Psalms 70
Psalm 70 is the briefest cry in the Psalter, and one of the most naked: Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O LORD. Five verses, no warm-up, no settled composure - just a man so pressed that long sentences are impossible. He can only say the most direct thing there is: Do not delay. Come quickly. The whole psalm has the breathlessness of real emergency about it; you can feel that the one praying it has run out of everything except the cry itself.
And yet this is not the prayer of someone who has stopped believing. It is the prayer of someone who believes God is close enough, and quick enough, to be reached with a single shout.
The psalm is almost identical to the last five verses of Psalm 40 (vv. 13-17), as though that desperate ending were so needed, so often on the lips of God's people, that it had to be lifted out and given a song of its own. Its little frame holds three movements at once: a cry to be delivered (v. 1), a prayer that the enemies who jeer Aha, aha would be turned back (vv. 2-3), and - even in the rush - a glad word for all those that seek thee, who are called to rejoice and be glad and to say continually, Let God be magnified (v. 4).
The hunted man does not pray only for himself; he still wants God to be made great among all who love Him.
It ends where its singer truly stands: But I am poor and needy: make haste unto me, O God: thou art my help and my deliverer; O LORD, make no tarrying. He does not climb above his condition before he prays; he names it. Poor and needy - the afflicted one, the one who lacks - and that very poverty becomes the ground of his hope, because the God he calls on is the One who heareth the poor and is never slack to save.
For three thousand years this little prayer has been the breath of people at the end of their strength - treasured and copied and carried down the centuries among the songs of Israel. And the New Testament lets us hear it, finally, on the lips of One who entered our poverty to the bottom: who in the days of His flesh offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears (Heb. 5:7), who became poor for our sakes (2 Cor. 8:9), and who has made the cry of the needy His own - and answers it.
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People in this chapter
Psalm 70:1-3 · To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David, to bring to remembranceMake Haste, O God, to Deliver Me
1MAKE HASTE, O GOD, TO DELIVER ME; MAKE HASTE TO HELP ME, O LORD. 2Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward, and put to confusion, that desire my hurt. 3Let them be turned back for a reward of their shame that say, Aha, aha.
The psalm does not ease in; it begins already running. Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O LORD. The very first word is the cry, and it is doubled - make haste… make haste - the language of someone who has no margin left. This is the prayer of the emergency, where every second matters and there is breath only for the most necessary thing.
Notice what the brevity itself is telling us. The psalmist does not stop to build a case or reason his way toward calm; the trouble is too immediate. All he can do is name his need and ask God to move, and move now.
And there is a quiet theology buried in that very urgency. To pray make haste is to believe that God is near enough to be reached with a shout and quick enough to act before it is too late. A person who had given up would not bother to ask God to hurry. The shortness of this prayer is not the sign of a shrinking faith; it is the reflex of a faith so sure of God's nearness that it dispenses with everything but the cry.
The cry for help has a backdrop, and it is hostile. There are those who seek after my soul - who hunt his very life - and who desire my hurt, who actively wish him harm (v. 2). The psalmist prays that they would be ashamed and confounded… turned backward, and put to confusion.
It is worth being clear about what this prayer is and is not. It is not a plot of private revenge; the singer lifts no hand against anyone. He asks God to turn the danger back - to frustrate the schemes aimed at him, to let the trap close on empty air. To be turned backward is to be stopped in mid-stride, the attack collapsing before it lands.
This is the cry of someone who knows he cannot defend himself and so commits his defense to God. He does not ask for his enemies' destruction so much as their defeat - that the malice desiring his hurt would come to nothing. There is a kind of trouble where the only honest prayer is, “Lord, stop this; turn it back; do not let them have their way” - and the psalm gives that prayer its words.
Strong crying - not composed and distant, but the loud, urgent pleading of one in real anguish.
We hear it in the garden of Gethsemane, where He fell on the ground, where His soul was exceeding sorrowful, even unto death (Mark 14:34), and where He prayed the same word this psalm prays - that if it were possible the hour might pass, that the cup might be taken away (Mark 14:35-36). The One through whom all things were made knelt in the dirt and cried make haste to the Father, trusting Himself entirely to the One able to save.
