Psalms 79
Psalm 79 carries the simple heading A Psalm of Asaph - from the guild of temple singers descended from Asaph, one of the musicians David set over the song of the house of God. But this is no song for a festival. It is a lament written in the smell of smoke and blood, over a Jerusalem that has been broken open and desecrated.
An enemy army has done the unthinkable: the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps (v. 1). The horror deepens line by line - the bodies of God's servants left to the birds and beasts, the blood poured out like water round about Jerusalem; and there was none to bury them (vv. 2-3), and the survivors reduced to a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and derision to them that are round about us (v. 4).
Out of that desolation rises the oldest cry of God's suffering people: How long, LORD? wilt thou be angry for ever? shall thy jealousy burn like fire? (v. 5). The psalm does not rush to comfort; it lets the question hang in the air, the way real grief does.
And then it pivots on a hinge that turns the whole lament toward hope. When the singer at last asks for help, he does not plead the people's goodness - he openly confesses their former iniquities (v. 8). Instead he lays the whole appeal on the honour of God's own name: Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name: and deliver us, and purge away our sins, for thy name's sake (v. 9).
The deepest need is not merely rescue from enemies but to be cleansed of the sin that brought the ruin - and the ground of the asking is not human merit but the glory of God.
The closing movement lays the people's whole case before the only righteous Judge. Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is their God? (v. 10) - the prayer appeals to God's own reputation among the nations and asks Him, not the wronged people, to avenge the blood of His servants. The hard words of verses 6 and 12 - the cry that God pour out His wrath, that He render unto our neighbours sevenfold - are not a license for private revenge; they are the appeal of the helpless, handing the reckoning over to God and refusing to seize it.
And the psalm ends not in the ashes but in a vow that crosses every generation: So we thy people and sheep of thy pasture will give thee thanks for ever. The New Testament will hear, under this whole psalm, sins purged away for his name's sake, the cry of the martyrs' blood at last answered, and the Good Shepherd who came to gather the very sheep of this pasture.
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People in this chapter
Psalm 79:1-4 · A Psalm of AsaphThe Heathen Are Come Into Thine Inheritance
1O GOD, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps. 2The dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be meat unto the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the earth. 3Their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem; and there was none to bury them. 4We are become a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and derision to them that are round about us.
The psalm does not ease in; it opens already in horror. O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps (v. 1). Notice first to whom the catastrophe is addressed: not to fate, not to the empire that did it, but to God - and notice the possessive pressed three times over. It is thine inheritance, thy holy temple, and the city is the LORD's own.
The singer is not chiefly mourning lost property or national pride; he is grieving that the one place on earth set apart for God has been broken open by those who do not know Him. The word translated defiled is the language of ritual pollution - the holy made unclean, the consecrated trampled by the common. And the result is rubble: Jerusalem laid on heaps, a city reduced to mounds of stone. Before he asks for anything, the singer holds the desecration up before God and reminds Him - and himself - whose house this was.
The desecration is described with mounting grief, and it moves from the sacred to the most intimate. First the temple is defiled and the city laid in heaps (v. 1). Then comes a horror the ancient world felt to the bone: The dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be meat unto the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the earth (v. 2).
To leave the dead unburied, exposed to scavenging birds and beasts, was the ultimate degradation - a contempt that reached past death itself, the very curse Scripture names for the defeated and the godless (Deut. 28:26; Jer. 7:33). These are not nameless casualties; they are thy servants, thy saints - God's own devoted people, dishonoured in their dying.
And the blood of verse 3 - shed like water round about Jerusalem - speaks of slaughter so vast it ran in the streets like rainwater, cheap and uncounted, with none to bury them. The survivors are left to bear the final indignity: We are become a reproach to our neighbours (v. 4), the watching nations turning the catastrophe into a jeer. The psalm refuses to soften any of it. It lays the full weight of the desolation on the page before it dares to pray.
Scripture insists that such blood is never truly forgotten by God; from Abel onward, the blood of the righteous crieth… from the ground (Gen. 4:10), and God hears it. The whole arc of the Bible bends toward the day that cry is answered - and toward the One whose own blood was also shed outside the walls of Jerusalem. Jesus suffered without the gate (Heb. 13:12), His blood poured out as the temple of His body was torn down.
