Psalms 18

Psalms 18:1-50

God manifesting Himself for His Anointed. (To the chief musician: [a psalm] of David, the servant of Jehovah, who spake unto Jehovah the words of this song, in the day when Jehovah had delivered him out of the grasp of all his enemies, and out of the hand of Saul. And he said:) We come now, in the third psalm of this series, to the manifestation of God in behalf of Messiah, whose deliverance and exaltation involve the deliverance and blessing of the people with whom He has linked Himself. But the result is wider than this also: He is made the Head of the nations, and a people that He had not known before serve Him. But a large part of the psalm is taken up with the way in which God has displayed Himself in all this, -His personal intervention, His character as manifested, -all that makes Him the object of His people’s praise. And this revelation of Himself is, as this implies, their blessing and happiness forever, as it is that of all His creatures, -unfallen and redeemed alike. This psalm is found also at the end of David’s history in the book of Samuel,* the occasion of it being given similarly in each place, and the end of the psalm itself assuring us of its application to David in the first place, though a greater than he shines through continually. At this we have no possible cause to wonder, knowing him to be in his life so largely typical of God’s “Beloved” and King, for whom we look.
In perfect accord with its character, the first forty-five verses of the psalm are in triplets throughout; these dividing into six main portions, the seventh closing with five verses of praise.

1. The psalm begins, as it ends, with praise. Jehovah, the living and unchanging God, is celebrated in it as the Rock of faith, and that in double character: the first word “means properly,” as Delitzsch observes, “a cleft in a rock, then a cleft rock”; the second, a great and hard mass of rock." Accordingly, in the first, “the idea of a safe (and comfortable) hiding-place preponderates”; in the second, “that of firm ground and inaccessibility. The one figure calls to mind the well-watered Edomitish Sela, surrounded with precipitous rocks, . . . the other calls to mind the Phoenician rocky island Tzur (Tyre), the refuge in the sea.” The cleft Rock is a figure for the Christian full of tender, wonderful associations; the firm, impregnable, eternal Rock, yet cleft for a refuge to the soul fleeing to it for escape. And this double thought is varied and expanded through all these epithets with which the psalmist declares the good cause he has for fervent love toward his God. They are capable also of double application, as the language of the Lord, or of those whom we have seen that He here identifies Himself with and represents.

We shall find, of course, in this as in other psalms, passages in which One personality shines out, forbidding association of any other with it. We may find, perhaps, those in which it is easier at least to recognize the many for whom He stands (or some of these), than it is their Representative. This we may expect. One passage (verse 23) which, as it reads in the common and other versions, could not be applied to Him, should receive, it is believed, another meaning. In general,we may expect to find unmistakably through these psalms the Voice like which there is no other, while yet we shall sufficiently discern that He who speaks has linked Himself with others, so that His cause and theirs are one. The third verse gives the realization of Jehovah as the rock of the soul: “I call upon Jehovah, the object of my praise, and I am saved from my enemies.” This is what he who speaks has found; and all that follows here is the expansion of it. 2. Accordingly we go back to the “strait” out of which he cries to God, and is answered. And once more we find that it is the shadow which darkens the world which he is facing. The toils of death are round him, escape shut off; and it is death as we have seen it, and as the conscience recognizes it, -death as the doom of sin. The words are simple enough, but all the more has their meaning to be gathered from their context and connections, rather than learned directly. And this is characteristic of the psalms, as it is of much of the Old Testament. We have to bring in the light of the New in order to be able to see what is hidden in it for us: it is the Old Testament itself that bids us remember that “it is the glory of God to conceal a thing,” as it is “the honor [or glory] of kings to search out a matter.” (Proverbs 25:2.) Would that in this research into Scripture “kings” were more plentiful! Here the person of the speaker is of all importance; and however He may identify Himself with others, in this psalm it is Christ who is this throughout. Thus, when He says “the torrents of Belial put me in fear,” we have to consider in what sense it would be possible for Him to say this. Belial -though it seems better to anglicize than to translate the Hebrew word means, evidently, “worthlessness,” the “ungodly men” of the common version, which the revised changes into “ungodliness.”* The word is, indeed, much more than the English one, of a moral significance very positive, and not negative merely. In the moral and spiritual spheres, there is nothing merely negative: simple indifference here is crime. Thus Belial is used in the New Testament as standing for the direct opposite of Christ; and the “sons of Belial,” in the language of the Old, are always those lawless ones who,whenever the occasion arises, manifest themselves as law-breakers, hostile to God and man. The “torrents of Belial” are undoubtedly such corrupt and lawless men; only marking their wickedness as that which produces fear in Him who speaks here.

