress closes it with the quietest and strongest sentence he could speak. The burden has been cast. The matter is left with God. And whatever comes, the resolve stands: I will trust in thee.