Psalms 69
Psalm 69 opens with a man whose head is going under water: Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing. It is one of the most desperate openings in the Psalter - not the language of someone facing a setback, but of someone who feels the flood closing over his mouth, who has cried until his throat is dried and his eyes fail while he waits for his God (v. 3). The enemies are real and many; they hate me without a cause (v. 4), and the singer is worn down by the sheer weight of being despised. What makes the psalm extraordinary is that this drowning man keeps praying - and that the words he prays would one day be heard on the lips of Another.3
The psalm is unusually honest. The singer does not claim to be spotless: O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee (v. 5). He knows exactly what he is. And yet the suffering he describes is not the just penalty of his foolishness; it is reproach he carries for thy sake - because for thy sake I have borne reproach; shame hath covered my face (v. 7). His trouble flows from his devotion to God, from a zeal for God's house that has made him a stranger even to his own brothers (vv. 8-9). He is talked about by those who sit in the gate and made the song of the drunkards (v. 12). This is the particular ache of the psalm: to suffer not in spite of loving God but because of it.
More than almost any other psalm except the twenty-second, Psalm 69 is woven through the account of Jesus. The disciples remembered the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up when He drove the traders from the temple (John 2:17); Jesus quoted they hated me without a cause over His own rejection (John 15:25); Paul read its borne reproaches as the very pattern of Christ (Rom. 15:3); and at the cross, in His thirst, they gave Him vinegar to drink, that the scripture might be fulfilled (John 19:28-29). The psalm even furnishes the words for the betrayer's empty place (Acts 1:20). But it does not leave us in the flood. It climbs, at the last, out of the mire and into a song - I will praise the name of God - and ends with God saving Zion and a people who love His name coming home to dwell.
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Psalm 69:1-12 · To the chief Musician upon Shoshannim, A Psalm of DavidThe Reproach I Bear for Thy Sake
1Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. 2I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. 3I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God. 4They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of mine head: they that would destroy me, being mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty: then I restored that which I took not away. 5O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee. 6Let not them that wait on thee, O Lord GOD of hosts, be ashamed for my sake: let not those that seek thee be confounded for my sake, O God of Israel. 7Because for thy sake I have borne reproach; shame hath covered my face. 8I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother's children. 9For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up; and the reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me. 10When I wept, and chastened my soul with fasting, that was to my reproach. 11I made sackcloth also my garment; and I became a proverb to them. 12They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song of the drunkards.
The psalm does not warm up; it begins already drowning. Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing. Two images are braided together, and both are pictures of helplessness. There is the flood - water rising past the chest, past the chin, into the soul itself - and there is the mire, the deep mud at the bottom where a foot finds nothing solid and every struggle only sinks you further. This is what overwhelming trouble feels like from the inside: not a problem to be managed but a weight that is closing over your head. And the singer has been at it long enough to be exhausted by his own praying: I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God. He has shouted until his voice is gone and strained his eyes looking for help that has not yet come. Notice, though, what he is still doing even at the end of his strength: he is waiting for my God. The crying has worn him out, but it has not stopped. He prays from the bottom of the well, with no floor under him, because there is nowhere else to direct the cry.
In the middle of protesting his innocence, the singer says something startlingly honest: O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee (v. 5). He does not pretend to be flawless before God. He knows he is a sinner, and he says so plainly - his folly is not hidden from the One who sees everything. This honesty matters, because the rest of the psalm insists that his present suffering is undeserved: he is hated without a cause, bearing reproach for thy sake. Both things are true at once. He is a flawed man, and the abuse heaped on him is unjust. He does not use his sins as an excuse for his enemies, nor does he claim a purity he does not have to justify himself. He simply lays it all open before God and trusts God to sort the true from the false. And it is exactly here that the psalm begins to strain beyond its author. For the words of innocent suffering, of reproach borne for God's sake, of zeal that consumes - words that fit David only partly, the sinner that he was - would one day be spoken by One in whom no fault could be found at all, who bore reproaches that were never His own.
Psalm 69:13-21They Gave Me Vinegar to Drink
13But as for me, my prayer is unto thee, O LORD, in an acceptable time: O God, in the multitude of thy mercy hear me, in the truth of thy salvation. 14Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink: let me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters. 15Let not the waterflood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me. 16Hear me, O LORD; for thy lovingkindness is good: turn unto me according to the multitude of thy tender mercies. 17And hide not thy face from thy servant; for I am in trouble: hear me speedily. 18Draw nigh unto my soul, and redeem it: deliver me because of mine enemies. 19Thou hast known my reproach, and my shame, and my dishonour: mine adversaries are all before thee. 20Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness: and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none. 21They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.
