Psalm 107:13

Psalm 107 opens with a call to give thanks to the LORD (Psalm 107:1), then tells of four kinds of distress: wanderers lost in the wilderness (Psalm 107:4–9), these prisoners, people sick because of their sin (Psalm 107:17–22), and sailors caught in a storm (Psalm 107:23–32). Each story runs the same way. Trouble comes, the people cry to the LORD, he delivers them, and the psalm calls for thanks. The cry comes back almost word for word at verse 6, verse 13, verse 19 and verse 28, and the call to praise stands unchanged at verse 8, verse 15, verse 21 and verse 31. The repetition keeps one truth before us through every story, that God is always the deliverer.

Like the sick people of verse 17, these prisoners suffer for their own sin, and verse 11 says so outright: “Because they rebelled”. Their rescue is a story of mercy shown to the guilty.

The psalm names no single event. Its picture fits the experience of Israel, above all the exile in Babylon, when God’s people were held in a foreign land, far from home and temple, suffering for their disobedience. Jeremiah records how the king of Babylon imprisoned Zedekiah, Judah’s last king (Jeremiah 52:11). The psalm may well have been sung after the return from Babylon, as the thanksgiving of a whole people for God’s faithful care through all their history.

Verse 10 describes the prisoners before anything is done for them. They “sit in darkness”, a settled and lasting condition. Darkness, chôshek, is the ordinary word for the absence of light, and in Scripture it also carries distress, misery and sorrow. “The shadow of death” is tsalmâveth, a word for deep darkness or the shade of death, used of extreme peril and gloom. Together the two words describe dungeons without light and the hopelessness that fills them. Lamentations uses the same picture of a man shut in darkness (Lamentations 3:6).

“Being bound in affliction and iron” names their chains. The word behind “bound”, ʼâçîyr, means a captive or prisoner. Affliction, ʻŏnîy, is misery or depression, from a root meaning to depress. Iron, barzel, is the metal of chains and fetters. The verse joins a misery and a metal in one phrase, so that the affliction binds them as truly as the iron does. In that day iron fetters, foul cells and the loss of all freedom were the common lot of prisoners of war, debtors and slaves, and imprisonment often ended in death.

Verse 11 begins with “Because”, and it gives the reason for everything in verse 10. The prisoners “rebelled against the words of God”. The verb mârâh means to rebel or disobey. Strong’s gives its first sense as being bitter, with rebellion as its figurative use. It is the word for Israel’s rebellions in the wilderness, as at the rock where Moses called the people rebels (Numbers 20:10). “The words of God” is imrei-El in Hebrew, from ʼêmer, a thing said, a word or saying, and ʼêl, God, a name Strong’s also connects with strength and might. These are the things God had actually said, his commands and his revealed truth.

The second line says the same thing another way: they “contemned the counsel of the most High”. To contemn, nâʼats, is to scorn, despise or spurn, to treat something as worthless. Counsel, ʻêtsâh, is advice and purpose, here God’s wisdom and his guidance for his people. The Most High, ʻelyôwn, is a word meaning high or upper that serves as a title of God, and it reminds us whose counsel they scorned. The two lines together describe disobedience and disdain, a refusal of God’s commands joined to contempt for his wisdom.

Israel’s history shows this pattern again and again. Moses set before the people blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience (Deuteronomy 28), and Judges tells of a people who turned away and fell under oppression time after time (Judges 2). In Proverbs, Wisdom calls and is refused, and those who refuse her reap what they chose (Proverbs 1:24–31). Paul describes people who suppress the truth they know and turn to idols (Romans 1:21–25). God’s commands are the way of life for the people he made, so turning from them leads into distress and bondage.

“Therefore” ties verse 12 to the rebellion of verse 11, and “he” is God. The verb kânaʻ means to humble or subdue, and Strong’s gives its root sense as bending the knee. The heart, lêb, is the centre of the whole person in Hebrew thought, the seat of mind, will and conscience as well as feeling. So “he brought down their heart” means God humbled them through and through, breaking the pride that had despised his counsel. He did it “with labour”, ʻâmâl, which means toil, trouble and misery, burdensome work that wears a person down in body and spirit.

