Psalms 71

Like so many psalms, this one opens with the bedrock confession that everything else will rest on: In thee, O LORD, do I put my trust. But the prayer that follows it - let me never be put to confusion - tells you what kind of trust this is. To be “put to confusion” is to be put to shame, to be left exposed and disappointed, the way a man is shamed when the thing he leaned on gives way and everyone sees him fall. The singer is asking God never to let that happen - never to let his lifelong trust turn out to have been misplaced. It is a bold thing to ask, but it rests on something solid: a whole history of being kept. He is not gambling on God for the first time here. He is appealing to a God he has trusted for so long that to be disappointed now would unmake everything. This is faith with a track record behind it, and the prayer of the rest of the psalm is simply the unfolding of that one settled relationship into the frightening new territory of old age.

For thou art my hope, O Lord GOD: thou art my trust from my youth (v. 5). Here is the spine of the entire psalm in a single line. This is not a recent faith, taken up late as a hedge against death. It is a trust the singer has carried from my youth - through the strength of his early years, through the long middle of his life, and now into its closing chapters. That continuity is everything. It means his prayer against being cast off in old age (v. 9) is not the panic of a stranger suddenly reaching for God, but the appeal of a lifelong companion. There is a particular dignity in a faith that has weathered decades, that can say from my youth and mean it - and there is a particular comfort in serving a God whose own faithfulness spans the whole length of a life. The hope of his old age is not a different hope from the hope of his youth. It is the same hope, grown deep and grey and sure, in the same God who has never once let him down.

I am as a wonder unto many; but thou art my strong refuge (v. 7). The word wonder here can cut two ways, and the singer may well mean both. To some he is a marvel of God's grace - a man whose long, kept life is itself a kind of sign, a walking testimony to a God who does not let go. But to others a wonder is a spectacle, something stared at, even an object of suspicion or scorn - look how far he has fallen; look how his God has left him. Either way, the singer is exposed, the subject of other people's watching. And he meets that exposure with a single defiant but: but thou art my strong refuge. Let them make of him what they will. Whatever the onlookers see when they look at him, he knows where he actually stands - not out in the open for the crowd to judge, but hidden behind the walls of God. It is a good word for anyone whose life has become, for better or worse, something other people talk about: the verdict that matters is not theirs. Your refuge is not their opinion. It is God.

Now the psalm names its great fear directly, in words that have become the prayer of believers in every generation since: Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth (v. 9). Notice exactly what he dreads. It is not pain, and it is not even death. It is being cast off - discarded, set aside as useless - at the precise moment he is least able to fend for himself. There is a special vulnerability to the failing of strength. In youth, weakness can be hidden or outrun; in age, it stands plainly visible, and the world is quick to write off those who can no longer produce. The singer feels that. He fears that as his body weakens, he will be treated as finished - and worse, that even God might join the verdict. So he prays against it with everything he has. And the very form of the prayer is its own quiet answer: a God you can still cry to like this is not a God who has cast you off. The plea itself is an act of the trust that v. 5 confessed.

The enemies do not merely attack; they interpret. They look at the old man's weakness and announce its meaning: God hath forsaken him: persecute and take him; for there is none to deliver him (v. 11). This is the cruelest blow in the psalm, because it aims past the body at the soul. They are not just hunting him; they are telling him that his God has already given up on him, that his decline is the proof of it, and that no rescue is coming. It is the same logic the mockers would one day fling at the cross: He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him (Matt. 27:43). The voice that says God hath forsaken you - look at the state of you is one of the oldest weapons in the world, and it is never louder than when we are weak. The singer's answer is not to argue with the accusation but to turn from it to God: O God, be not far from me… make haste for my help (v. 12). When the verdict “God has left you” is hurled at you, the reply is not self-defense. It is prayer - running again to the refuge the accusers swear has abandoned you.

And then comes the great hinge of the psalm, on the smallest of words: But. But I will hope continually, and will yet praise thee more and more (v. 14). The enemies have had their say; now the singer has his. Against their God hath forsaken him he sets a resolve they cannot touch - he will hope continually, and not only hope but praise, and not only praise but praise more and more. This is faith refusing the verdict of the crowd. Nothing in his circumstances has improved; the strength is still failing, the enemies still circling. But he chooses the trajectory of his own soul: not down into the despair they are pressing on him, but up into ever-increasing hope and ever-louder praise. Notice the word yet - will yet praise thee. It is the language of someone who has already praised God for a lifetime and is determined that the song is not over, that there is more praise still to come even in these last and weakest days. The accusers measure his future by his fading body. He measures it by the faithfulness of God - and so his best praise, he insists, is still ahead of him.

The aging singer now reveals what he most wants his remaining days for, and it is striking: not rest, not ease, not even relief from his enemies, but the chance to keep witnessing. O God, thou hast taught me from my youth… Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come (vv. 17-18). His whole life has been a school - thou hast taught me from my youth - and now he asks to live long enough to pass the lesson on. There is a whole vision of old age in that one word until. He does not see his final years as a slow fade into irrelevance, but as a bridge between generations: he has received God's faithfulness, and he means to hand it forward to this generation and to every one that is to come. This is the proper work of the grey head. The young have strength; the old have testimony - a long, proven record of what God has done - and that testimony is precisely what the next generation needs and cannot get any other way. The singer's prayer is that he might be a faithful link in the chain, telling those who follow what he has seen of the God who never let him go.

After the height of verse 20, the singer adds two quiet promises he is sure God will keep: Thou shalt increase my greatness, and comfort me on every side (v. 21). It is a remarkable thing to say at the close of a life. The world's arithmetic runs the other way - in old age, greatness is supposed to diminish, influence to shrink, the circle of life to narrow toward nothing. But the singer expects increase, not decrease, because his greatness was never his own to begin with; it was always God's gift, and God is not constrained by failing strength. And alongside that, comfort… on every side - not comfort from one direction while trouble pours in from the rest, but God's comfort surrounding him completely, hemming him in on every side the way the enemies once tried to. This is the deep reversal the whole psalm has been moving toward. The man who began afraid of being cast off ends expecting to be increased and surrounded with comfort. Faith has not just steadied him; it has turned his fear inside out. The very season he dreaded most has become, in God's hands, a season of increase.