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Commentary on Psalms 10 verses 1–11
David, in these verses, discovers,
I. A very great affection to God and his favour; for, in the time of trouble, that which he complains of most feelingly is God's withdrawing his gracious presence (Psa 10:1): "Why standest thou afar off, as one unconcerned in the indignities done to thy name and the injuries done to the people?" Note, God's withdrawings are very grievous to his people at any time, but especially in times of trouble. Outward deliverance is afar off and is hidden from us, and then we think God is afar off and we therefore want inward comfort; but that is our own fault; it is because we judge by outward appearance; we stand afar off from God by our unbelief, and then we complain that God stands afar off from us.
II. A very great indignation against sin, the sins that made the times perilous, Ti2 3:1. he beholds the transgressors and is grieved, is amazed, and brings to his heavenly Father their evil report, not in a way of vain-glory, boasting before God that he was not as these publicans (Luk 18:11), much less venting any personal resentments, piques, or passions, of his own; but as one that laid to he art that which is offensive to God and all good men, and earnestly desired a reformation of manners. passionate and satirical invectives against bad men do more hurt than good; if we will speak of their badness, let it be to God in prayer, for he alone can make them better. This long representation of the wickedness of the wicked is here summed up in the first words of it (Psa 10:2), The wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor, where two things are laid to their charge, pride and persecution, the former the cause of the latter. Proud men will have all about them to be of their mind, of their religion, to say as they say, to submit to their dominion, and acquiesce in their dictates; and those that either eclipse them or will not yield to them they malign and hate with an inveterate hatred. Tyranny, both in state and church, owes its origin to pride. The psalmist, having begun this description, presently inserts a short prayer, a prayer in a parenthesis, which is an advantage and no prejudice to the sense: Let them be taken, as proud people often are, in the devices that they have imagined, Psa 10:2. Let their counsels be turned headlong, and let them fall headlong by them. These two heads of the charge are here enlarged upon.
1.They are proud, very proud, and extremely conceited of themselves; justly therefore did he wonder that God did not speedily appear against them, for he hates pride, and resists the proud. (1.) The sinner proudly glories in his power and success. He boasts of his heart's desire, boasts that he can do what he pleases (as if God himself could not control him) and that he has all he wished for and has carried his point. Ephraim said, I have become rich, I have found me out substance, Hos 12:8. "Now, Lord, is it for thy glory to suffer a sinful man thus to pretend to the sovereignty and felicity of a God?" (2.) He proudly contradicts the judgment of God, which, we are sure, is according to truth; for he blesses the covetous, whom the Lord abhors. See how God and men differ in their sentiments of persons: God abhors covetous worldlings, who make money their God and idolize is; he looks upon them as his enemies, and will have no communion with them. The friendship of the world is enmity to God. But proud persecutors bless them, and approve their sayings, Psa 49:13. They applaud those as wise whom God pronounces foolish (Luk 12:20); they justify those as innocent whom God condemns as deeply guilty before him; and they admire those as happy, in having their portion in this life, whom God declares, upon that account, truly miserable. Thou, in thy lifetime, receivedst thy good things. (3.) He proudly casts off the thoughts of God, and all dependence upon him and devotion to him (Psa 10:4): The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, that pride of his heart which appears in his very countenance (Pro 6:17), will not seek after God, nor entertain the thoughts of him. God is not in all his thoughts, not in any of them. All his thoughts are that there is not God. See here, [1.] The nature of impiety and irreligion; it is not seeking after God and not having him in our thoughts. There is no enquiry made after him (Job 35:10, Jer 2:6), no desire towards him, no communion with him, but a secret wish to have no dependence upon him and not to be beholden to him. Wicked people will not seek after God (that is, will not call upon him); they live without prayer, and that is living without God. They have many thoughts, many projects and devices, but no eye to God in any of them, no submission to his will nor aim at his glory. [2.] The cause of this impiety and irreligion; and that is pride. Men will not seek after God because they think they have no need of him, their own hands are sufficient for them; they think it a thing below them to be religious, because religious people are few, and mean, and despised, and the restraints of religion will be a disparagement to them. (4.) He proudly makes light of God's commandments and judgments (Psa 10:5): His wings are always grievous; he is very daring and resolute in his sinful courses; he will have his way, though ever so tiresome to himself and vexatious to others; he travails with pain in his wicked courses, and yet his pride makes him wilful and obstinate in them. God's judgments (what he commands and what he threatens for the breach of his commands) are far above out of his sight; he is not sensible of his duty by the law of God nor of his danger by the wrath and curse of God. Tell him of God's authority over him, he turns it off with this, that he never saw God and therefore does not know that there is a God, he is in the height of heaven, and quae supra nos nihil ad nos - we have nothing to do with things above us. Tell him of God's judgments which will be executed upon those that go on still in their trespasses, and he will not be convinced that there is any reality in them; they are far above out of his sight, and therefore he thinks they are mere bugbears. (5.) He proudly despises all his enemies, and looks upon them with the utmost disdain; he puffs at those whom God is preparing to be a scourge and ruin to him, as if he could baffle them all, and was able to make his part good with them. But, as it is impolitic to despise an enemy, so it is impious to despise any instrument of God's wrath. (6.) He proudly sets trouble at defiance and is confident of the continuance of his own prosperity (Psa 10:6): He hath said in his heart, and pleased himself with the thought, I shall not be moved, my goods are laid up for many years, and I shall never be in adversity; like Babylon, that said, I shall be a lady for ever, Isa 47:7; Rev 18:7. Those are nearest ruin who thus set it furthest from them.
