Psalms 57
Psalm 573 comes to us with a story attached. Its title sets the scene: David sang it when he fled from Saul in the cave - one of those desperate stretches when the anointed-but-not-yet-crowned shepherd was hunted through the wilderness by a jealous king, hiding in the darkness of a cave with an army on his trail. And yet this is not a psalm of despair. It opens with a plea so urgent it says the same thing twice - Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me - and then names, in one of the tenderest images in all of Scripture, exactly where a hunted soul finds safety: for my soul trusteth in thee: yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast. The cave was real shelter from Saul's spears; but David knows his true hiding place is not the rock around him, but the God above him.
The danger is not minimized. David describes his enemies with vivid, frightening honesty: My soul is among lions: and I lie even among them that are set on fire, even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword.3 He is lying down to rest in a den of predators, surrounded by men whose words wound like weapons. And right in the middle of that fear, the psalm does something startling - it stops crying about the lions and lifts its eyes clean above them: Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens; let thy glory be above all the earth. It is the first sounding of a refrain that will close the whole psalm. David's deepest desire, even in the cave, is not merely his own rescue but the exaltation of his God over heaven and earth.
And then the psalm turns fully into song. From a trap his enemies have set - they have prepared a net for my steps… they have digged a pit before me - into which they themselves fall, David rises to one of the great declarations of settled faith in the Psalter: My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise. Awake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp: I myself will awake early. He summons his whole self and his instruments to wake before the dawn and worship. And the praise refuses to be contained: I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people: I will sing unto thee among the nations. The man who began trembling in the dark ends by promising a song that will reach the ends of the earth - and seals it with the refrain once more: Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens: let thy glory be above all the earth.
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.

Psalm 57:1-3 · To the chief Musician, Altaschith, Michtam of David, when he fled from Saul in the caveIn the Shadow of Thy Wings
1Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me: for my soul trusteth in thee: yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast. 2I will cry unto God most high; unto God that performeth all things for me. 3He shall send from heaven, and save me from the reproach of him that would swallow me up. Selah. God shall send forth his mercy and his truth.
The psalm opens the way a drowning man calls for help - not once, but twice in a single breath: Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me. The repetition is not careless; it is the sound of real urgency, the cry doubled because the need is so great. And notice what David appeals to. He does not say “be merciful, for I deserve it” or “for my cause is just” - though hunted unjustly, he could have. He says, for my soul trusteth in thee. His whole plea rests on the fact that he has thrown himself upon God; his confidence is in God's mercy, not in his own merit. Then comes the image that gives the psalm its heart: in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast. A man hiding in a cave from a king's army reaches past the rock walls around him to a deeper shelter - the wings of God. And mark the small, hope-filled word until. He does not pretend the trouble is gone; he calls it what it is, calamities. But he believes they will pass, and that the shadow of God's wings is a place safe enough to wait out the storm.3
David is sure that heaven itself will move on his behalf: He shall send from heaven, and save me from the reproach of him that would swallow me up. His enemy is pictured as a beast about to swallow him whole - but David expects rescue to come down from above, from a higher place than any earthly threat can reach. And then the verse closes with a beautiful pairing: God shall send forth his mercy and his truth. These two travel together all through Scripture - mercy (His covenant love, His steadfast kindness) and truth (His faithfulness, His reliability to do what He has said). David does not merely hope for rescue in the abstract; he expects God to send forth the very qualities that make Him trustworthy. It is as if mercy and truth were two messengers dispatched from heaven to find a hunted man in a cave and bring him home. When you cannot see a way out, this is what faith reaches for - not a change in the circumstances first, but the steady character of God sent forth into them: His love that will not quit, and His faithfulness that cannot fail.
Psalm 57:4-6My Soul Is Among Lions
4My soul is among lions: and I lie even among them that are set on fire, even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword. 5Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens; let thy glory be above all the earth. 6They have prepared a net for my steps; my soul is bowed down: they have digged a pit before me, into the midst whereof they are fallen themselves. Selah.
David now turns to describe what surrounds him, and he holds nothing back: My soul is among lions: and I lie even among them that are set on fire, even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword. The picture is harrowing. He is not merely near danger; he must lie down - rest, sleep, be at his most defenseless - in the middle of a pride of lions. His enemies are set on fire, burning with hostility; and their weapons are their words. Their teeth are spears and arrows, their tongue a sharp sword. It is a striking detail that the danger David dwells on is not chiefly swords of steel but the violence of speech - the slander, the threats, the cutting words of men inflamed against him. Anyone who has lain awake replaying what others have said about them knows how real these wounds are. Yet see what David does not do. He does not answer the lions in their own language. He names the danger honestly to God - and then, in the very next breath, he stops looking at the lions altogether and looks up.
