Psalms 60

The prayer begins with a complaint addressed straight to God, and it pulls no punches: O God, thou hast cast us off, thou hast scattered us, thou hast been displeased. Read how the verbs all land on God Himself. It is not we were defeated or the enemy was strong; it is thou hast cast us off, thou hast scattered us. This is one of the most striking features of biblical lament - the sufferers do not hold God at arm's length from their pain, blaming chance or fate or merely the enemy. They lay the whole disaster before Him directly, in the second person, because they will not pretend He is anything less than King over all that happens. And notice that this honesty is not the end of faith but a form of it. Only a people who truly believe God reigns would dare to address their calamity to Him. A smaller god could simply be excused - the loss was outside his control. The God of Israel is given no such excuse, and so the complaint becomes a plea: O turn thyself to us again. The same hand they feel has turned away is the only hand that can turn back. They are not informing the empty air that they have been wronged; they are asking the God who has, it seems, withdrawn, to come back to them.³

The image in verse 3 is unforgettable: Thou hast shewed thy people hard things: thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment. The wine of astonishment is the cup of reeling - a draught so strong it leaves the drinker staggering, unsteady on his feet, the ground itself seeming to lurch. It is the same picture verse 2 has already drawn: Thou hast made the earth to tremble; thou hast broken it… for it shaketh. Defeat has not merely cost them a battle; it has knocked the world off its footing, left a whole people stunned and stumbling as though drunk on grief. And they say plainly where the cup came from: God made us to drink it. Yet even here, in the bitterest line, there is a thread of hope hidden in the verbs of verse 2. They do not only say thou hast broken it; they pray heal the breaches thereof. The same God who is named as the breaker is appealed to as the healer. A people staggering under the wine of astonishment still know the only One who can steady the ground beneath them - and they ask Him to mend what has been torn open.

Everything in the psalm changes at verse 6, and it changes because of four words: God hath spoken in his holiness. Up to this point the prayer has been all wound and plea - cast off, scattered, staggering, begging God to turn back. Now a new note sounds, and it is the note of certainty. God has spoken. And what God speaks from His holiness cannot fail; it is as fixed and sure as His own character. So the very next words are not more lament but rejoicing: I will rejoice. Nothing in the outward situation has yet changed - the borders are still bleeding, the defeat is still fresh - but the king has remembered that God has given His word, and on the strength of that word alone he can already begin to rejoice. This is the hinge the whole psalm swings on, and it is the hinge faith always swings on: not the sight of the victory but the certainty of the promise. The believer's confidence does not rest on how the battle currently looks. It rests on what God has said. And because God has spoken in His holiness, the king can speak of the future as though it were already done.³

Having named the tribes of his own people as his possession by God's gift - Gilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine; Ephraim also is the strength of mine head - the king turns to the surrounding nations that had loomed so large, and cuts them down to size with three vivid images. Moab is my washpot - Moab, the proud neighbour, reduced to a basin for washing the feet, the most menial vessel in the house. Over Edom will I cast out my shoe - to fling one's sandal onto a piece of ground was a gesture of taking possession, the way an owner claims his land; Edom, the bitter rival, becomes mere property staked out by a tossed shoe. And Philistia, triumph thou because of me - the old enemy is summoned, not to celebrate its own victory, but to acknowledge the king's. The point of all three is the same, and it follows directly from the oracle of verse 6. Because God hath spoken in his holiness, the nations that terrified a scattered people are no longer the measure of anything. The God who gives the land also rules the neighbours; the powers that seemed so towering from the dust of defeat are, from the vantage of God's promise, a washbasin and a plot of ground. This is not arrogance; it is faith doing the math correctly. When God has spoken, the enemy shrinks to its true size.

The psalm circles back to the hard ground it started on, and it does so with two honest questions: Who will bring me into the strong city? who will lead me into Edom? The strong city is the fortified stronghold, the objective that lies behind enemy walls - and the king openly admits he does not see how he will get there. It is a striking thing to find right after the soaring confidence of verses 6-8. He has just rejoiced in God's promise and divided up the land in his mind - and now he asks, plainly, but who will actually get me in? This is faith being honest, not faith failing. The promise is sure; the path to it is not yet clear. And the king does not pretend otherwise. Then he answers his own question by turning it into a prayer, and he does it without flinching from the very wound he named at the start: Wilt not thou, O God, which hadst cast us off? and thou, O God, which didst not go out with our armies? He looks to the only One who can lead him into the strong city - and it is the same God he has just accused of casting them off and staying home from the battle. There is no other helper to turn to. The God who seemed to withdraw is the God he must still ask, because there is simply no one else who can do it.

Verse 11 lands the lesson the whole psalm has been driving toward, and it lands it in five plain words: vain is the help of man. This is the truth defeat is meant to teach, and it is a truth a people only ever seem to learn through loss. When the battle was going well, it was easy to trust the bow, the army, the alliance, the strategy - easy to quietly believe that human strength was enough. But the scattering of verse 1 has burned that confidence away. Now the king sees clearly what was always true: the help of man, however impressive, is finally vain - empty when the weight comes to rest on it. This is not a counsel of despair, and it is not contempt for human effort; the king will still ride out, still fight, still lead his armies. It is rather the relocating of confidence. Trust does not sit in the soldier or the sword anymore; it sits in God. And there is a strange mercy hidden in a defeat that teaches this. To discover the vanity of human help is painful - but it is the doorway to the only help that does not fail. A people who have learned that man's help is vain are exactly the people ready to say what comes next.³