Psalm 77:19

Psalm 77 is a lament of Asaph, a Levite who led Israel’s music and is also called a seer. It opens with sleepless nights and with hard questions about whether God has forgotten to be gracious (Psalm 77:1–9). The turn comes when he resolves to remember “the years of the right hand of the most High” and God’s “wonders of old” (Psalm 77:10–12). He begins to recount God’s mighty deeds (Psalm 77:13–15), and in these last five verses the memory becomes a picture of the Exodus itself.

The crossing of the Red Sea, told in Exodus 14, was the founding rescue of Israel’s history. It made them a people, and it stayed at the centre of their worship as the proof that the LORD keeps his covenant and can deliver from any danger. As a leader of that worship, Asaph knew the story well, and he turns to it on purpose. Scripture asks the same of all God’s people: “Remember the former things of old” (Isaiah 46:9).

The psalm closes on this memory. Asaph’s questions are answered by what God has already done, and his lament ends as a statement of trust.

Verse 16 speaks of the sea as if it were alive. The waters see God, they are afraid, and the depths are troubled. Asaph says “the waters saw thee” twice, which presses the point that the sea met God face to face and knew who he was. He addresses God as Elohim, the name that speaks of him as the mighty Creator of all things.

The word for waters, mayim, is the ordinary word for water, and here it means the sea that stood between Israel and safety. The verb behind “they were afraid” is chûwl, a word for writhing or trembling that is used of anguish and of the pains of labour. So the fear in this verse is bodily. The waters are seized and convulsed at the sight of God.

“The depths” are tᵉhôwm, the deep, the same word used for the deep that lay under darkness before God ordered the world (Genesis 1:2). Even the lowest and most hidden waters are “troubled”, shaken through. The Hebrew form here, yirgazu, belongs to the verb râgaz, to quiver or quake, which returns in verse 18 when the earth trembles.

In Scripture the sea often stands for chaos and untamed power, and other passages speak of sea monsters such as Rahab and Leviathan, though this verse names none. For the nations, a god who could master the sea was a god above all others. Asaph says that the sea trembled at the mere sight of the LORD. This is what happened when Moses stretched out his hand and the LORD drove the sea back (Exodus 14:21). Nahum says of him that “he rebuketh the sea, and maketh it dry” (Nahum 1:4).

Verses 17 and 18 describe a storm, and every part of it belongs to God. The clouds “poured out” water, and the verb zâram means to gush or to sweep away as with a flood, so this is a torrent. The skies “sent out a sound”. The word is qôwl, which means a voice or a sound, and beside clouds and lightning it means thunder. Verse 18 uses the same word in “the voice of thy thunder”, and so thunder here is God’s own voice, a deliberate word from heaven. Psalm 29 is built on this, where “the voice of the LORD” is upon the waters, breaks the cedars and shakes the wilderness (Psalm 29:3–9).

“Thine arrows” are the lightning. The word is châtsâts, akin to the usual word for an arrow, chêts, and Scripture elsewhere sets God’s arrows and his lightnings side by side (Psalm 18:14). Asaph calls them “thine”. The lightning is a weapon in God’s hand, swift and aimed, and it goes where he sends it.

In verse 18 the lightning is named directly. Bârâq means lightning, and it is also the word for the flash of a polished weapon. The lightnings “lightened” the world, from the verb ʼôwr, to be or become light and to make something shine. The “world” is têbêl, the whole inhabited earth, so God’s glory was shown openly and widely. Then the earth answers as the sea did. It “trembled”, râgaz, to quiver or quake, and it “shook”, râʻash, to undulate or quake as the ground does. The two verbs together describe the earth convulsed before its Maker.

The nations around Israel thought of thunder as a god’s voice and lightning as his weapons, and they had storm gods of their own. Asaph gives the storm, the sea and the earth to the LORD alone, who at the Exodus defeated the gods of Egypt.

