Psalms 63

The psalm opens with a claim before it opens with a request: O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee. Before he asks for anything, David fixes the relationship - thou art my God - not a god, not the god of his fathers only, but mine, the One he belongs to and is bound to. And from that settled belonging flows the resolve: early will I seek thee. The word carries the sense of seeking at first light, at the dawn, before the day's other claims crowd in - God sought first, sought eagerly, sought as the day's first business rather than its leftover. Remember where this is being prayed. David is in the wilderness of Judah, a fugitive in a hard country, and the natural first thought of a hunted man at daybreak is his own survival: where is water, where is the enemy, where can I hide. David's first thought is God. The desert has not driven him away from God; it has stripped away every lesser comfort until the one true thirst stands clear. When everything else has been taken from you, what your soul reaches for first in the morning tells you what you actually live on.

David does not hurry past his circumstances; he names them with unflinching exactness: my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is. This is not poetic decoration. The wilderness of Judah is a real and brutal place - sun-scorched, waterless, the kind of country where a man can die of thirst within sight of the hills. And David lets the landscape do its work. The dry land outside becomes the perfect mirror of the parched soul inside. Notice, too, that it is not only his soul that thirsts but his flesh that longeth - the whole person, body and spirit together, leaning toward God. There is no division here between a “spiritual” part that wants God and a “physical” part that wants water; the entire creature David is, flesh and soul alike, strains after his Maker. This is what real spiritual hunger feels like when it is honest: not a tidy religious sentiment, but a craving as total and bodily as thirst in a desert. And the genius of the verse is that David does not ask the desert to be less dry. He lets it teach him how thirsty he already was for God.

Out of that verdict - that God's lovingkindness is better than life - comes a settled resolve for all his days: Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in thy name. Mark the reach of it: while I live. Not only in this crisis, not only until the desert is behind him, but for the whole length of his life. The praise David promises is not a mood that will pass when his fortunes improve; it is a lifelong direction, a way of facing God that he intends to keep until his last breath. And the lifting up of hands is the bodily posture of it - open hands raised toward heaven, the ancient gesture of a worshipper reaching for God, surrendering, receiving, blessing. It is worth noticing that David, who has just spoken of his thirsting flesh, now worships with his body too - lifted hands, praising lips. The whole person who longs for God in verse 1 is the whole person who blesses God in verse 4. He does not wait to feel safe to bless God; he resolves to bless Him as long as the breath is in him, desert or no desert.

The turn from thirst to feasting is sudden and total: My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips. David reaches for the richest image of plenty his world knew. Marrow and fatness is the language of a banquet - the choicest, most nourishing parts of the feast, the fat of well-fed animals that signified abundance and celebration. It is striking enough that a man in a desert speaks of a feast at all; more striking still is what he is feasting on. The soul that thirsted in verse 1 is satisfied in verse 5 - not by food, not by the desert blooming, not by his circumstances changing, but by God Himself. God is the marrow and fatness. And out of that satisfaction comes song: my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips. The thirst did not end in mere relief; it ended in joy. This is the deep pattern of the life with God - that the very longing which feels like emptiness is the appetite He means to fill, and fill so fully that the parched soul finds itself, in a wasteland, eating at a feast and singing.

And David tells us when this satisfaction comes - in the dark, in the most exposed hours: When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches. The night is when fear has its way with the hunted. Lying down in the wilderness, an enemy on his trail, David could have spent those long hours in dread, listening for footsteps, replaying his danger. Instead he fills the dark with God: he remembers Him, and he meditates on Him through the night watches - the long stretches into which the night was divided. To meditate here is to turn something over in the mind, to murmur it, to chew on it slowly - not a blank emptying of the mind but a deliberate filling of it with God. This is what feeds him at the feast of verse 5: not a single moment of insight, but the patient, repeated turning of his thoughts toward God hour after sleepless hour. There is great wisdom here for anyone who has lain awake in the dark. The night will be filled with something. David shows us how to fill it - not with the rehearsal of our fears, but with the remembrance of our God.³

The section closes with the quiet ground beneath all the joy: thy right hand upholdeth me. The right hand is, throughout Scripture, the hand of strength and of action - the place of power, the hand that saves and sustains. And the verb is gentle and constant: God's right hand upholdeth - holds up, supports, bears the weight. Set this beside the clinging of the first half of the verse and the whole picture comes clear. David is following hard after God, fastening himself to Him with all the strength of love - and yet the security of the verse does not finally rest on the strength of David's grip. It rests on God's. A man can grow tired; even the most devoted grip can weaken in a long night. But the hand that holds him does not weaken. This is the assurance the desert cannot touch: not that David is strong enough to hold on, but that the right hand which upholds him is strong enough to keep him. The soul that thirsts, that remembers in the dark, that cleaves and will not let go, is itself being held - and that is why it can rejoice.

The psalm turns at last to the enemies who have shadowed it all along: But those that seek my soul, to destroy it, shall go into the lower parts of the earth. Notice the exact reversal at work. David's soul has been followeth hard after God, lifted up in praise, satisfied as at a feast, upheld by God's right hand - rising, in every sense. His enemies, by contrast, shall go into the lower parts of the earth - downward, into the grave, into death. The very ones who sought to send David's soul down to destruction will go down themselves. There is a deep moral logic in this that runs all through Scripture: the malice aimed at the righteous has a way of recoiling on the one who launches it. David does not say he will destroy them; he does not lift a hand. He simply states what will become of those who set themselves against God's anointed and God's ways. The man whose deepest desire is God ascends; the men whose deepest desire is to destroy him descend. David leaves the outcome where it belongs - in the hands of the God he has been clinging to.

The downfall is described with stark, unsoftened imagery: They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes. To fall by the sword is to die in defeat, cut down in the violence they themselves intended. And to become a portion for foxes - or jackals, the scavengers of the wilderness - is to be left unburied on the open ground, the final dishonor in the ancient world, the body abandoned to the desert creatures rather than laid to rest. The picture is grim on purpose. The wilderness that nearly claimed David becomes the grave of those who hunted him; the same waterless land where he found God to be his feast becomes, for his enemies, the place where they fall and are consumed.³ The psalm does not gloat - it states a sober truth: those who give their lives to destroying others end as the desert's portion, while the soul that thirsts for God ends at His banquet. Two roads run through the same wilderness, and they end in opposite places.

Sit for a moment with how the whole psalm has moved - because the last verse gathers it all up. It began with a soul thirsting in a dry land; it ends with a king rejoicing in God. Nothing in David's circumstances has changed across these eleven verses. He is still in the wilderness; the enemies are still real; the crown is still far off. And yet the soul that was parched is now satisfied, the man who was hunted is now rejoicing. What changed was not his situation but his anchor - he fixed his whole thirst on God, prized God's love above life itself, clung to God through the night, and found himself upheld. The king shall rejoice in God. Not in his rescue, not in his vindication, not in the fall of his enemies - in God. That is the destination the psalm has been traveling toward all along, and it is the destination it offers to every one that sweareth by him, everyone who casts their lot with the Lord and trusts His name. The liars will be silenced; the scavengers will have their portion; but those whose deepest joy is God Himself will glory - will share, somehow, in the very gladness of their King. The thirst of verse 1 was never a curse. It was the beginning of the road to this joy.