“They fell down” describes the collapse that followed, when they were unable to stand under the weight of their suffering. Then comes the bleakest line of the passage: “and there was none to help.” The word for help, ʻâzar, means to aid or protect, and here every source of aid has failed, their own strength and everyone else’s.

Proverbs says that “the way of transgressors is hard” (Proverbs 13:15), and verse 12 shows how hard it can be. Yet God’s hand in it has a purpose. He humbled Israel in the wilderness in the same way (Deuteronomy 8:3), and the letter to the Hebrews speaks of the discipline God gives his children and the good he means by it (Hebrews 12:5–11).

Verse 13 is the turning point. “Then”, when strength and help were gone, “they cried unto the LORD in their trouble”. The verb zâʻaq means to cry out, especially for help in hardship, a shriek from anguish or danger. It is the cry of people in desperate need. Israel cried to God out of their slavery in Egypt (Exodus 2:23), and Jonah cried to the LORD from the belly of the fish (Jonah 2:2).

People ask whether this means a loud or public prayer. The word speaks of urgency, and a cry whispered alone is as much a cry as one shouted aloud, because what matters is the heart’s appeal to God.

“Trouble” in Hebrew is tsar, a word from the idea of narrowness, and “distresses” is mᵉtsûwqâh, which means narrowness and, figuratively, trouble, anguish and distress. They were hemmed in, and the LORD “saved them out of” the tight places. To save, yâshaʻ, is the great Old Testament word for rescue. It means bringing someone out of danger into safety, freeing him from oppression, or giving him victory over an enemy.

The striking thing about this verse is who is saved. These are the rebels of verse 11, and God answers them as readily as he answered the lost wanderers of verse 6. His steadfast love, the goodness the psalm praises, is the reason he hears. Other scriptures say the same. The LORD hears the righteous when they cry and delivers them out of all their troubles (Psalm 34:17). He will be very gracious at the voice of his people’s cry (Isaiah 30:19). And the writer of Lamentations called on his name out of the low dungeon and was heard (Lamentations 3:55–57).

Verse 14 answers verse 10 point by point. They sat “in darkness and in the shadow of death”, and “he brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death”, with the same words chôshek and tsalmâveth. They were bound, and “he brake their bands in sunder”. Bands, môwçêr, are fetters, ropes or chains. The verb nâthaq means to tear off, pull apart or break off, a forceful tearing of the bonds, and God himself does it. The prisoners move from darkness into light and from the edge of death into life.

Verse 16 gives the picture its full strength: “For he hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron in sunder.” Brass here is nᵉchôsheth, copper or bronze, a strong and durable metal. City gates and prison doors were made of the hardest materials people had, and they were secured with the bᵉrîyach, a bar or bolt, a word the lexicons tie to a root meaning to pass through. God has broken the gates, with shâbar, to break or shatter, and cut through the bars, with gâdaʻ, which means to fell a tree and so to cut down or cut asunder. Verses 14 and 16 share the English words “in sunder”, though the verbs behind them are different.

Those gates were built so that human strength could never break them, which is why their breaking belongs to God. He asks in Jeremiah, “Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for me?” (Jeremiah 32:27). Isaiah uses the very picture of God breaking gates of bronze and bars of iron (Isaiah 45:2). When Peter lay chained in prison, an angel came, his chains fell off, and the iron gate of the city opened of its own accord (Acts 12:7–10). Israel’s whole story as a people began with such a release, when God brought them out of slavery in Egypt (Exodus 12). And the light that meets the freed prisoners is the light Isaiah promised, when “the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2).

Verse 15 stands between the rescue of verse 14 and the broken gates of verse 16, and it is the line the whole psalm keeps coming back to. “Oh that” translates a Hebrew particle, lu, that expresses a strong wish. The psalmist longs for people to give God the thanks he is due. The KJV prints “men” in italics because the translators supplied it, and the Hebrew simply says “they”.