After the great refrain of verse 5, David returns briefly to his enemies' schemes - and records a striking reversal: They have prepared a net for my steps; my soul is bowed down: they have digged a pit before me, into the midst whereof they are fallen themselves. His foes have laid traps. They have spread a net to catch his feet and dug a concealed pit for him to tumble into - the patient, deliberate work of men plotting another's ruin. And under the weight of it, David admits, my soul is bowed down; the pressure is real, and he feels it. But then comes the turn that runs all through Scripture: the pit they dug for him becomes the grave they fall into themselves. Into the midst whereof they are fallen themselves. This is the deep moral logic of God's world - that malice has a way of recoiling on the one who launches it, that he that diggeth a pit shall fall into it (Eccl. 10:8). David does not have to spring the trap on his enemies; he simply trusts the God who governs such things to let evil collapse under its own weight. The Selah that follows invites a pause - to sit with the wonder that the schemes which once loomed so large have quietly undone their own makers.3
Psalm 57:7-11My Heart Is Fixed
7My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise. 8Awake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp: I myself will awake early. 9I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people: I will sing unto thee among the nations. 10For thy mercy is great unto the heavens, and thy truth unto the clouds. 11Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens: let thy glory be above all the earth.
Now the whole psalm blossoms into song, and it begins with a declaration repeated for emphasis, the way the plea was doubled at the start: My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise. At the opening David cried be merciful twice; now he says my heart is fixed twice - and the matching repetitions frame the journey of the psalm, from doubled plea to doubled resolve. A fixed heart is not a heart that feels no fear; it is a heart that has been settled, anchored, made steady, so that the fear cannot tear it loose from God. And out of that settledness comes music: I will sing and give praise. Then David rouses his whole being for worship: Awake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp: I myself will awake early. He calls his “glory” - his soul, his innermost self - to wake up, summons his instruments to join, and resolves to greet the dawn with praise. Picture it: a man in a cave, danger still outside, rising before sunrise to play and sing. This is the triumph of the psalm. The fixed heart does not wait for the lions to leave before it worships; it worships in the dark, and so meets the morning already singing.
Why can the hunted heart be so steady and so full of song? David gives the reason in a single soaring verse: For thy mercy is great unto the heavens, and thy truth unto the clouds. Here again are the two great companions from verse 3 - mercy and truth - but now measured against the sky. God's steadfast love reaches unto the heavens; His faithfulness towers unto the clouds. The picture is of qualities too vast to be exhausted, too high to be overtopped by any trouble below. However tall the lions loom, God's mercy is taller; whatever depths the pit descends to, His truth rises higher than the clouds. This is the ground of the fixed heart. David does not say his heart is steady because he is brave or because his situation is improving; he says it because thy mercy is great unto the heavens. The settledness rests entirely on the size of God's love and the height of His faithfulness. And it is fitting that this verse stands just before the final refrain, for a heart that has measured God's mercy against the heavens cannot help but cry the next words: Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens. The One whose mercy reaches the heavens deserves to be exalted above them.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Psalm 57 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for chasah (v. 1, “make my refuge,” to flee for shelter), for kanaph (v. 1, the “wings” in whose shadow he hides), and for kun (v. 7, the “fixed,” established heart).
- Psalm 57 ↔ Matthew 23 · Philippians 2 · Romans 15Intertextual BibleTraces the verbal threads tying Psalm 57's shelter in the shadow of thy wings (v. 1) to the gathering wings of Matthew 23:37, its refrain Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens (vv. 5, 11) to the exaltation of Christ (Phil. 2:9; Eph. 4:10), and its I will sing unto thee among the nations (v. 9) to praise among the Gentiles (Rom. 15:9).
- Psalm 57 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Psalm 57 - the superscription Altaschith (“destroy not”) and the cave setting, the lion imagery and “set on fire” of verse 4, the net-and-pit reversal of verse 6, and the “fixed” heart of verse 7.
Where this echoes in Scripture
In the Shadow of Thy Wings
- Matthew 23:37How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!The shadow of the wings of verse 1 - the gathering, sheltering love of God come near in Christ.
- Psalm 36:7Therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of thy wings.The same refuge-image and the same verb (chasah) - the children of men sheltering under God’s wings.
- Ruth 2:12A full reward be given thee of the LORD God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust.To come <em>under His wings</em> (v. 1) - the language of taking refuge in the God of Israel.
- Psalm 91:4He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.The wings as refuge, and the <em>mercy and truth</em> of verse 3 - His truth a shield to the one who hides in Him.
My Soul Is Among Lions
- Philippians 2:9-10God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow.The cry <em>Be thou exalted</em> (v. 5) answered - God lifting the risen Christ to the highest place.
- Ephesians 4:10He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.Exalted <em>above the heavens</em> (v. 5) - the One who descended low now ascended far above all heavens.
- Ecclesiastes 10:8He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it; and whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent shall bite him.The reversal of verse 6 - the trap-digger falling into his own pit, malice recoiling on its maker.
- 1 Peter 5:8Your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.The lions among whom David lies (v. 4) - the predatory enemy the believer still faces, and is kept from.
My Heart Is Fixed
- Romans 15:9For this cause I will confess to thee among the Gentiles, and sing unto thy name.The song <em>among the nations</em> (v. 9) - praise of God rising among the Gentiles through Christ.
- Psalm 112:7He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed, trusting in the LORD.The fixed (kun) heart of verse 7 - the steady heart that meets bad news unafraid.
- Acts 16:25And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them.The fixed heart that sings in the dark (vv. 7-8) - praise rising from a prison at midnight.
- Revelation 7:9A great multitude... of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne.The song among the nations (v. 9) brought to its end - every nation gathered before the throne.