But His was the blood that does not merely cry for vengeance; it speaketh better things than that of Abel (Heb. 12:24), for it was shed to cleanse rather than to condemn.
And the martyrs of every age - the slain servants whose blood ran like water - are gathered up into the vision of the last book of Scripture, where their cry is at last heard and answered: How long, O Lord… dost thou not judge and avenge our blood? (Rev. 6:10). The blood that Psalm 79 sees lying unburied in the streets is not lost to God. He has marked every drop, and in Christ He has both answered it and redeemed it.
The first thing this psalm teaches is that you are allowed to bring that, in full, to God. The singer does not tidy up the horror before he prays; he lays the rubble and the blood straight before the LORD and names it for what it is.
And the second thing is the truth the psalm keeps pressing: it is thine inheritance, thy servants, thy saints. What was violated belonged to God, and the people who suffered are His. The blood shed like water is not water to Him; He has counted every drop. You are not invisible in your violation. The God who marks the blood of His servants has not looked away from yours.
Psalm 79:5-9For Thy Name's Sake
5How long, LORD? wilt thou be angry for ever? shall thy jealousy burn like fire? 6Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not called upon thy name. 7For they have devoured Jacob, and laid waste his dwelling place. 8O remember not against us former iniquities: let thy tender mercies speedily prevent us: for we are brought very low. 9Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name: and deliver us, and purge away our sins, for thy name’s sake.
Out of the rubble comes the question that catastrophe always asks: How long, LORD? wilt thou be angry for ever? shall thy jealousy burn like fire? (v. 5). It is among the oldest prayers in Scripture, and it is worth seeing exactly what it does and does not assume.
The singer does not deny that God is angry - he feels the wrath as something real, burning like fire. But he refuses to believe it is for ever. The whole force of the question presses against the word ever: surely, he is saying, this anger has an end; surely God will not be against His own people without limit.
To ask how long is not unbelief; it is faith under unbearable pressure, faith that keeps speaking to God even when God seems silent. And mark that the singer aims the question at God - prayed to the very One whose anger he longs to see lifted. The lament does not rush past the pain to a tidy answer. It lets the how long stand, raw and unanswered, the way real grief must.
Verses 6 and 7 turn outward to the nations: Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee… For they have devoured Jacob, and laid waste his dwelling place. This is a hard prayer, and it must be read carefully.
The singer asks that God's wrath fall on the heathen that have not known thee - not on personal rivals he wishes to be rid of, but on the kingdoms that have set themselves against God Himself and devoured His people. And crucially, he asks God to pour it out. He does not raise an army or plot a return blow; he commits the whole reckoning into the hands of the only One with the right to judge.
This is the very discipline the New Testament will later command: 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 against injustice is real and is allowed; but it is laid at God's feet, not seized into the singer's own. There is a world of difference between “I will make them pay” and “O God, You are the Judge - let Your justice be done.” This psalm prays the second.
Then the prayer makes a move that lifts it above mere complaint against enemies: it turns the searchlight inward. O remember not against us former iniquities: let thy tender mercies speedily prevent us: for we are brought very low (v. 8). The singer does not pretend the people are innocent victims with nothing to answer for. He confesses former iniquities - the sins of the past that lie behind the present ruin - and asks God not to hold them against the people any longer.
The word rendered prevent in the King James means to go before, to come quickly to meet someone in their need; he is begging God's tender mercies to hurry out ahead and reach the people before they are utterly destroyed, for we are brought very low. This is the honesty that makes the psalm so trustworthy as a prayer. It holds two truths together: the enemies have done great wickedness, and the people themselves have sinned. The cry for deliverance does not depend on the people being blameless. It depends on God's mercy being greater than their sin.
Here the gospel hears its own language coming back to it. The apostle John writes to the church the very answer this prayer reaches toward: I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for his name's sake (1 John 2:12). The forgiveness the psalm pleads on the basis of God's name is announced as accomplished - on the ground of who God is and what His Son has done.
For the verb purge away is the language of atonement, of sin covered and wiped clean, and Scripture says that this is exactly what Christ accomplished: now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself (Heb. 9:26).
