Psalms 80

The psalm opens by reaching for God under one of the tenderest names He bears: Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a flock. To call God a Shepherd is to confess that the people are sheep - not self-sufficient, not able to find pasture or fend off the wolf on their own, but utterly dependent on being led.

And the second title lifts the eyes higher still: thou that dwellest between the cherubims. Above the ark of the covenant, between the outstretched wings of the golden cherubim, was the place where the LORD was understood to be enthroned among His people - the throne of heaven touching earth.

So the One addressed is at once the gentle Shepherd who walks ahead of the flock and the enthroned King above the holiest place. And to both, the cry is the same: shine forth. It is a strange thing to ask of a Shepherd and a King - unless the trouble is precisely that the Shepherd seems to have wandered out of sight and the throne has gone dark. The whole psalm is the prayer of people who can no longer see the face of the God they belong to, asking Him to show Himself again.

When the psalmist names God as the One that dwellest between the cherubims (v. 1), he is pointing to the most sacred spot in Israel's worship: the mercy seat atop the ark of the covenant, where two golden cherubim stretched their wings toward one another, and where the LORD had promised, there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims (Exod. 25:22).

The cherubim of the ancient world were not the soft infant figures of later art but awesome winged guardian-creatures, the kind set to guard the way to the tree of life (Gen. 3:24). Their wings formed the throne; the space between them was the meeting place of heaven and earth.

So the plea shine forth is asking the enthroned God to do again what that throne was for - to break His silence, to let His presence blaze out from between the wings and meet His people. The throne is still there. The question the psalm dares to raise is whether the One enthroned upon it will turn His face back toward them.

Between the first two soundings of the refrain comes one of the most aching questions in the Psalter: O LORD God of hosts, how long wilt thou be angry against the prayer of thy people? (v. 4). Read it slowly, because it is almost unbearable. The people are praying - and the thing they are up against is not merely their enemies but the sense that God is angry against the prayer itself, that their very crying out is being met with displeasure rather than mercy.

They are fed the bread of tears and given tears to drink in great measure (v. 5) - weeping has become their daily food and drink, the staple of their existence. This is the particular darkness of a faith that has not given up but feels unheard: to keep praying into what seems like a closed heaven.

And yet notice what the question assumes even in its pain. How long is not the cry of someone who has concluded God will never answer; it is the cry of someone who still believes the anger has an end, that the silence is a season and not the last word. The psalmist argues with God's apparent anger by appealing to God's deeper character - and keeps praying straight through it.

Now the psalm tells Israel's entire history in a single, sustained image: a vine. Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt: thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted it (v. 8). Every verb has God as its subject. He brought the vine out - the exodus; He cast out the heathen - the conquest of the land; He planted it - the settling of the people in their inheritance.

This is not a nation that made itself. It is a vine transplanted by the hand of God from the soil of slavery into ground He cleared for it Himself. And it flourished extravagantly: God preparedst room before it, gave it deep root, until it filled the land (v. 9), its shadow covering the hills, its boughs like the goodly cedars, its branches reaching from the sea to the river (vv. 10-11) - the whole span of the promised land at its height.

The picture is of a people who owe every inch of their growth to God's deliberate care. They did not earn the ground; He gave it. They did not plant themselves; He did. The image is laying a foundation for the prayer that follows: the One who planted this vine has a claim on it, and a reason to come back to it.

There is a quiet tenderness in the way the planting is described: God preparedst room before it, and didst cause it to take deep root, and it filled the land (v. 9). A gardener planting a treasured vine does not simply drop it in the ground; he clears the space, breaks up the soil, gives the roots room to go down deep before the plant is asked to bear anything.

That is the picture of how God dealt with His people - He went ahead of them, made room, established them, gave them time to take deep root before they filled the land. It is worth lingering on, because it says something about how God grows the things He loves. He is not careless or hurried. He prepares the ground first. He cares about roots before fruit, about depth before spread. The flourishing that followed - the hills covered, the boughs like cedars - was real, but it grew out of roots God Himself had given time to go down.

And that history is precisely what makes the next verse so painful. A vine this carefully planted, this deliberately rooted, this lovingly given room - why would its keeper now seem to walk away from it?

The image turns, and the turn is addressed straight to God as a wound: Why hast thou then broken down her hedges, so that all they which pass by the way do pluck her? (v. 12). The hedge was the vine's protection - the wall or thorn-fence that kept out both casual thieves and wild animals. With the hedge broken, the vine is utterly exposed: all they which pass by help themselves to its fruit, and worse, the boar out of the wood doth waste it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it (v. 13).

What God once planted and walled about now lies open to be trampled and torn.

And notice the staggering honesty of the question: the psalmist lays the broken hedge at God's own door - why hast thou… broken down her hedges? He does not pretend the disaster came from nowhere; he brings it back to the God who had been the vine's protector, and asks Him, in effect, why He has withdrawn the protection that was His to give.

This is faith at its most raw and most real: not explaining God away, not pretending the pain is not happening, but bringing the very devastation to God Himself and asking Him to account for it - because the One who planted the vine is the only One who can mend its hedge.

The prayer now gathers itself and presses its case on God by reminding Him whose vine this is: Return, we beseech thee, O God of hosts: look down from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine; and the vineyard which thy right hand hath planted (vv. 14-15). The whole appeal rests on a single fact - thy right hand hath planted it. The psalmist is not asking God to take up a stranger's cause; he is asking God to come back to His own planting, to visit what His own hand set in the ground.

The verbs pile up like knocks on a door: return… look down… behold… visit. And the picture of ruin is unsparing: It is burned with fire, it is cut down: they perish at the rebuke of thy countenance (v. 16). The vine that once covered the hills is now scorched and felled.

Yet even here the prayer's logic holds: if the vine perishes at the rebuke of thy countenance - God's face turned away in displeasure - then its only hope is the same face turned back in favour. The disaster and the remedy are two motions of the one countenance. The whole psalm has been pleading for that face to turn; now it pleads for the One on whom the turning will rest.

After the plea for the man of God's right hand comes a vow and a final cry: So will not we go back from thee: quicken us, and we will call upon thy name (v. 18). It is a promise born of hope - if God will only revive them, they will not turn away from Him again; they will call upon thy name.

But notice the order, and how carefully the psalm has been built to make it. The people do not promise faithfulness first and ask for revival as a reward. They ask to be quickened - made alive again - and only out of that new life comes the not-going-back. The reviving has to come first; the faithfulness flows from it.

It is the same shape as the refrain's turn us: even the people's return to God begins with God's work in them. Quicken us is a plea for life from the outside, life they cannot generate themselves, the breath of God reviving a vine that is burned and cut down. And then the psalm ends where it has circled all along, the refrain sounded for the third and final time, now with its fullest title for God: Turn us again, O LORD God of hosts, cause thy face to shine; and we shall be saved.