2.They are persecutors, cruel persecutors. For the gratifying of their pride and covetousness, and in opposition to God and religion, they are very oppressive to all within their reach. Observe, concerning these persecutors, (1.) That they are very bitter and malicious (Psa 10:7): His mouth is full of cursing. Those he cannot do a real mischief to, yet he will spit his venom at, and breathe out the slaughter which he cannot execute. Thus have God's faithful worshippers been anathematized and cursed, with bell, book, and candle. Where there is a heart full of malice there is commonly a mouth full of curses. (2.) They are very false and treacherous. There is mischief designed, but it is hidden under the tongue, not to be discerned, for his mouth is full of deceit and vanity. He has learned of the devil to deceive, and so to destroy; with this his hatred is covered, Pro 26:26. He cares not what lies he tells, not what oaths he breaks, nor what arts of dissimulation he uses, to compass his ends. (3.) That they are very cunning and crafty in carrying on their designs. They have ways and means to concert what they intend, that they may the more effectually accomplish it. Like Esau, that cunning hunter, he sits in the lurking places, in the secret places, and his eyes are privily set to do mischief (Psa 10:8), not because he is ashamed of what he does (if he blushed, there were some hopes he would repent), not because he is afraid of the wrath of God, for he imagines God will never call him to an account (Psa 10:11), but because he is afraid lest the discovery of his designs should be the breaking of them. Perhaps it refers particularly to robbers and highwaymen, who lie in wait for honest travellers, to make a prey of them and what they have. (4.) That they are very cruel and barbarous. Their malice is against the innocent, who never provoked them - against the poor, who cannot resist them and over whom it will be no glory to triumph. Those are perfectly lost to all honesty and honour against whose mischievous designs neither innocence nor poverty will be any man's security. Those that have power ought to protect the innocent and provide for the poor; yet these will be the destroyers of those whose guardians they ought to be. And what do they aim at? It is to catch the poor, and draw them into their net, that is, get them into their power, not to strip them only, but to murder them. They hunt for the precious life. It is God's poor people that they are persecuting, against whom they bear a mortal hatred for his sake whose they are and whose image they bear, and therefore they lie in wait to murder them: He lies in wait as a lion that thirsts after blood, and feeds with pleasure upon the prey. The devil, whose agent he is, is compared to a roaring lion that seeks not what, but whom, he may devour. (5.) That they are base and hypocritical (Psa 10:10): He crouches and humbles himself, as beasts of prey do, that they may get their prey within their reach. This intimates that the sordid spirits of persecutors and oppressors will stoop to any thing, though ever so mean, for the compassing of their wicked designs; witness the scandalous practices of Saul when he hunted David. It intimates, likewise, that they cover their malicious designs with the pretence of meekness and humility, and kindness to those they design the greatest mischief to; they seem to humble themselves to take cognizance of the poor, and concern themselves in their concernments, when it is in order to make them fall, to make a prey of them. (6.) That they are very impious and atheistical, Psa 10:11. They could not thus break through all the laws of justice and goodness towards man if they had not first shaken off all sense of religion, and risen up in rebellion against the light of its most sacred and self-evident principles: He hath said in his heart, God has forgotten. When his own conscience rebuked him with the consequences of it, and asked how he would answer it to the righteous Judge of heaven and earth, he turned it off with this, God has forsaken the earth, Eze 8:12; Eze 9:9. This is a blasphemous reproach, [1.] Upon God's omniscience and providence, as if he could not, or did not, see what men do in this lower world. [2.] Upon his holiness and the rectitude of his nature, as if, though he did see, yet he did not dislike, but was willing to connive at, the most unnatural and inhuman villanies. [3.] Upon his justice and the equity of his government, as if, though he did see and dislike the wickedness of the wicked, yet he would never reckon with them, nor punish them for it, either because he could not or durst not, or because he was not inclined to do so. Let those that suffer by proud oppressors hope that God will, in due time, appear for them; for those that are abusive to them are abusive to God Almighty too.