Where Psalm 79 prays from a defiled temple for the people's sins to be covered, the New Testament announces a great High Priest who entered not the holy places made with hands… but into heaven itself (Heb. 9:24), and made the atonement the Day of Atonement foreshadowed. The psalm's most desperate request - purge away our sins, for thy name's sake - is not a cry into silence. It is a prayer God has answered, in His Son, for His own name's sake.
First, he tells the truth about himself: O remember not against us former iniquities. He does not march into God's presence insisting he has been wronged and deserves rescue; he admits the people's own sin is part of the wreckage. There is enormous freedom in that. You do not have to build a case for why you deserve to be heard. You can come, as this psalm does, brought very low, with your failures named and not hidden.
Second, watch the ground he stands on when he asks: not his own record, but God's name - for the glory of thy name… for thy name's sake. When you pray for cleansing, for a fresh start, for deliverance from something you partly brought on yourself, you can do the same. Do not plead your goodness; plead His character. Ask Him to forgive and restore you for His own name's sake, because that is precisely the ground on which the gospel says He does it: your sins are forgiven you for his name's sake. The most honest prayer - I have sinned; cover it, for who You are - turns out to be the one most surely answered.
Psalm 79:10-13The Sheep of Thy Pasture
10Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is their God? let him be known among the heathen in our sight by the revenging of the blood of thy servants which is shed. 11Let the sighing of the prisoner come before thee; according to the greatness of thy power preserve thou those that are appointed to die; 12And render unto our neighbours sevenfold into their bosom their reproach, wherewith they have reproached thee, O Lord. 13So we thy people and sheep of thy pasture will give thee thanks for ever: we will shew forth thy praise to all generations.
The final movement opens by appealing, daringly, to God's own reputation: Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is their God? (v. 10). The taunt of the nations is not merely cruel; it is theological. They are asking, in effect, whether the God of Israel is real and able - whether He can protect His own or has been beaten by their gods.
The singer turns that taunt into an argument: Lord, Your honour is bound up with us. If You let the nations mock unanswered, You let them be proven right. So he prays, let him be known among the heathen in our sight by the revenging of the blood of thy servants which is shed. He longs for God to act so visibly that the question Where is their God? is silenced - not for the people's sake alone, but so that the LORD is known among the nations as the living God who does not abandon His own.
Before the prayer closes, it bends down to the most helpless: Let the sighing of the prisoner come before thee; according to the greatness of thy power preserve thou those that are appointed to die (v. 11). After the vast horrors - a ruined temple, a slaughtered people, the mocking nations - the psalm narrows to a single, almost inaudible sound: the sighing of the prisoner. These are the captives of the catastrophe, those carried off in chains, and especially those that are appointed to die - the condemned, awaiting execution at the enemy's hand.
The singer asks God to bend His ear to their barely-breathed groan, and to put forth the greatness of His power to keep alive those whom the world has already written off. There is deep tenderness here. The God appealed to is not only the Judge of nations but the One who hears the faintest sigh of the lowest prisoner, and whose power is great enough to preserve the as-good-as-dead. It is the same heart Scripture celebrates elsewhere: the LORD who looseth the prisoners (Ps. 146:7) and heareth the poor, and despiseth not his prisoners (Ps. 69:33).
Verse 12 prays the hardest words in the psalm: And render unto our neighbours sevenfold into their bosom their reproach, wherewith they have reproached thee, O Lord. We should not flinch from it, but we must read it as the psalm itself frames it. First, mark what the reproach was aimed at: it was God who was reproached - wherewith they have reproached thee. The mockery the singer wants repaid is the mockery of God Himself.
Second, and decisively, mark whose hand is asked to do the rendering. The singer does not say let us repay them sevenfold; he asks God to render it. The reckoning is committed entirely to the divine Judge, exactly where the New Testament insists it belongs: Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord (Rom. 12:19), an echo of the ancient word, To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence (Deut. 32:35).
This is not a license for personal revenge; it is its opposite - the deliberate handing of the case to the only One who can judge it justly. The wronged and the helpless are not told to swallow the injustice as if it did not matter, nor to seize the sword themselves. They are taught to lay even their fiercest cry for justice at God's feet, and to trust Him to be the righteous Judge that He is.