The verb yâdâh means to praise, give thanks or confess. Strong’s traces it to holding out the hand, and praise in this word is an outward thing, spoken and shown, an open acknowledgment of what God has done. The LORD here is Yᵉhôvâh, the covenant name of Israel’s God.

The first reason for praise is “his goodness”, which is cheçed, one of the richest words in the Old Testament. It is translated steadfast love, loyal love, mercy and covenant faithfulness, a love that holds firm within a relationship and acts on it. It belongs to who God is, and it is the reason he rescues these rebels at all. Lamentations rests on the same love, saying that his compassions are new every morning (Lamentations 3:22–23).

The second reason is “his wonderful works”, from pâlâʼ, to be wonderful, extraordinary, beyond understanding. These works, nifla’ot, are his astonishing deeds: finding the lost, freeing the captive, healing the sick and stilling the sea, as the psalm recounts, and its sailors see his wonders in the deep (Psalm 107:24). Israel sang of the same God after the crossing of the sea, “Who is like unto thee, O LORD, among the gods? who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders?” (Exodus 15:11), and the redeemed in Revelation sing, “Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty” (Revelation 15:3–4).

These works are done “to the children of men”, livnei adam, from bên, son, and ʼâdâm, man. The phrase reaches beyond Israel to all humanity. God’s care and his power to save are for people everywhere, and the call to praise goes out to all of them, looking ahead to the God who so loved the world (John 3:16).

Zacharias, at the birth of his son John, praised God for the coming of one who would “give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Luke 1:79), the very words of verse 10. Isaiah foretold one who would open blind eyes and bring prisoners out of the dungeon (Isaiah 42:7), and one anointed to proclaim liberty to the captives (Isaiah 61:1). Jesus took up that promise in his first sermon. He came “to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised” (Luke 4:18).

We all stood where these prisoners stood. “All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23), and we were dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1–3), without strength and with none to help, when Christ died for the ungodly (Romans 5:6). The rebellion of verse 11 is ours. Jesus alone kept the words of God perfectly and always did what pleased his Father (John 8:29). He is the Word made flesh (John 1:14), and in him “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3), so that to reject him was to despise the counsel of the Most High in person. Yet he was brought down for us. On the cross he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), and God made him to be sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). So he can call all who labour and are heavy laden to come to him (Matthew 11:28).

Christ is the light that shines in the darkness: “In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:4–5). He says, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). God has delivered us from the power of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of his dear Son (Colossians 1:13–14). Through death Christ destroyed the one who had the power of death, to “deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:14–15). He disarmed the powers of darkness and triumphed over them (Colossians 2:15), and he holds “the keys of hell and of death” (Revelation 1:18). Those were the gates of brass and the bars of iron that held mankind, and he has broken them. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36), and so Paul tells the freed to “stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free” (Galatians 5:1).

The wonderful works of verse 15 are seen in his ministry as well. He set captives free, healed all manner of sickness (Matthew 4:23), and stilled the wind and the waves with a word (Mark 4:39). He is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15), so God’s goodness is seen in him in full, and through him God has reconciled us to himself (2 Corinthians 5:18–19). Whoever confesses him as Lord and believes that God raised him from the dead is saved (Romans 10:9–10), and God gives his people the Spirit of wisdom and revelation to know him (Ephesians 1:17), so that the counsel the prisoners despised becomes the counsel we walk in.

These verses give us an honest account of sin and a bright account of mercy. They name rebellion as the cause of the prisoners’ chains, and they show God himself bringing their hearts down until they had nowhere else to turn. Then they show him hearing the moment they cry. The ones he frees are the ones who despised his counsel, and that is the measure of his goodness.

The God of this passage breaks what people cannot break. Bronze and iron give way before him, and so do sin, death and the grave, as the cross and the empty tomb show. Whatever holds a person fast is weaker than the God who hears the cry of the prisoner. And the psalm’s longing still stands, that men would praise the LORD for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men.