After the long account of the flood, there is a hinge, and it turns on two small words: But as for me. Whatever the enemies are doing, whatever the gate says and the drunkards sing, the singer has settled his own course - my prayer is unto thee, O LORD, in an acceptable time. He does not pray as though he had to force the door; he prays trusting that there is a time when God is pleased to hear, a season of favour, and that he can throw himself into it. And mark what he leans his whole weight on: not his own merit, but the multitude of thy mercy and the truth of thy salvation. He appeals to the sheer abundance of God's steadfast love and to the reliability of God's rescue - God's character, not his own record. There is great comfort in that phrase, an acceptable time. The prophet would later hear God say, In an acceptable time have I heard thee, and in a day of salvation have I helped thee (Isa. 49:8), and Paul would seize on it for the whole gospel age: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation (2 Cor. 6:2). The drowning man prays into a window God has thrown open - and so may we.
Before the cruelest detail comes the loneliest line: Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness: and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none (v. 20). The scorn has done more than wound him; it has broken his heart. And what makes the breaking unbearable is the isolation. He looks around for someone - anyone - to show a flicker of pity, and there is no one. He looks for comforters, and the place where they should be is empty. This is suffering at its most desolate: not only the pain itself, but the absence of a single hand reaching toward you in it. Anyone who has lain awake with a grief that no one else seemed to notice knows this exact loneliness. The psalm does not rush past it or tidy it up. It lets the emptiness stand on the page. And it is worth remembering, when you find yourself in that place, that these words were heard again in a garden where the chosen friends slept through the watch, and on a hill where they all forsook him, and fled (Mark 14:50). The One who fulfilled this psalm knew the look around for comforters and the finding of none. You are not, in that loneliness, anywhere He has not been.
Psalm 69:22-36God Will Save Zion
22Let their table become a snare before them: and that which should have been for their welfare, let it become a trap. 23Let their eyes be darkened, that they see not; and make their loins continually to shake. 24Pour out thine indignation upon them, and let thy wrathful anger take hold of them. 25Let their habitation be desolate; and let none dwell in their tents. 26For they persecute him whom thou hast smitten; and they talk to the grief of those whom thou hast wounded. 27Add iniquity unto their iniquity: and let them not come into thy righteousness. 28Let them be blotted out of the book of the living, and not be written with the righteous. 29But I am poor and sorrowful: let thy salvation, O God, set me up on high. 30I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify him with thanksgiving. 31This also shall please the LORD better than an ox or bullock that hath horns and hoofs. 32The humble shall see this, and be glad: and your heart shall live that seek God. 33For the LORD heareth the poor, and despiseth not his prisoners. 34Let the heaven and earth praise him, the seas, and every thing that moveth therein. 35For God will save Zion, and will build the cities of Judah: that they may dwell there, and have it in possession. 36The seed also of his servants shall inherit it: and they that love his name shall dwell therein.
Here the psalm turns dark, and we should not flinch from it. After the gall and the vinegar, the singer prays a string of terrible things down on his persecutors: let their table become a snare… let their eyes be darkened… pour out thine indignation upon them… let their habitation be desolate… let them be blotted out of the book of the living (vv. 22-28). These are the “imprecations,” the curse-prayers, and they can shock a reader who has heard love your enemies. But notice carefully what the sufferer does not do. He does not take up a sword. He does not plot revenge or lift a hand against anyone. He commits the whole matter to God and asks God to judge - which is exactly the discipline the New Testament commends: avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord (Rom. 12:19). The cry for justice is laid at God's feet, not seized into the singer's own hands. And the New Testament does take these words up - soberly, never with relish. The desolate habitation of verse 25 is read of the betrayer's empty place when the apostles sought a replacement for Judas (Acts 1:20); the table become a snare of verse 22 Paul applies to a hardening in his own people - yet in the very same breath he insists the hardening is not the end, for God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all (Rom. 11:9-10, 32)3. So these verses are not a license for hatred. They are the honest sound of a wounded man handing his enemies over to a just God - and even in the New Testament's use of them, the door to mercy is never finally shut.