In singing this psalm and praying it over, we should have our hearts much affected with a holy indignation at the wickedness of the oppressors, a tender compassion of the miseries of the oppressed, and a pious zeal for the glory and honour of God, with a firm belief that he will, in due time, give redress to the injured and reckon with the injurious.
In his wish to give vent to his anger and desires, [a wicked person] becomes so caught up in his passion as to be unaware that there is someone who has an eye to human affairs.… He acts as if God were not surveying what happens.
Do you see the fruit of vice? Their light is extinguished, their thinking impaired, they are taken captive by wickedness. Just as the disabled person constantly falls into a pit, so too these people, since they do not have the fear of God before their eyes, are totally absorbed in vice—not a case of now in virtue and now in vice, but permanently in vice, mindful not of hell, or of the judgment to come or of accounts to be rendered. Instead, rejecting all these aids as though bridle and bit, they are like a ship without ballast that is at the mercy of winds and fierce billows with no one to guide their thinking. Do you see the wicked in the actual condition of vice having to give an account? After all, what is worse than an unbridled horse, a ship without ballast, a maimed individual? Yet more miserable than all these is the person living in vice, having extinguished the light coming from the fear of God and given over to captivity.
"The sinner has angered the Lord" [Psalm 10:4]. Let no one congratulate the man that prospers in his way, to whose sins no avenger is near, and an approver is by. This is the greater anger of the Lord. For the sinner has angered the Lord, that he should suffer these things, that is, should not suffer the scourging of correction. "The sinner has angered the Lord: according to the multitude of His anger He will not search it out." Great is His anger, when He searches not out, when He as it were forgets and marks not sin, and by fraud and wickedness man attains to riches and honours: which will especially be the case in that Antichrist, who will seem to man blessed to that degree, that he will even be thought God. But how great this anger of God is, we are taught by what follows.
The unbeliever and the sinner never keeps God before his eyes; instead, each day and at every moment he soils and sullies his paths, not believing there is any judgment. Well, what is the reason for this?… He completely despises your laws; he spends all his time in lawlessness. The unbeliever, in fact, belittles and vilifies the commands of God.
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SUMMARY
Psalms 10:4 offers a profound and sobering diagnosis of the wicked, revealing the spiritual root of their rebellion. It portrays an individual whose outward display of arrogance and self-sufficiency stems from an internal conviction that God is utterly irrelevant or non-existent in their daily considerations, deliberate plans, and overall worldview. This verse encapsulates the practical atheism of those who, driven by an overwhelming pride, actively refuse to acknowledge, seek, or include the Divine in any aspect of their lives, leading to a trajectory devoid of divine accountability, purpose, or moral compass.
CONTEXT
EXPOSITION AND ANALYSIS
Key Word Analysis
Verse Breakdown
Literary Devices
Psalms 10:4 masterfully employs several literary devices to convey its powerful message regarding the wicked. The most prominent is Characterization, where the psalmist paints a vivid portrait of the wicked, not just by their actions but by their internal disposition and outward demeanor. The phrase "pride of his countenance" is a potent form of Metonymy, where the "countenance" (face) stands in for the entire person's outward expression of their inner arrogance and haughtiness. This also functions as Symbolism, where the proud face symbolizes a heart utterly alienated from God and defiantly self-sufficient. The statement "will not seek [after God]" is a clear declaration of Rejection, emphasizing the active, deliberate choice of the wicked to ignore or dismiss the divine. Finally, "God [is] not in all his thoughts" utilizes a form of Hyperbole (though a chillingly accurate one) to emphasize the absolute and pervasive absence of God from the wicked's consciousness, planning, and moral framework. This absolute statement underscores the profound depth of their spiritual rebellion and practical atheism.