It is one of the deepest threads in all of Scripture, and it runs straight to the last book of the Bible. There the souls of the martyrs - those slain for the word of God - cry out from beneath the altar in words that could be lifted straight from this psalm: How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? (Rev. 6:10).
And heaven's reply is not a rebuke but a promise: they are told to rest yet for a little season, until the appointed reckoning is complete (Rev. 6:11). God hears the blood of His servants, and He has set a day to answer it - for true and righteous are his judgments… and he hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand (Rev. 19:2).
But the wonder of the gospel is that the One who will avenge the blood of the servants first allowed His own blood to be shed - and that His blood speaketh better things (Heb. 12:24), opening a way of mercy even to enemies before the day of judgment falls. The God of Psalm 79 is not deaf to the blood crying from the streets. In Christ He has both answered the cry and, astonishingly, made a way for the guilty to be forgiven before the reckoning comes.
This is the confession that runs all through the Old Testament - we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture (Ps. 100:3) - and it points forward, like an arrow, to a Shepherd who would come in person to gather them. When that Shepherd came, He named Himself in exactly these terms: I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep (John 10:11). Where Psalm 79 fears the flock has been abandoned to the slaughter, the Good Shepherd says the opposite of His own: I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand (John 10:28).
And He went looking for the scattered and the harassed precisely because He saw the multitudes… as sheep having no shepherd (Matt. 9:36).
The flock of Psalm 79 - defiled, bereaved, surrounded by enemies - has, in Christ, a Shepherd who lays down His own life between the sheep and the danger. The temple could be burned; the belonging could not. And so the lament ends, rightly, not in despair but in a song that will never stop: we… will give thee thanks for ever.
Two things to carry from it. First, when you have been genuinely wronged, do what verses 10 and 12 do: hand the case to God rather than seizing it into your own hands. Render unto our neighbours… - not let me render. You are not required to be the judge; you are free to lay even your fiercest longing for justice at the feet of the One who judges rightly, and to let Him carry it.
Second, hold onto the name the psalm holds onto in the ruins: the sheep of thy pasture. When everything that gave you a sense of God's nearness has been stripped away, you are still His. The Shepherd does not stop being your Shepherd because the fold was wrecked. So you can do what this singer does - you can begin to give thanks before the answer comes, not because the pain is not real, but because your belonging is more real still.
The lament can close before the deliverance arrives, and still be a song of faith. The temple may burn. The Shepherd will not let go of His sheep.
Where this echoes in Scripture
The Heathen Are Come Into Thine Inheritance
- Deuteronomy 32:9For the LORD's portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.The inheritance of verse 1 is not merely land - God's own people are His heritage.
- Genesis 4:10the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.The unburied blood of verse 3 cries to God - He never forgets the blood of the righteous.
- Hebrews 13:12Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate.Christ's blood, too, was shed outside the walls of Jerusalem - but to cleanse rather than condemn.
- Revelation 6:10How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?The shed blood of the servants (v. 3) gathered into the martyrs' cry - and at last answered.
For Thy Name's Sake
- 1 John 2:12your sins are forgiven you for his name's sake.The exact ground of verse 9 - forgiveness granted not for our deserving but for His name's sake.
- Hebrews 9:26now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.The atonement purge away our sins (v. 9) reaches toward, accomplished once for all in Christ.
- Romans 12:19avenge not yourselves... Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.The discipline behind verses 6-7 - the cry for wrath laid at God's feet, never seized.
- Daniel 9:18-19we do not present our supplications before thee for our righteousnesses, but for thy great mercies... for thine own sake, O my God.The same prayer-shape as verses 8-9 - pleading God's mercy and name, not the people's deserving.
The Sheep of Thy Pasture
- Revelation 6:10-11How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood... rest yet for a little season.The cry to avenge the servants' blood (v. 10) raised again by the martyrs - and answered with a promised, appointed reckoning.
- Deuteronomy 32:35To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence... for the day of their calamity is at hand.The ground of verse 12 - the reckoning belongs to God, handed wholly to Him rather than seized.
- John 10:11I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.The sheep of thy pasture (v. 13) gathered at last by a Shepherd who lays down His life for them.
- Psalm 100:3we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.The same confession of belonging that closes Psalm 79 - still His flock, even in the ruin.