And then, on a single word, everything turns. But I am poor and sorrowful: let thy salvation, O God, set me up on high. I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify him with thanksgiving (vv. 29-30). The man who began the psalm drowning ends it singing. Nothing in his circumstances has visibly changed - he is still poor and sorrowful, still waiting to be set up on high - and yet the prayer lifts into praise before the rescue has even arrived. This is faith doing its truest work: not waiting for deliverance to be glad, but praising the God of salvation from within the trouble, sure that He has heard. And the singer says something striking about that praise: This also shall please the LORD better than an ox or bullock that hath horns and hoofs (v. 31). A song of thanksgiving from a broken man pleases God more than the costliest animal on the altar. The whole sacrificial system, at its heart, was always reaching for this - a thankful, trusting heart - and here the sufferer offers it directly. It is the offering the New Testament still calls for: By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name (Heb. 13:15). The drowning man has found the floor under the flood, and it turns out to be a song.
The singer's new gladness immediately reaches outward to others in the same low place: The humble shall see this, and be glad: and your heart shall live that seek God. For the LORD heareth the poor, and despiseth not his prisoners (vv. 32-33). His own rescue becomes a word of hope for every other humble, hunted, imprisoned soul - see what God has done for me, and take heart. And he states the principle that has carried him the whole way: God heareth the poor, and He despiseth not his prisoners. The very people the world overlooks - the poor, the bound, the ones no one listens to - are precisely the ones God bends down to hear. This is the thread that runs straight through to the One who stood up in the synagogue and read His own mission from Isaiah: he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives… to set at liberty them that are bruised (Luke 4:18). The God who does not despise His prisoners came, at last, in Person to open the prison. If you are among the poor and the bound today, this verse is for you: you are not beneath His notice. You are exactly the one He listens for.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Psalm 69 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for the drowning imagery of metsulah (vv. 2, 15, “the deep”), for cherpah (vv. 7, 9, 19-20, “reproach”), for the pleaded chesed (vv. 13, 16, “lovingkindness, mercy”), and for rosh and chometz (v. 21, “gall” and “vinegar”).
- Psalm 69 ↔ John 2 · John 15 · John 19 · Romans 15Intertextual BibleTraces the dense verbal threads tying Psalm 69 to the New Testament - the zeal of God's house (John 2:17), the hatred without a cause (John 15:25), the reproaches borne for God (Rom. 15:3), the gall and vinegar of the cross (Matt. 27; John 19), and the desolate habitation read of the betrayer (Acts 1:20).
- Psalm 69 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Psalm 69 - the flood-and-mire imagery of the opening, the force of the reproach vocabulary, the legal sense of the imprecations in verses 22-28, and the “book of the living” in verse 28.
Where this echoes in Scripture
The Reproach I Bear for Thy Sake
- John 2:17And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.Verse 9 read of Jesus at the cleansing of the temple - the consuming zeal that would cost Him His life.
- Romans 15:3For even Christ pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me.The second half of verse 9 applied directly to Christ - the world’s scorn of God falling on Him.
- John 15:25But this cometh to pass, that the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law, They hated me without a cause.Jesus takes verse 4 onto His own rejection - hated not for any wrong, but for the good He did.
- Psalm 42:7Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.The same drowning imagery as verses 1-2 - the engulfing flood of overwhelming trouble.
They Gave Me Vinegar to Drink
- John 19:28-30Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst.Verse 21 fulfilled at the cross - the vinegar held to the lips of the thirsting Christ.
- Matthew 27:34They gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall: and when he had tasted thereof, he would not drink.The gall and the vinegar of verse 21, both present at Golgotha.
- Hebrews 5:7Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears.The weary crying of verse 3 and the prayer of verses 13-18 - the strong crying of the One who fulfilled the psalm.
- Isaiah 49:8In an acceptable time have I heard thee, and in a day of salvation have I helped thee.The “acceptable time” of verse 13 - the window of favour into which the sufferer prays.
God Will Save Zion
- Acts 1:20Let his habitation be desolate, and let no man dwell therein: and his bishoprick let another take.Verse 25 read soberly of the betrayer’s empty place when the apostles sought Judas’ replacement.
- Romans 11:9-10Let their table be made a snare, and a trap, and a stumblingblock, and a recompence unto them.Paul takes up verses 22-23 - yet in the same chapter insists God shut all up in unbelief to have mercy on all.
- Matthew 5:5Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.The inheritance of verses 35-36 promised to the humble - the very kind of person this psalm has been about.
- Hebrews 13:15By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips.The song that pleases God better than an ox (v. 31) - thanksgiving as the offering He desires.