Psalms 83

The psalm does not open with praise or even with petition in the usual key; it opens with something closer to protest. Keep not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God. Three times in one verse the singer presses the same plea from a different angle - do not be silent, do not hold your peace, do not be still - and the repetition is the sound of urgency. What troubles him is not that God is absent but that God seems, for the moment, to be saying nothing while His enemies are saying a great deal. There is a particular anguish in that: the heavens quiet, the threats loud. Notice, though, what the singer does with the silence. He does not conclude that God has forgotten, and he does not take matters into his own hands. He prays into the silence, and he prays boldly - almost arguing with God, the way a child tugs at a parent who has gone still in a moment of danger. This is faith under pressure, not faith collapsing. The one who can say O God twice in a single breath, even while begging Him to stop being quiet, has not let go of God at all.¹

The threat is described with chilling precision: They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones (v. 3). The enemies are not blundering into conflict; they have sat down and schemed - crafty counsel, cunning laid against the helpless. But look at the tender name the psalm gives the threatened people: thy hidden ones. The Hebrew pictures those whom God has treasured up and concealed, the way one hides something precious to keep it safe. It is the same note Scripture strikes elsewhere - thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy presence from the pride of man (Ps. 31:20), for in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion (Ps. 27:5). So the verse sets two hidings against each other. The enemies plot in secret; but God's people are hidden in Him. The conspiracy is covert, but it is aimed at those already sheltered under the hand of the Most High. That is the quiet comfort buried in a frightening verse: the ones being plotted against are not exposed and abandoned. They are God's hidden treasure - and what is hidden in God is not within reach of the schemers, however crafty their counsel.

Here the enemies speak in their own words, and the words are terrible: Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance (v. 4). This is not a raid for plunder or a fight over a disputed field. The goal is erasure - to end Israel as a people, and to wipe out even the memory of her name. It is the oldest and darkest of ambitions against the people of God: not merely to defeat them but to make it as though they had never been. And notice the strange logic of it, which the rest of the psalm will expose. The nations want the name of Israel blotted out - yet Israel exists only because of the name of her God, who called her into being and bound Himself to her by covenant. To erase the people is, whether the enemies grasp it or not, to make war on the One whose name they carry. That is why the singer can be so confident even while begging God to break His silence: the survival of this people does not finally rest on their own strength. It rests on whether God will let His own name be erased from the earth - and He will not.

Verse 5 names the heart of the matter, and verses 6-8 spell out its scale. For they have consulted together with one consent: they are confederate against thee - and then the roll-call: Edom… the Ishmaelites… Moab… the Hagarenes… Gebal… Ammon… Amalek… the Philistines… Tyre… Assur. Ten peoples, ringing Israel from every side - old kinsmen turned enemies (Edom descended from Esau, Moab and Ammon from Lot, whose children close the list in verse 8), desert tribes, coastal cities, and the great empire of Assyria looming behind them all. What unites this unlikely alliance is a single thing: enmity toward God's people. But the psalm refuses to let that enmity be read as merely political. The decisive word is in verse 5 - they are confederate against thee. The coalition imagines it is moving against a small and vulnerable nation; the singer sees what it is really doing. To league together against the people of God is to league together against God. That single reframing changes everything about how the prayer that follows can be prayed: the outcome no longer depends on counting Israel's soldiers against the enemies' numbers, because the real contest is between a ring of nations and the Most High whom they have, without knowing it, defied.

Having laid out the threat, the singer now reaches for memory. Do unto them as unto the Midianites; as to Sisera, as to Jabin, at the brook of Kison… Make their nobles like Oreb, and like Zeeb… as Zebah, and as Zalmunna (vv. 9-11). These are not random names; they are the great deliverances of the book of Judges, when impossible odds were overturned by God's hand. Sisera and Jabin were the Canaanite power swept away at the brook Kishon, when the very stars and the river fought for Israel (Judges 4-5). Oreb and Zeeb, Zebah and Zalmunna were the princes and kings of Midian routed by Gideon's three hundred men with their torches and trumpets - a victory so lopsided that no one could mistake whose it was (Judges 7-8). The singer's logic is the logic of all remembering prayer: You have done this before; do it again. He is not informing God of anything; he is preaching the past to his own fearful heart, anchoring tomorrow's hope in yesterday's rescues. When the present looks like a ring of ten nations and a silent sky, the answer is often to look back - to set the remembered faithfulness of God against the felt threat of the moment, and to pray from there.

Verse 12 lets the enemies speak once more, and in doing so exposes the real prize they are after: Who said, Let us take to ourselves the houses of God in possession. Strip away the politics and the armies, and this is what the confederacy wants - to seize what belongs to God and make it their own. The phrase reaches beyond a single building; it is the impulse to lay hold of God's inheritance, God's dwelling, God's portion, and possess it as plunder. This is the same arrogance the psalm has tracked from the start: enemies who have lifted up the head (v. 2), who scheme to erase the people God has claimed (v. 4). And it clarifies why the prayer for their scattering is not mere vindictiveness. What is being defended is not Israel's real estate but God's right to His own - His people, His dwelling, His name. The singer is not asking God to take his side in a quarrel; he is asking God to defend what is rightfully His against those who would carry it off. There is something steadying in that for anyone who feels their faith, their family, or their calling under siege: the things truly given to God are not finally ours to defend by force, nor the enemy's to seize at will. They are God's - and He is well able to keep His own.

O my God, make them like a wheel; as the stubble before the wind. As the fire burneth a wood… So persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraid with thy storm (vv. 13-15). The images come fast, and every one of them is a picture of weightlessness before God. A wheel - or, as the Hebrew may also mean, whirling chaff or a tumbleweed - is something that cannot hold its ground; it is rolled and spun wherever the wind drives it. Stubble is the dry leftover of the harvest, so light a breath scatters it. The confederacy that looked so formidable in verses 6-8 - ten nations, the empire of Assyria behind them - is suddenly seen as it truly is before the breath of God: chaff, stubble, dry grass before a wildfire and a storm. This is the psalm's great reversal. The enemies measured their strength against Israel and found themselves mighty; the singer measures their strength against God and finds it nothing. And mark the address that opens verse 13: O my God. In the thick of the most violent imagery in the psalm, the singer is closer to God than ever - not raging on his own behalf, but committing the whole storm into the hands of the One he calls my God. The fire and tempest he calls for are not his to wield; they are God's. He asks; he does not seize.

And now the psalm turns - and the turn is breathtaking. After all the fire and tempest, the singer reveals what he has actually been praying for: Fill their faces with shame; that they may seek thy name, O LORD (v. 16). The shame he asks God to send is not an end in itself. It has a purpose, and the purpose is the enemies' own salvation. He wants them brought low - but so that they will stop, and turn, and seek the very God they have been fighting. This is shame unto repentance, not shame unto mere ruin. There is a kind of being humbled that breaks a proud heart open rather than simply crushing it - the shame that makes a person finally see the truth about themselves and reach, at last, for God. That is what the singer dares to hope for his enemies. It does not erase the seriousness of verse 17, with its plea that the unrepentant be confounded and troubled; the psalm holds judgment and mercy together without flinching from either. But it will not let the prayer end in destruction alone. Even against the confederacy that wanted to wipe out the name of God's people, the deepest desire of this prayer is that those enemies might come to seek the name of God. The imprecation, at its very root, bends toward redemption.