THEOLOGICAL AND THEMATIC CONNECTIONS
Psalms 10:4 profoundly articulates the theological truth that pride is the fundamental root of spiritual rebellion and estrangement from God. It reveals that the absence of God in one's thoughts is not merely a passive oversight or intellectual skepticism, but often the deliberate consequence of an arrogant heart that refuses to acknowledge any authority beyond itself. This practical atheism, where God is systematically excluded from one's plans and considerations, leads inevitably to a life devoid of true moral compass, divine purpose, and ultimately, genuine spiritual flourishing. The verse underscores the stark contrast between the self-sufficient, godless worldview of the wicked and the humble, God-centered life to which believers are called, where seeking God's will and presence permeates every thought and action, fostering a life of dependence and righteousness.
REFLECTION AND APPLICATION
Psalms 10:4 serves as a powerful mirror, inviting us to critically examine the landscape of our own inner lives and the true priorities that govern our decisions. It challenges us to confront the subtle and overt ways in which pride can creep into our hearts, leading us to rely on our own wisdom, strength, and resources rather than humbly seeking God's guidance. Are our plans, ambitions, and daily considerations truly submitted to the Lordship of Christ, or do we, like the wicked, operate as if God is an optional add-on or, worse, utterly irrelevant to our "thoughts" and "schemes"? This verse calls us to a radical reorientation, where God is not merely acknowledged on Sundays but actively invited into every facet of our existence, shaping our character, informing our choices, and permeating our very consciousness. A life where God is truly "in all our thoughts" is one marked by profound humility, unwavering dependency on His grace, and an unyielding commitment to His sovereign will, leading to genuine spiritual vitality, profound peace, and purposeful living.
Questions for Reflection
FAQ
What does "pride of his countenance" truly mean in this verse?
Answer: "Pride of his countenance" refers to an outward, visible manifestation of inner arrogance and self-exaltation. The Hebrew word for "countenance" (H639, ʼaph) literally means "face" or "nostril," so it suggests that the wicked person's pride is evident in their very demeanor, facial expression, posture, and overall bearing. It's not just an internal feeling but a public display of haughtiness and defiance, a refusal to bow before any authority, especially God's. It signifies a person who is so self-absorbed and independent that their very presence exudes an air of superiority and contempt for divine authority.
Is the verse suggesting that the wicked are intellectual atheists?
Answer: Not necessarily intellectual atheists in the modern sense of philosophically denying God's existence. Rather, the phrase "God [is] not in all his thoughts" (H4209, mᵉzimmâh – more accurately, "schemes" or "plans") points to a practical or functional atheism. This means that even if they intellectually acknowledge God's existence, they live their lives as if He doesn't exist or is utterly irrelevant to their daily affairs. God plays no role in their decision-making, their moral framework, their ambitions, or their daily considerations. Their entire worldview and life's trajectory are intentionally devoid of divine input or accountability, which is a far more common form of godlessness than outright intellectual denial. This concept is powerfully echoed in Psalm 14:1, where the "fool" is not necessarily a philosophical atheist but one whose life demonstrates a practical disregard for God's reality and authority.
CHRIST-CENTERED FULFILLMENT
Psalms 10:4, in its stark portrayal of the wicked's profound godlessness, finds its ultimate contrast and fulfillment in the person and redemptive work of Jesus Christ. The "pride of his countenance" and the active refusal to "seek after God" perfectly describe humanity's fallen state, a condition utterly remedied by Christ's atoning sacrifice. Unlike the wicked who deliberately exclude God from their thoughts and plans, Jesus perfectly embodied a life entirely centered on God. His every thought, word, and deed was in perfect alignment with the Father's will, as He declared, "I always do what pleases him" (John 8:29). While the wicked refuse to seek God, Jesus is the very manifestation of God actively seeking humanity, coming "to seek and to save the lost" (Luke 19:10). His profound humility, culminating in His obedient sacrifice on the cross, stands in direct opposition to the wicked's self-exalting pride. He "humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8). Through His atoning work, He breaks the power of pride and self-sufficiency, enabling those who believe in Him to have God not just in some thoughts, but to be indwelt by the Holy Spirit, who guides their every thought and intention (Romans 8:9-11), transforming them into the image of the One who perfectly sought and pleased God.