This is the wonder at the center of the gospel: that He did not stand above our desperation but went down into it, and prayed our most undefended prayer from the inside. So when you can manage only the briefest, most breathless cry for help, you are not praying alone, and you are not praying beneath His notice. You are praying words He has prayed before you - and He, of all who ever cried make haste, was heard.
And that exact sound - the jeer over a suffering man - is heard again at the foot of the cross. As Jesus hung dying, they that passed by railed on him, wagging their heads, and saying, Ah, thou that destroyest the temple… save thyself (Mark 15:29-30); the rulers derided him, and the soldiers mocked him (Luke 23:35-36); they cried, He saved others; himself he cannot save… let him deliver him now, if he will have him (Matt. 27:42-43).
It is the very posture of verse 3 - the Aha, aha of those who take pleasure in a righteous man's pain. The Lord Jesus bore that scorn to the end and did not answer it with scorn of His own.
The psalm hands this experience its words centuries early: to be not only hurt but laughed at in the hurting. If you have ever felt the sting of being mocked in your weakness - if there has been an Aha aimed at your worst moment - you are standing where the singer stands, and where the Lord stood before you. The mockery did not get the last word over Him, and it will not get the last word over those who are His.
God hears the one-word shout of the overwhelmed as surely - as swiftly - as the most polished prayer ever prayed.
So the practice this psalm presses on you is almost startling in its simplicity: in the moment of panic, of grief, of sudden need, do not wait until you can pray “properly.” Pray now, in the only words you have. Help. Come quickly. Make haste.
And there is a second thing to carry, for the day when the hurt is doubled by mockery - when someone says, in effect, Aha, aha over your weakness. Do not fire the scorn back. Do what the singer does: hand it to God, ask Him to turn it back, and remember that the Lord Himself was jeered at in His agony and did not answer in kind. You are not required to defend yourself against the laughter. You are only required to keep crying out to the God who hears.
Psalm 70:4-5But I Am Poor and Needy
4Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee: and let such as love thy salvation say continually, Let God be magnified. 5But I am poor and needy: make haste unto me, O God: thou art my help and my deliverer; O LORD, make no tarrying.
In the middle of his own emergency, the singer's heart widens. He has been praying for himself; now, for a moment, he prays for everyone else who belongs to God: Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee: and let such as love thy salvation say continually, Let God be magnified (v. 4). This is a remarkable turn for a man under pressure. Trouble tends to shrink us, to narrow the whole world down to our own crisis - and yet here, mid-cry, the psalmist asks that the great company of all those that seek thee would be filled with joy.
Notice how he describes them: not as the strong or the deserving, but as those who seek God and love His salvation. That is the whole qualification - to want Him, to love being rescued by Him. And notice what he wants their joy to produce: a word said continually, over and over, Let God be magnified. To magnify God is not to make Him bigger - He cannot be made bigger - but to make Him look bigger, to enlarge the place He holds in human seeing, so that others catch sight of how great He truly is.
The singer's own rescue, when it comes, will be one more reason for that song; but even before it comes, he wants God magnified. His crisis has not made him selfish. It has made him long, for himself and for everyone, that God would be seen as great.
Then the psalm comes home to its truest note, and the contrast is deliberate: But I am poor and needy. Over against the rejoicing company of verse 4, the singer sets his own bare condition. He does not pretend to have risen above his circumstances; he names them flatly. He is poor - bowed down, afflicted, pressed low - and needy - lacking, dependent, with nothing of his own to fall back on. This is not self-pity; it is honesty, and it is the honesty that prayer is made of.
Many of us labor to assemble some reason God should help us - some merit, some strength, some track record - before we feel we have the right to ask. The psalmist does the opposite. He comes with empty hands and says exactly what he is: a poor and needy man with nowhere else to turn. And far from disqualifying him, that emptiness is precisely his claim on God. For the God of Israel is the One who heareth the poor (Ps. 69:33), who shall deliver the needy when he crieth; the poor also, and him that hath no helper (Ps. 72:12).
