Psalms 62

The psalm opens not with a request but with a settled report of where the soul already is: Truly my soul waiteth upon God: from him cometh my salvation. The very first word - truly - sets the tone; this is not a tentative hope but a fixed conviction, a man speaking from solid ground. And the posture is striking: his soul waiteth. Not frantically working, not casting about for help, but waiting - the active, trusting stillness of someone who has decided that the help he needs will come from God and from God alone, and so is content to be quiet until it does. We tend to think of waiting as the hardest, most passive thing - the thing we do when there is nothing else to be done. David turns it into the strongest thing. To wait on God is not to do nothing; it is to refuse every false rescue and rest the whole weight of the soul on the only One who can truly save. From him cometh my salvation - the word means rescue, deliverance, safety; and the point is the direction. It comes from him. Not up from David's own resourcefulness, not in from a powerful ally, but down from God. That single conviction is what lets a hunted man be still.

David gathers up his confidence into three short images, each one a picture of stability: He only is my rock and my salvation; he is my defence; I shall not be greatly moved. God is his rock - the high, immovable crag that does not shift underfoot; his salvation - the rescue that actually delivers; and his defence - the secure height, the stronghold lifted above the reach of the enemy. And from those three he draws one conclusion: I shall not be greatly moved. Note the honesty of that word greatly. David does not claim he will never feel the tremor, never be shaken at all in this first telling; he claims he will not be greatly moved - not toppled, not overthrown, not knocked off his foundation. A man on the rock may feel the wind; he will not be blown away. There is realism here that makes the confidence trustworthy. Faith does not pretend the storm is not blowing; it insists that the rock will hold. And it is the same word - only - doing the quiet work again: he only is my rock. Not God plus my own cleverness, not God plus a powerful friend - God, and nothing else, is the rock. Everything else David might have leaned on, he has set aside, and found that the One who remains is enough.

Having confessed his rock, David turns to look squarely at his enemies - and the contrast could not be sharper. How long will ye imagine mischief against a man? ye shall be slain all of you: as a bowing wall shall ye be, and as a tottering fence. He pictures the men plotting against him as a bowing wall and a tottering fence - a wall that has begun to bulge and lean, a fence already swaying, both on the very edge of collapse. It is a brilliant reversal. They imagine they are the threat that will bring David down; David sees that they are the thing about to fall. The very people scheming to topple him from his place are themselves toppling. And there is a steadying truth buried in the picture: those who set themselves against God's purposes are never as solid as they look. From the ground, opposition can seem like an immovable wall; seen rightly, it is a wall already cracking, propped up for a moment and destined to come down. David does not have to push the wall over; he simply has to stand on the rock and watch the leaning fence do what leaning fences do. Verse 4 fills in why their fall is just: they only consult to cast him down… they delight in lies… they bless with their mouth, but they curse inwardly. Their whole energy goes into scheming; their words and their hearts run in opposite directions. A life built on lies and a divided heart is, in the end, a tottering fence - and it cannot stand against a man whose foundation is the Rock.³

Something quietly remarkable happens in verse 5. Up to now David has been telling us what his soul does - my soul waiteth upon God. Now he turns and speaks to his own soul: My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him. He preaches to himself. He takes the truth he confessed at the start and presses it back onto his own heart as a command. This is one of the most important habits in the spiritual life, and the Psalms are full of it - the believer learning to talk to himself rather than only listen to himself. Left to itself, the heart drifts toward worry, replays the threat, rehearses the what-ifs. David does not let his soul run that course unchecked. He interrupts it: wait thou only upon God. And notice the word that returns - only. Not wait on God among your other options, but wait thou only. He commands his soul to do the very narrowing the whole psalm is about. Then he gives the reason: for my expectation is from him. The word means hope - that forward-leaning, expectant trust that watches for God to act. David is telling his soul where to look. Not at the leaning wall of his enemies, not at his own thinning resources, but at God, from whom alone his hope comes. When your own heart starts to spiral, this is the discipline: stop listening to its fears, and start preaching it the truth.

