Psalms 56

The psalm opens with no introduction and no composure - only a cry for mercy and a plain statement of the danger: Be merciful unto me, O God: for man would swallow me up; he fighting daily oppresseth me. The image is vivid and frightening. David's enemies are not merely opposed to him; they are ravenous, they would swallow him up, devour him whole, as a beast swallows its prey. And the threat is not a single moment of crisis but a wearing, grinding constancy: he fighting daily oppresseth me. The next verse doubles it - Mine enemies would daily swallow me up: for they be many. Day after day, with no let-up, surrounded and outnumbered. This is the situation of the psalm laid bare, and it is worth pausing over how honest it is. David does not open by reciting his faith; he opens by telling God exactly how bad things are. The cry for mercy comes first because the need is real and the fear is real. Yet even here, in the rawest line, notice where he turns: not inward to despair, not outward to a weapon, but upward - Be merciful unto me, O God. The first move of a hunted faith is to take the danger straight to God.³

The refrain that follows is one of the bravest things a frightened person ever said: What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee. In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me. Read the first phrase carefully, because everything hangs on it - what time I am afraid. David does not claim to be fearless. He does not pretend the terror is not real, or scold himself for feeling it. He simply tells the truth: there are times he is afraid. And then, having admitted the fear, he makes a choice that does not wait for the fear to pass - I will trust in thee. This is the whole secret of the psalm. Faith is not the absence of fear; it is what you do with the fear. The brave person is not the one who feels no terror but the one who, feeling it, turns and leans on God anyway. Notice too what David says he will trust: I will praise his word - he leans his weight on what God has said, on the promises and character of God, rather than on his shifting circumstances. When the situation gives him every reason to despair, he goes back to the word of God as the one fixed thing. And out of that comes the resolve: I will not fear what flesh can do unto me. The fear does not get the final say. Trust does.

David turns back to describe the enemies pressing in, and the picture is one of constant, calculated malice: Every day they wrest my words: all their thoughts are against me for evil. They gather themselves together, they hide themselves, they mark my steps, when they wait for my soul. Each phrase adds a thread to the net closing around him. They wrest his words - they twist what he says, distorting it into something it never meant, a wound anyone who has been misrepresented will recognise. All their thoughts are against me for evil - it is not occasional but total; their whole mental energy is bent toward his harm. And then the hunting language: they gather, they hide, they mark my steps, they wait for my soul. This is the vocabulary of predators stalking prey - lying in wait, tracking every movement, watching for the moment to strike at his very life. David feels watched, cornered, hunted. Then comes a sharp turn in verse 7: Shall they escape by iniquity? in thine anger cast down the people, O God. He hands the matter to God rather than seizing vengeance himself - the cry that wickedness should not simply escape, that the God who sees all should not let injustice run unchecked. It is the same instinct that runs through the Psalms: not personal revenge, but an appeal to the righteous Judge to deal with evil as only He has the right to do.

Now the psalm turns from the enemies outside to the God who is watching over David, and it gives us one of the tenderest verses in all of Scripture: Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? Three images, each more intimate than the last. First, thou tellest my wanderings - the word tellest here means countest, as a shepherd numbers his sheep. God keeps an exact count of every restless step of the fugitive's flight, every place David has fled and hidden and wandered. None of it is random to God; none of it is unseen. Second, put thou my tears into thy bottle - an image of astonishing tenderness, of which more in a moment: God gathers David's tears as precious things, not spilled and lost but collected and kept. And third, are they not in thy book? - the suffering is written down, recorded, remembered, entered in God's own book where nothing is ever lost. Put the three together and you have the great comfort of the verse: the God David trusts is not a distant power who attends only to grand events. He counts the steps, He keeps the tears, He writes it all down. Your wanderings, your weeping, your smallest sorrows - not one of them escapes His notice or slips His memory.³

David now repeats his great refrain, and the repetition is the point: In God will I praise his word: in the LORD will I praise his word. In God have I put my trust: I will not be afraid what man can do unto me. He said almost exactly this back in verses 3 and 4, and here he says it again - because the truths we most need are the ones we must preach to ourselves more than once. Faith is not a single decision made and then left behind; it is a resolve that must be renewed, especially under pressure that does not let up. Notice the slight deepening the second time around. In verse 4 he trusted in God; now he names the covenant name itself - in the LORD will I praise his word - grounding his confidence in the God who has bound Himself to His people by name. And again he returns to leaning his weight where it belongs: in God have I put my trust. The repetition shows us trust at work in real time - a man saying the same true thing to his own frightened heart until it holds. And once more he sizes up his enemies correctly: I will not be afraid what man can do unto me. Not man cannot do anything - man can do a great deal of harm. But what man can do is limited, bounded, mortal; it reaches only so far. The soul that has put its trust in God has placed the deepest part of itself beyond the reach of anything man can do.

The psalm ends where every honest prayer hopes to land - in the open air of deliverance and praise: Thy vows are upon me, O God: I will render praises unto thee. For thou hast delivered my soul from death: wilt not thou deliver my feet from falling, that I may walk before God in the light of the living? First, the vows: thy vows are upon me - David acknowledges the promises he made to God in his distress, and far from wanting to forget them now, he means to keep them: I will render praises unto thee. Then he looks back and sees what God has already done: thou hast delivered my soul from death. He speaks of rescue in the past tense even as the danger may still linger, because faith counts God's deliverance as good as accomplished. And on the strength of the past deliverance he reaches confidently into the future: wilt not thou deliver my feet from falling? - surely the God who saved me from death will keep me from stumbling now. The goal of it all is the loveliest phrase in the psalm: that I may walk before God in the light of the living. Not merely to survive, not merely to escape his enemies, but to walk before God - to live the rest of his days in God's presence, in the light, among the living. The man who began the psalm swallowed up in fear ends it walking free in the light of God's face. Nothing in his circumstances had to change for the prayer to do its work; what changed was that he handed his whole trembling self to the God who was for him - and that made all the difference.