Psalms 74

The psalm does not ease in; it opens already in anguish. O God, why hast thou cast us off for ever? why doth thine anger smoke against the sheep of thy pasture? (v. 1). Two things are worth seeing at once. First, the singer addresses the catastrophe to God directly - not to fate, not to the enemy, but to the LORD whose anger he believes he can feel like smoke in the air. He does not stop believing God is there; he believes God is there and asks why. Second, notice the tender name he uses for the broken people: the sheep of thy pasture. Battered, scattered, defenseless - but still thy sheep, still belonging to the Shepherd even in the ruin. And immediately the prayer reaches for memory: Remember thy congregation, which thou hast purchased of old… this mount Zion, wherein thou hast dwelt (v. 2). The plea is not built on the people's worthiness but on God's long history of ownership - thou hast purchased… thou hast redeemed… thou hast dwelt. Before he describes the wreckage, the singer reminds God (and himself) that these ruins were once, and are still, God's own.

The singer asks God to come and look: Lift up thy feet unto the perpetual desolations; even all that the enemy hath done wickedly in the sanctuary (v. 3). It is a startling, almost daring image - as though God had walked away and the prayer were begging Him to stride back across the distance and survey the wreckage with His own eyes. The word behind perpetual carries the sense of something enduring, unending; the ruins feel permanent, as if the desolation will never be undone. And the heart of the offence is named precisely: what the enemy has done in the sanctuary. This is not lament over lost property or national pride. It is grief that the one place set apart for God on the whole earth has been violated. The verses that follow make the desecration vivid: enemies roar - the word for the bellow of a lion, or the shout of triumph - in the midst of thy congregations, the very rooms built for worship now ringing with the noise of conquest. They set up their ensigns for signs: where the tokens of God's presence once stood, the conquerors plant their own battle-standards, as if to say the place belongs to them and to their gods now.⁴

The destruction is described with a craftsman's grief. Verses 5 and 6 remember how the sanctuary was once built - skilled men famous for the work of their axes among the thick trees, the beauty of carved work raised to the glory of God - and then how that same beauty was hacked apart: now they break down the carved work thereof at once with axes and hammers. The tools that once shaped the holy place are turned to smashing it. Then comes the line that names the worst of it: They have cast fire into thy sanctuary, they have defiled by casting down the dwelling place of thy name to the ground (v. 7). Fire and demolition together - the building burned, and what survives the flames torn down to the dirt. But mark the words the psalm chooses: it is thy sanctuary, and the place defiled is the dwelling place of thy name. The deepest injury is not architectural. The Name of God - His revealed presence, His honour, the thing the temple existed to safeguard - has been dragged to the ground and trampled. The singer feels the blasphemy more than the loss; what burns is not only cedar and stone but the reputation of God among the nations.

If verses 1-8 are the wound, verse 9 is the salt in it: We see not our signs: there is no more any prophet: neither is there among us any that knoweth how long. The signs were the visible tokens of God's presence - the worship, the festivals, the assurances that the LORD was with His people. They are gone. And worse, the voice that might interpret the darkness is gone too: there is no more any prophet. When the prophets fell silent, the people lost not only comfort but orientation; no one could tell them what the disaster meant or when it would end. That is the precise ache of the line - neither is there among us any that knoweth how long. It is one thing to suffer with an end in sight; it is another to suffer with no word about the duration at all. Out of that void comes the cry of verses 10 and 11: O God, how long shall the adversary reproach?… Why withdrawest thou thy hand? The singer feels as if God has tucked His mighty right hand away into the folds of His robe and refuses to act. He is not being irreverent; he is being honest about how the silence of God feels from inside it. And crucially, he aims even that complaint at God - the One whose hand he longs to see move.

From the hinge of verse 12, the singer launches into a roll-call of God's mighty acts - and he begins with the sea. Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters (v. 13). There are two layers here, and they reinforce each other. On the surface is the memory of the Exodus, when God divided the sea and brought His people through on dry ground while the waters crashed back on Pharaoh's army. Beneath that runs the older language of the ancient world, in which the raging sea and its monsters - the dragons, the chaos-creatures of the deep - stood for everything wild, hostile, and opposed to life and order. To say God brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters is to declare that no power of chaos, however terrifying, is a match for Him. The sea-monster that the nations feared as a rival god is, in Israel's song, merely a creature God shattered. The point for a people sitting in the rubble is pointed: the same God who once broke the heads of the dragons is not helpless before the empire that has burned His house. The forces that look like cosmic, unstoppable evil have heads that the LORD has broken before - and can break again.³

The roll-call widens from rescue to creation itself. God didst cleave the fountain and the flood and driedst up mighty rivers (v. 15); and then the horizon opens all the way out: The day is thine, the night also is thine: thou hast prepared the light and the sun. Thou hast set all the borders of the earth: thou hast made summer and winter (vv. 16-17). This is a deliberate and steadying move. The singer lifts his eyes from the smoking ruins of one building to the vast, ordered world - the rhythm of day and night, the turning of summer and winter, the very boundaries of the earth - and he says to God, all of this is yours. The same hand that seems withdrawn (v. 11) is the hand that hangs the sun and keeps the seasons in their courses. There is deep comfort in the scale of it. When your own world has been reduced to ashes, it can feel as though chaos has won everywhere; the psalm answers by pointing to a creation still running on time, still held in the grip of its Maker. The God who lost none of His authority over the cosmos has not lost it over your ruins either. The day is still His. The night, however long it feels, is His too.

The final movement is one long, urgent prayer, and it returns again and again to a single verb: remember. Remember this, that the enemy hath reproached, O LORD, and that the foolish people have blasphemed thy name (v. 18). The singer is not informing God of something He has missed; “remember” in the Hebrew Bible is less about recall than about acting on what one knows - to remember is to step in. And notice once more where the singer locates the real outrage. It is not merely that he has been hurt, but that God's name has been blasphemed by foolish people. The word “foolish” here is not about low intelligence; it is the Bible's word for the moral fool, the one who says in his heart there is no God and acts as if heaven will never answer. The singer's argument, pressed through these verses, is essentially this: Your honour is bound up with us, Lord. If You let the fools mock Your name unanswered, You let them be proven right. It is a bold way to pray - appealing not to his own importance but to God's. He pleads for the helpless in the same breath: O deliver not the soul of thy turtledove… forget not the congregation of thy poor (v. 19). The people are a defenseless dove among predators; the prayer is that God will not hand His own over to the hunters.

The prayer keeps the lowly in view to the very end: O let not the oppressed return ashamed: let the poor and needy praise thy name (v. 21). It is a beautiful and revealing request. The singer asks that the oppressed - those crushed and humiliated by the catastrophe - would not have to turn away from God's presence empty-handed and ashamed, as if their trust had been misplaced. And he asks it not chiefly for their comfort but for God's glory: let the poor and needy praise thy name. The deepest answer to the blasphemy of the foolish (v. 18) would be the praise of the rescued poor. Where the enemy drags God's name to the ground, the gratitude of the delivered lifts it back up. This is the same heart that runs all through Scripture - the God who raiseth up the poor out of the dust (Ps. 113:7), the Saviour who came to preach the gospel to the poor (Luke 4:18). The singer is asking God to act in such a way that the broken would have new reason to worship Him. It is a prayer God delights to answer, because the praise of the once-helpless is the surest sign that the fools were wrong - that there is a God, and He hears, and He does not let His needy ones go down to shame.