The refrain returns in verse 6, almost identical to verse 2 - He only is my rock and my salvation: he is my defence - but with one small, telling change. The first time, David said I shall not be greatly moved. Now he simply says I shall not be moved. The word greatly has fallen away. It is as though, in the act of preaching the truth back to his own soul, his confidence has grown firmer. The same God, the same rock - but a steadier grip. That is often how faith works: we say the truth, and in the saying of it the truth takes deeper hold, until the tremor we once admitted to has quieted into something more settled. Then verse 7 piles up the names of God like a man heaping stones on a sure foundation: In God is my salvation and my glory: the rock of my strength, and my refuge, is in God. Four times in one breath the confidence is anchored in God - salvation, glory, strength, refuge, all of it in God. Notice especially my glory. David was a king; he had honor, standing, a name. But he locates his real glory not in his throne or his reputation but in God - the only honor that cannot be plotted away by scheming men. And my refuge - the place he runs to and is safe. The whole verse is a man saying, in every way he can find words for, that everything which makes his life secure and weighty and worth having is found in one place: in God.

Out of his own settled trust, David turns and throws the door open to everyone else: Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us. It is one of the warmest invitations in the whole Psalter, and every phrase of it is worth lingering over. Trust in him - the same resting confidence David has modeled. At all times - not only in the crisis, not only when the wall is leaning, but in every season, the calm as well as the storm; trust is to be the steady background music of a life, not an emergency measure. Ye people - he widens it past himself to all who will listen; what he has found is not a private privilege but an open door. And then the tender heart of it: pour out your heart before him. The picture is of emptying a vessel completely, turning the heart upside down and letting all of it run out before God - the fear, the grief, the anger, the confusion, the things too raw to say to anyone else. God does not ask for an edited heart, a tidied-up version of ourselves brought to Him in our best clothes. He invites the whole unfiltered contents. We are often more honest with a friend, or with no one, than we are with God - as if He could not bear the real state of us. David says the opposite: pour it all out, because God is a refuge for us - a safe place, a shelter, the One before whom you can finally stop pretending. The Selah that closes the verse invites a pause - to actually do it.

Having staked everything on God, David now weighs the alternatives men trust - and finds them weightless. Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie: to be laid in the balance, they are altogether lighter than vanity. The image is a set of scales. Put humanity in the balance - both the obscure and the eminent, the nobody and the somebody - and what is the verdict? Lighter than vanity. The Hebrew word behind vanity means a breath, a vapor, a puff of air that is here and gone - the same word that opens Ecclesiastes, vanity of vanities. And David says men are lighter even than that - lighter than a breath. It is a startling leveler. We instinctively rank people: the men of low degree we tend to overlook, the men of high degree we tend to fear or court or envy. David sets them both on the scale and watches the needle barely move. This is not contempt for human beings; it is a clear-eyed measure of where real weight is found. To put your trust in any mere human - whether the powerless who cannot help you or the powerful who could crush you - is to lean your whole weight on a breath. The mighty enemy scheming against David, who looms so large from the ground? Laid in the balance against God, lighter than air. And so is every human power we are tempted to fear more than we fear God, or to trust more than we trust Him.³

From the emptiness of trusting people, David turns to the emptiness of trusting possessions: Trust not in oppression, and become not vain in robbery: if riches increase, set not your heart upon them. He warns first against wealth gotten by wrong - oppression and robbery, riches squeezed out of others - and against the puffed-up emptiness (become not vain) that such gain breeds. But then comes the line that searches even the honest: if riches increase, set not your heart upon them. Notice how careful and gracious this is. David does not say riches are evil, or that they will never come; he allows that they may well increase. The danger he names is not having wealth but setting the heart upon it - letting the affections sink their roots into it, letting it quietly become the thing you really trust, the rock beneath the rock. Money makes a treacherous foundation precisely because it can grow without a sound, and the heart can attach itself to it without ever deciding to. One day you simply notice that your sense of safety rises and falls with a number. David's counsel is surgical: let riches do whatever they do - increase or not - but do not give them your heart. The heart belongs on the Rock. Anything else, however much it grows, is just more weight piled on a breath.³