Their power, whatever it were, surely could not, any more than death could in its physical suffering, or in aught beyond it. For Him, the sting of it would be as judgment from God; and such it was, of necessity, for Him who took it as the Sin-bearer and Substitute for sinners. Thus wrath was in it, separation from Him who was of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, though this was upon Him only.
“The torrents of Belial” must then have “put Him in fear,” by the horror of what sin was to Him, as He realized it in the light in which He lived with God, from the joy of that well-known, glorious Presence, earth itself but the footstool of Deity. He had come into it but to do, amid sorrow and suffering, the Father’s will, which man could violate at his pleasure, and count it pleasure, and imagine it freedom to do so! For this He was to die, taking the sinner’s place; men like these -His creatures, with His stamp defaced in them -driving the nails which fastened Him to the cross, plunging the spear into His side, sealing Him up in His grave, defying Him to come out of it again! Giving Himself up freely to all this, while struck with the awful horror of it all, well might He exclaim, “The torrents of Belial put me in fear!” Sin itself, -just to know it aright, could it be known fully, -in a soul where there was no callousness such as it induces, -what a supreme agony would it be! And the due of sin, -to bear that death, as no saint has known, -as no sinner could ever know it, -the living death of the Heir and Fountain of Life; the Life eternal proving the nameless woe of the shadow of death, where faith could no more say, “But Thou art with Me.” It is impossible to speak of it aright. Scripture itself leaves the veil upon it. Those who, moved by the Spirit of God to give us the story of the cross, as from their various points of view they regard it, stand in the hush of the night that falls, pointing, as it were in silence, to the sacred Figure “lifted up from the earth,” and upon its head the crown of thorns. “I cry . . . and Thou answerest not,” are the words of the psalm of atonement; but then again, “when He cried unto Him, He heard.” (Psalms 22:2; Psalms 22:24.) Both things, of course, true: each suited in its place. The psalm here celebrates the hearing, and that out of the sanctuary, -the answer of God in His holiness to the Holy One: with that answer, and its result in blessing for the people of God (that is, for Israel and the millennial nations,) the rest of the psalm is occupied. 3. We have now therefore the appearing of God in behalf of His suffering Holy One. But when we come to the detail of this intervention, while it may well apply to the accompaniments of the resurrection of Christ, and no doubt has this in view, on the other hand the description as a whole irresistibly reminds us of the deliverance of Israel out of Egypt. Indeed the actual theophany, the heavens bowed as God comes down, the judgment executed upon the enemies, ending with the exaltation of Christ over the nations of the earth, -all this connected as it is together, carries us on to events yet future, when God will out-do the wonders in Egypt in a new deliverance of Israel from the hands of the nations their enemies, and bring in the final blessing of which prophecy is full. (Micah 7:15.) This accounts for the apparent glance back at the exodus; while it is really the answer of God to Christ’s work of atonement, which accounts equally for His voice being heard as it is, all through. Thus we find the same representative character of the Lord as in the previous psalm, and the confirmation of the view of that which has been already taken. (a.) The twelve verses of this section, one might expect to have the usual 3 x4 division, and so they have. The first three show us God as the Almighty, the earth and the heavens bearing witness to His power alike. The earth to the foundations of the hills trembles before Him; His wrath is a consuming fire; the heavens are bowed under Him as He comes down. This witness of nature to His presence, readily as we understand it, and simple as it really is, has yet lessons for us which would serve us well if they were better learned. Creation is not only a mirror of divine perfections: it is pervaded by His power, and sensitive to His slightest movement. There is an intimate sympathy thus between the natural and spiritual, which we feel far better than we can explain, and which makes the face of nature a constant parable of spiritual things.