Verse 19 gathers the whole memory into one sentence. “Way” is derek, a road, a course, or a manner of acting. “Sea” is yâm, the sea or any large body of water. God’s road ran straight through the thing that had blocked his people. Asaph says it twice in parallel lines, “thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters”, and the second line enlarges the first. The greater the waters, the plainer it is that God is their master. Isaiah praises him in the same terms, as the LORD who makes a way in the sea and a path in the mighty waters (Isaiah 43:16).

For Israel the sea was an impassable barrier, the place where human strength ends. God made his path exactly there, and he opened a way where there had been none.

After the thunder, the psalm ends in a single quiet verse. “Thou leddest” is nâchâh, to lead or guide. The whole journey out of Egypt and through the forty years in the wilderness is credited to God himself, who went before Israel in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night (Exodus 13:21). “Thy people” marks them as his own, bound to him by covenant.

“Like a flock” uses tsôʼn, a collective word for a flock of sheep and goats. Israel was a nation of shepherds and knew what the picture meant. A flock depends on its shepherd for food, direction and protection, and Israel in the desert depended on God for all three. Kings in those days were called shepherds of their people, and the LORD is the true one: “The LORD is my shepherd” (Psalm 23:1). Isaiah speaks of the same tender care (Isaiah 40:11).

“By the hand of” uses yâd, the word for hand, and with its preposition (bəyāḏ) the phrase marks the agent through whom something is done. Moses the lawgiver and prophet, and Aaron his brother, the first high priest, were the men God led through. God called Moses to bring Israel out (Exodus 3:10) and promised to be with his mouth and teach him what to say (Exodus 4:12). Scripture speaks of God’s own mighty hand at work in the same deliverance (Exodus 3:19). The leading was God’s, and he chose to do it through people.

The verse sums up everything before it. The power that convulsed the sea was used to bring a flock safely through, and Asaph, who feared that God had forgotten to be gracious, ends with the Shepherd.

The God before whom the waters trembled came among us in Jesus Christ. On the Sea of Galilee he rebuked the wind and stilled the sea, and his disciples asked, “What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:39–41). He walked on the water to them in the night (Matthew 14:22–33). The sea knows him because all things in heaven and earth were created by him (Colossians 1:16).

He also makes the hidden God known. God’s footsteps in the sea were unseen, and nobody has seen God at any time, yet the Son has declared him (John 1:18). He is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15) and “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3). The voice that thundered over the waters is heard in him, for the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God and live (John 5:25). As God made a way through the sea, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). By his death and resurrection he opened a path through sin and death, and he triumphed over the powers that stood against us (Colossians 2:15).

Moses and Aaron were faithful and they were temporary. Jesus is counted worthy of “more glory than Moses” (Hebrews 3:1–6). He is the ruler of God’s people Israel announced in Matthew 2:6, and he says of himself, “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). He calls his own sheep by name and goes before them (John 10:3–4), and he is “that great shepherd of the sheep” whom God brought again from the dead (Hebrews 13:20–21).

The shaking of verse 18 looks forward as well. Christ’s return will come with signs in the heavens (Matthew 24:29–30) and a great shaking (Revelation 6:12–17), when God shakes the earth and heaven too (Hebrews 12:26–27). In the new heaven and new earth there is “no more sea” (Revelation 21:1), and every chaos that threatened God’s people is gone.

Asaph’s circumstances are the same at the end of the psalm as at the beginning. What has changed is what he is looking at. He set his trouble beside the Red Sea, and the God of the Red Sea was large enough to answer it. The psalm gives us that same memory to use, along with the cross and the empty tomb, which Asaph never saw.

It also tells us the truth about how God’s help often looks from the inside. His path may run through the deepest water, and his footsteps may stay hidden while we are in it. Israel saw no footprints in the sea bed, and they came out on the far shore. When you can find no trace of what God is doing, this passage says that a way through the sea is the kind of way he makes.

And it shows us who God is with both sides held together. The one whose voice shakes the earth leads his people at the pace of a flock. He still does much of that leading through people he appoints, as he did through Moses and Aaron, and behind every faithful guide the Shepherd is the LORD himself.