Psalms 142

Psalms 142:1-7

Jehovah the refuge and portion. Maskil of David: a prayer when he was in the c cave. In the third psalm here, we have the last Maskil, or psalm of instruction, -a worthy close to the series; for it leaves us with God as the only refuge and rest of the soul, man having failed, not only in power but in heart to help. The psalm is a very short and simple one; wholly a prayer, but closing with confident assurance. At once the psalmist emphatically states that it is to Jehovah that he cries: before Him he declares his strait, as if there were no other. He can appeal with confidence to One who has known all about him, and in circumstances of deepest distress: his spirit overwhelmed, the enemy’s snare hidden for him in the path in which (as is implied) he had walked before Him (compare Psalms 1:6). Among men he found no helper, none who would own acquaintance with him. Refuge was cut off unless he found it in Jehovah: none beside cared at all. A terrible place to be in; if Jehovah were not His hiding-place! but if He were not, though all arms were stretched out to succor him; how vain would it all be! God -how easily in our insane folly we think to do without Him, who is the one necessity for all His creatures. But such discoveries constitute the grand moments for the soul, when it turns to God as now to be its all: “I cried unto Thee, Jehovah; I said, -Thou art my refuge, my portion, in the land of the living.” Two things which go together, and refuse absolutely to be separated from one another: for He cannot suffice us in the one way, except He suffices us in the other: these are but two aspects of one need into which we are fallen; as fallen away from Him, -shelterless, famine-stricken; because away from the Father’s house. To get back there is to find the one need met as surely as the other. And “in the land of the living”! For death itself invades not the Father’s house: “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” And even the way with Him is a “way everlasting”; as the life we already live is “everlasting life.” The psalmist could not know these things as we; but thus the truth he spoke was only fuller than he knew. Thus then he cries to God the one Helper, out of the depth, brought low by enemies too strong for Um, to whom he is left unless God come in. Be must be the Overcomer for him; and thus shut up, though a prisoner of hope, he looks to Him with an expectation brightening into perfect assurance. He sees himself amid a company also of righteous gathered with him by the same grace as himself, to give thanks to the glorious Name of his bountiful Redeemer.