Psalms 6

The psalm does not open where we might expect - with the enemies, or the sickness, or the long sleepless nights. It opens with God, and with a fear about God: O LORD, rebuke me not in thine anger, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure. Underneath all the suffering that is about to be described lies a deeper dread - the worry that the pain itself means God has turned against him.

But notice carefully what the prayer actually asks. It does not ask God to stop correcting him; it asks Him not to do it in anger. The words rebuke and chasten are the language of a father with a son (the same root the writer of Hebrews would later use: whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, Heb. 12:6) - and a son under his father's discipline does not beg to be disowned; he begs the correction to come gently, mixed with mercy and not with wrath.

So the very first breath of this psalm is not despair but a kind of stubborn hope: it speaks to God as one who can still be appealed to, who corrects those He loves, and whose anger a weak man may plead to have tempered.

The plea sharpens: Return, O LORD, deliver my soul: oh save me for thy mercies' sake. The word return is striking. It speaks as though God had withdrawn, turned away, left the room - and the sufferer is begging Him to come back. This is the language of felt absence, not of settled doctrine; the psalmist is not making a claim about where God actually is, but describing the awful sense that He is far off.

And notice the ground he stands on when he asks to be saved: not his own goodness, but thy mercies' sake. The Hebrew word is chesed - God's steadfast, covenant-keeping love, the loyal kindness He has bound Himself to show His own. The sufferer has run out of every other argument. He cannot appeal to his strength, for he is weak; he cannot appeal to his record, for he fears God's rebuke. So he appeals to the one thing that never fails: the unwavering love of God Himself.

Save me, he says - not because of what I am, but because of what You are.

Now the psalm reaches its lowest, most unguarded point, and it does not flinch from the picture: I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears. This is grief without composure - a man so spent with weeping that, in the language of poetry, the bed itself is flooded and the couch awash. The word weary means worn out, exhausted to the bone; even the groaning has become labor.

And then the body keeps its own tally: mine eye is consumed because of grief; it waxeth old because of all mine enemies. The eyes, swollen and dimmed from crying, have aged as though years had passed in a few nights.

What is remarkable is not that the psalm describes such suffering, but that it leaves it in the prayer - unedited, undignified, held up to God exactly as it is. There is no attempt here to sound brave. The tears are simply poured out before the One who is trusted to see them.

With no transition, no report that the sickness has lifted or the night has ended, the psalm turns - and the turn is total. The voice that a moment ago could only ask how long? now speaks with sudden authority: Depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity; for the LORD hath heard the voice of my weeping. What changed? Not the circumstances. The prayer. Three times over, like a man steadying himself on a rail, he names the one fact he is now sure of: the LORD hath heard the voice of his weeping; the LORD hath heard his supplication; the LORD will receive his prayer.

The very tears of verse 6 - which might have seemed like proof that God was far off - turn out to have been heard all along. This is the deep logic of the whole psalm: being heard is not the same as being instantly relieved. The pain may still be present; the answer to how long? may still be hidden. But the sufferer now knows he was never praying into an empty silence. He was heard. And from that one certainty, everything steadies.