This, superstition has misused on the one hand, while on the other the growing wisdom of the day, with its continual fresh discovery of governing laws, loses sight of or refuses what it helps to demonstrate. For laws governing without a governor are themselves an irrational superstition, no less so because a profane one. There is in nature, as they own, an inscrutable power which transcends it; and this, too, a “power that makes for righteousness.” Christianity alone tells us Whose this power is. (b.) In the second triplet of verses the Almighty becomes the Judge.* The cherub, from the first view in Eden to its Apocalyptic representatives in the last book of the New Testament, is always connected with divine government, -the throne of God as ruling over the earth. The ark and mercy-seat are still this throne in relation to Israel, and the cherubim there are of one piece with the latter, their faces looking to the place where the atoning blood is sprinkled before God. He was said to dwell between the cherubim and these express the executive righteousness of the throne; and in their fourfold character as lion, ox, with the face of a man, and flying eagle, we find represented power, patient service, intelligence, and yet inscrutability. (Proverbs 30:19.) The riding upon the cherub here, therefore, indicates judicial action, and the “wings of the wind” combine the speed and power of the storm blast, a figure which the next verses carry on.
Yet in judgment God is rather hidden than displayed: it is His “strange work.” Thus He makes the darkness His covert. It is His contrary, inasmuch as He is love and light; and yet He uses it as His pavilion, and, while not it, is in it. The judgment, where it comes, is in fact, in its most awful feature, separation from Him, -from the Light; while it is yet not merely that. From these thick clouds the light flashes forth, -hailstones and coals of fire (see Exodus 9:13-35, notes); for God is displayed even in the judgment that separates from Him. (c.) The third triplet gives the full display. It is now plainly Jehovah who thunders in the heavens, and the Most High who gives His voice. And we see where the bolt strikes: His arrows are lightnings, with which Messiah’s enemies are scattered and discomfited. The earth is laid bare to its foundations, and the channels of waters are seen: words which remind us of Israel’s passage of the Sea, and which may find in the future also their fulfillment in the drying up of the Euphrates. (Revelation 16:12.) The judgment of God is also the revelation of the earth at all times, and will finally declare the moral character of all its history. This is one great end of prophecy, to enable us beforehand to judge with God the condition of things through which we are now passing, according to that final judgment in which we find them to end. And that final disclosure will it not be in some sense also the eternal safeguard of His people from all the power of evil, the springs of which will be then laid bare? Scripture speaks of that day as the day of manifestation; and this will not be surely of the individual merely to himself, but of all in the presence of all; making all to see light in God’s light. Will not the “holiness of truth” be thus fully confirmed and established for eternity, sealed with the broad seal of God, and demonstrated by the example of all, evil and good alike? Will not the books that are opened then be in effect and effectively the Deuteronomy of the land so reached for every pilgrim? (d) We now come to the experience of the deliverance, in which we find expressions of weakness,which might at first make one doubt as to its being the Lord’s voice that is heard at all here. But the connection would assure us of it, and the place of thorough human dependence is that which He takes all through the psalm. Thus it was that, having assumed the burden of sin, and laying down His life, He committed Himself in peace into the Father’s hand, to take again from Him the life laid down. The language of the sixteenth psalm we have seen to be the expression of this confidence: “therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth; my flesh also shall rest securely: because thou wilt not abandon my soul to Sheol; nor wilt Thou suffer Thy pious One to see corruption.” Thus resurrection is His justification from God, the seal put upon His completed work; the justification, therefore, of all for whom He stands, -of all who through grace believe in Him. In this identification of Himself with them, He comes for the moment into the place of weakness and simple dependence upon the arm of Another for deliverance. “He reached from above, He took me: He drew me out of many waters.” In the last clause of the sentence we have a word only used once beside in the explanation of the name given to Moses, and from which that was derived; but the reference is only by way of comparison; for a greater than Moses is here. “He delivered me from my strong enemy, and from them that hated me: for they were too strong for me.” Thus the deliverance is the manifestation and glory of Jehovah Himself. “They confronted me in the day of my calamity: but Jehovah was my stay.” Jehovah’s character is thus brought out, as it is the glory of the gospel in every part, that it reveals Him. We “believe in Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead.” Thus we know Him to be for us, in His righteousness as well as in His love, and that very attribute which we had most reason to dread as sinners, is that upon which, because of the work of Christ for sinners, we can rest with undisturbed security. It is His righteousness that justifies the believer in Jesus. It is His righteousness that we are “made” to be now “in Christ.” (2 Corinthians 5:21.) 