The confession I am poor and needy is not the end of the prayer's hope. It is the ground of it.
The last word of the psalm is the first word made personal and pressed once more: make haste unto me, O God… O LORD, make no tarrying. The cry that opened the prayer comes back to close it, but now with the confession of need wrapped around it and the names of rescue spoken into it: thou art my help and my deliverer. Between the two pleas to hurry, the singer states what he believes about the God he is calling - not a distant power he hopes might notice him, but my help and my deliverer, the One whose very character is to come to the aid of the helpless.
And then, make no tarrying. Do not delay. Do not be slow. This is faith doing its boldest work: not a vague hope that things may eventually improve, but the conviction that God is already in motion, that rescue is not far off but near, that the only thing left to ask is that He would not be slow.
The psalm ends without telling us the deliverance arrived - and that is part of its honesty. It leaves the singer mid-cry, still poor, still needy, still asking God to hurry. But it leaves him certain of who he is asking, and that certainty is the whole point. The God who is not slack concerning his promise (2 Pet. 3:9), who hears the poor the moment they cry, can be trusted to make no tarrying.
He who lacked nothing took up the cry I am poor and needy as His own - born with no room in the inn, with nowhere to lay his head (Matt. 8:20), and at the last stripped even of His garments, crying make haste to help me from the cross.
And precisely there, in the lowest poverty, God was magnified as nowhere else. For the deliverance the psalmist asks for, God worked through the One who would not be delivered from the cross but through it - raised up, brought out, so that He could become for all who trust Him exactly what verse 5 names: my help and my deliverer.
This is the deep logic of the whole psalm. The poor man's cry and the seeker's song of praise meet in Christ: He made the cry of the needy His own so that He could fill the mouths of all who love His salvation with the unending word, Let God be magnified. The believer who comes to the end of himself and can only say I am poor and needy is standing exactly where the gospel begins - at the empty hands that the help and deliverer of this psalm came, in person, to fill.
So if you have come to the end of your own strength - if you are out of answers, out of resources, with nothing in your hands - do not read that as the end of hope. Read it as the beginning of the only prayer that has ever really worked. You do not have to manufacture some merit before you are allowed to ask God for help. You can come exactly as you are. I am poor and needy is not a disqualification; in the economy of this psalm, it is the qualification - because the help and deliverer it names is the One who came in person for the poor and needy, who made their cry His own.
So pray the whole of it, both halves at once: pray for your own rescue with the bluntness of make haste unto me, and, even mid-trouble, let your heart widen as the singer's did - pray that God would be magnified, and say it back to Him: thou art my help and my deliverer. Then wait, certain not that the trouble will vanish on your timetable, but that the God who hears the poor will make no tarrying.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Make Haste, O God, to Deliver Me
- Hebrews 5:7In the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears.The doubled cry of verse 1 on the lips of Christ in Gethsemane - strong crying to the One able to save.
- Psalm 22:19Be not far from me, O LORD: O my strength, haste thee to help me.The same urgent “haste” / chush (v. 1) - the cry that God would fold up the distance and come quickly.
- Mark 15:29-30They that passed by railed on him, wagging their heads... save thyself, and come down from the cross.The mockers' “Aha, aha” of verse 3 heard again beneath the cross of the Lord.
- Psalm 40:13-14Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me: O LORD, make haste to help me.Psalm 70 is nearly word for word the close of Psalm 40, lifted out as a prayer of its own.
But I Am Poor and Needy
- 2 Corinthians 8:9Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich.The help and deliverer of verse 5 became poor and needy Himself, to make the empty-handed rich.
- Psalm 34:6This poor man cried, and the LORD heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.The poor and needy one of verse 5 is exactly the one God bends down to hear.
- Matthew 5:3Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.The gospel keeps the shape of verse 5 - the kingdom opens first to the poor and needy.
- 2 Peter 3:9The Lord is not slack concerning his promise... but is longsuffering to us-ward.The ground of “make no tarrying” (v. 5) - the God who is never finally slow to save His own.