4. But we are now to be shown the character of the One for whom God thus comes in; and in this section, under the number which speaks both of testing and practical walk, we have (set side by side with the character of God Himself) His assured and perfect claim to be heard and answered. Nothing is more unmistakable in the Lord, as we see Him in the full truth of manhood upon earth, than the distinct and emphatic assumption of unspotted perfection at all times. “Meek and lowly in heart” though He was, and clear in His enunciation of man’s fallen condition, He never for a moment takes His place among men in any sense that could imply the slightest resemblance to them in this respect. His separateness is indeed so plain that He need not much assert it. Yet He can say as the ground of the Father’s constant presence with Him (manifested as it was by His mighty works), -“I do always those things that please Him.” And to His opposers even can put as a question admitting but of one answer, “Which of you convinceth Me of sin?” (John 8:29; John 8:46.) The psalmist maintains here for the One he personates a similar perfection, which David for himself, in his “last words,” disclaims. So, indeed, might any among mere men. It is He in whom, opening the heavens to do so, the Father proclaims His delight, who is, as we have seen, the real Speaker, -the true David, who is also David’s seed. (a) The divine delight in Him has its ground and justification in His perfect obedience. He is righteous not only in intent, but in the cleanness of His hands also. With Him is not the misery of shortcoming of the end of His desire and aim. What He designs He carries through. As He speaks so He is; and His speech is with fullest knowledge. Thus He can say, “I have kept Jehovah’s ways”; and His recompense is according to His righteousness. (b) The measurement of all with Him is not by His own thoughts either. He is not a law to Himself, nor does He do simply what is right in His own eyes. Knowing what He is, one might perhaps expect that; and if inspiration were the weak and fallible thing which men now make it, you could not account for the absolute respect which He who even as man had the Spirit given Him without measure, ever paid it. “But how, then, should the Scripture be fulfilled?” was with Him a decisive argument. On the cross, with the parching thirst of the crucified upon Him, it is only “that the Scripture might be fulfilled,” that He gives voice to this craving. Truly could He say, then, “All His judgments were before Me; nor did I put His statutes from Me.” This was no desultory or fragmentary or unbalanced obedience. All was in due proportion and perfect symmetry. It was obedience: the will of God recognized and governing Him in all things. “I was also perfect with Him,” He says: “and I kept myself from perverseness being mine.” * The word rendered “iniquity” in the common version, it is agreed means “perverseness,” -the spirit that would distort or turn aside the force of the divine commands. And again He affirms that Jehovah has recompensed Him according to His righteousness, and according to the cleanness of His hands before those holy eyes.

Now the character of God is put side by side with this. He deals with men according to what He sees them to be. The disposition they show toward Him He shows in like manlier toward them: the attitude which they assume He assumes; while of course His grace beseeches them to change that which is estranged and hostile, and to be reconciled to Him. But this last has no application to Him who is before us here, and does not therefore come in. Then He brings low the lofty and saves the humble; and death is that by which God levels all the pride of man, bringing up from death itself those who have accepted its sentence in the practical meaning of it. Thus we have the principle of resurrection, in which the power of God acts beyond the sentence, so affirming it, and yet showing His grace. And this grace, after this manner, He has shown in Christ, and shown also to a people identified in grace with Him. This is the God, then, before whom Christ is, and who answers Him, -though He stoop to death to find the answer, because of His identification with the need of others. 5. We are now carried on into the future, in order to see this answer, as it takes effect in the judgment of the nations who have rejected God and His Anointed. The present time we must not expect to find in Old Testament prophecy; and thus in that to which the Lord appeals in the synagogue of Nazareth (Isaiah 61:1-2), “the acceptable year of the Lord,” which He was there to proclaim, passes on immediately to the “day of judgment of our God,” and so to the restoration of Israel. The psalm here is in the same way connected with Jewish hopes and promises. The suffering Christ becomes, in exaltation, the Conqueror and Judge. As Son of man He comes in the clouds of heaven; as Son of man all judgment is committed to Him. Thus He still maintains His dependence: “Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool.” We need not wonder, then, that at the beginning of this section, He as the Speaker ascribes in a similar way His power to God. (a) Besides being a fifth section of the psalm, this has again five subsections, the verses still being in triplets, God manifesting Himself still in all, Jehovah being known in the judgment that He executes. “For it is Thou that lightest my lamp: Jehovah my God enlighteneth my darkness.” So may He say, who, though the Son of God, has been in the darkness of desertion at the cross. We think, naturally, of the tabernacle lamp and its identification of divine glory (the gold) with the almond fruit of resurrection, the sign of coming summer, and we remember how He is presented in the Apocalypse as the “Faithful Witness, and the First-born of the dead, and” -as He is going to be manifested directly -“the Ruler of the kings of the earth.” (Revelation 1:5.) Just so where He is coming out as this last, we are permitted first of all to see Him as come out of the darkness, where He has removed all hindrance to earth’s blessing, that we may rejoice in His assumption of power and possession of the inheritance which is now His. All enemies and obstacles are now to give way before Him: “For by Thee I run through a troop: and by my God I leap over a wall.” And then we have affirmed the character of Him whom the King represents and in whose power He acts: the Mighty One, perfect in His way; the Unchangeable, whose word is tried; and the sure defense of all who take refuge in Him. (b) And who beside is God? Where else is the Rock of confidence for faith? This is the question that will be pressed for speedy settlement when Christ appears. For now is the time of which it is predicted that “Jehovah shall be King over all the earth: in that day there shall be one Jehovah, and His Name one.” (Zechariah 14:9.) Heathenism is swept away at once; all forms of idolatry are brought to an end together; infidelity will cease from the earth, and agnosticism be no more: even though man’s heart may as really refuse the known, as it once did “the unknown God.” This Mighty One girds with strength the One whose place is still therefore one of loving service to Him, and makes His way perfect as is His own. His progress is uninterrupted, therefore. “He maketh my feet like hinds’ feet,” -able to surmount all difficulties, -“and setteth Me on my heights,” the mountains of the chosen land. For in that day “the mountain of Jehovah’s house shall be established in the tops of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.” (Isaiah 2:2.) For Jehovah’s throne in Zion shall once again and finally be filled with a human tenant, who shall perfectly represent Him; and “the government shall be upon His shoulder,” whose name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Father of eternity,* the Prince of peace." (Isaiah 9:6.)
(c) But the way this is realized is not, as one might think, by the preaching of the gospel of peace. It must be the “effect of righteousness,” and the Davidic phase of the kingdom must precede the Solomonic. We return, therefore, to see Him as the warrior-King: His hands trained for war; Himself covered impenetrably with the shield of God’s salvation; sustained by His strong right hand; and withal, as meek as a Conqueror as in His life of grace of old, He says, “Thy condescension also has made Me great.” His steps are still directed by Him who makes room thus for each one He takes; and His ankles waver not. (d) Thus we see His enemies now prostrate before Him: He pursues and overtakes them; they fall and rise not; and again it is God who girds Him with, the strength He manifests, and casts the pertinacious foe beneath His feet. (e) The end is reached in the fifth section. His foes turn their backs and flee in vain: God has given them up into His hand. They cry in despair at last, even to Jehovah now; but there is no reality in it, and they find no Saviour. They are beaten down as dust, and poured out as the mire of the streets. 6. The “rod of iron” of the second psalm is now sketched in three brief but emphatic verses. He is delivered from the strivings of the people -in Samuel, “my” people -Israel, in their old rebellious state, and made head of the nations, a people formerly unknown to Him. These are obedient as soon as they hear of Him; and there is a manifest power which forbids opposition. Strangers in heart bow perforce, though remaining such: and here we see already the cause of that fresh uprising of evil with which the millennial kingdom ends. And this condition of things shows why Satan, bound in the abyss for a thousand years, is permitted to come out of it at the close to bring out the reality.

The visible power of God with the blessing attendant upon Messiah’s sway is proved vain to bring man to God. Opposition to Him is no mere fruit of ignorance. In that day there will be none: the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea"; and yet of very many it will be said, as it was of those in the day of Christ’s previous sojourn among men: “Now have they both seen and hated both Me and My Father.” (John 15:24.) Thus the devil is permitted to do His final work. The awful inveteracy of sin is manifested. He comes out of a thousand years’ restraint; and with his doom at last before his eyes, to work out still unrepentantly the ruin of others and his own. And men on their side turn from the blessedness in which they have shared to listen to his deception. Thus the last verse finds its fulfillment: “sons of the stranger fade away, and are afraid out of their close places.” All is manifest at last, and the work of probation is over: eternity, in fact, has come. 7. The last five verses are an ascription of praise to God, in the same character as at the beginning of the psalm, and summing up in brief the mercies which have been recounted. He is the living and unchanging God, the Rock of faith, the Saviour; the avenging Judge, subduer of the peoples; the God of resurrection, thus lifting up above all enemies. For this cause He is praised among the nations. And the close celebrates the whole as loving-kindness to Jehovah’s King, to David and his seed alike. Thus, it is plain, the first series of these psalms ends; and in the nineteenth we go back to find a new beginning.