Psalm 109:21

The first ground of the plea is God’s name. A name, shêm, stood for the person himself, his character, his authority and his reputation. To ask God to act “for thy name’s sake” is to ask him to act in keeping with who he has shown himself to be. If God’s faithful servant is left in the hands of liars, God’s justice is called into question, and when God rescues him, God’s own faithfulness is on display. David speaks the same way when he says the LORD leads him in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake (Psalm 23:3). Through Ezekiel God says he will act to save Israel for the sake of his holy name, so that the nations will know he is the LORD (Ezekiel 36:22–23), and in Isaiah he says he will act for his own sake (Isaiah 48:11). The plea rests entirely on God, and that is what makes it strong.

The second ground is God’s mercy. The word, cheçed, means kindness, and it is one of the great words of the Old Testament, often rendered “lovingkindness” or “steadfast love”. It is the loyal love God has bound himself to show his people, and it acts on their behalf. The LORD proclaimed himself to Moses as merciful and gracious, slow to anger and rich in steadfast love and faithfulness (Exodus 34:6–7), and Psalm 136 opens by giving thanks to the LORD because he is good and his mercy endures for ever (Psalm 136:1). David calls this mercy good, ṭôwb, the broad word for good in every sense, and he leans his whole weight on it.

Then comes the request itself: “deliver thou me.” The verb nâtsal has the root sense of snatching away, and it is the word for rescuing a person out of the hand of whatever holds him. Here its object is David himself, and the hand he needs to be taken from is that of his accusers.

“I am poor and needy” joins two words for helplessness. The first, ʻânîy, comes from a root meaning to depress or afflict, and it describes someone bowed down by trouble and unable to defend himself. The second, ʼebyôwn, is someone in want, destitute, a beggar. Together they describe a man with no means and no protection, open to every injustice. David may have been a king when he prayed this, and still he calls himself poor, as he does again in Psalm 40:17.

These are the very people God has pledged to defend. His law told Israel to open its hand wide to a poor and needy brother (Deuteronomy 15:7–11), and through Isaiah he called his people to share their bread with the hungry and bring the poor into their homes (Isaiah 58:6–7). When David names himself poor and needy, he takes his place among those God has promised to hear, and his confession of weakness is itself an act of faith. Paul learned the same truth when the Lord told him that his strength is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9–10).

“My heart is wounded within me” goes deeper still. The heart, lêb, is the seat of the feelings, the will and the mind, and “within me” translates qereb, the inward part or centre. The verb for wounded, châlal, properly means to bore or pierce, and so to wound. The same root elsewhere means to profane, but here the sense is a wound that has gone right into the middle of him, the injury of betrayal and slander. “The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart” (Psalm 34:18), and the Messiah was sent to bind up the brokenhearted (Isaiah 61:1).

Verse 23 gives two pictures from the natural world. “I am gone like the shadow when it declineth” pictures a shadow, tsêl, at the end of the day. The verb nâṭâh means to stretch out or bend away, and it describes the long shadows of late afternoon that stretch across the ground just before night swallows them. David feels his life and strength draining away in the same way. Job says that man comes forth like a flower and flees as a shadow (Job 14:1–2), David asks God to show him how frail he is (Psalm 39:4–5), and Moses counts our years at seventy or eighty and soon gone (Psalm 90:10).

“I am tossed up and down as the locust” adds helplessness to frailty. The verb nâʻar means to tumble about or to shake off, and its form here is passive, so David is the one being shaken, by forces outside himself. The locust, ʼarbeh, is named for how fast it multiplies, and in swarms it can strip a land bare (Joel 1:4). A single locust, though, is small and light, and the wind carries it wherever it blows.

People ask whether it is wrong for a believer to feel as low as this. Scripture gives God’s people words for despair this deep and brings them to God in prayer, and the Lord Jesus himself told his disciples in Gethsemane that his soul was sorrowful even to death (Matthew 26:38). We are told to cast all our care on God, because he cares for us (1 Peter 5:7), and Paul could say that he was troubled on every side, yet not distressed (2 Corinthians 4:8–9), because his hope was fixed on God, an anchor of the soul (Hebrews 6:19). The strong pictures of this verse tell the truth about how David’s suffering felt, and they show God how urgently he needs help.

Verse 24 turns to David’s body. “My knees are weak” uses kâshal, to totter or waver, and it describes knees that wobble and lose their balance under him. The cause is fasting, tsôwm. In Israel people fasted to mourn, as the men of Jabesh did after Saul’s death (1 Samuel 31:13), to repent, as Nineveh did at Jonah’s preaching (Jonah 3:5), and to seek God’s help in danger, as Ezra did before a long journey (Ezra 8:21). Daniel set his face to seek God with prayer and fasting when he interceded for his people (Daniel 9:3). David’s fast is grief and prayer together, a man so absorbed in seeking God in his distress that he has let food go.

“My flesh faileth of fatness” means his body has lost its fullness. The word for fatness, shemen, is oil or grease, and figuratively richness. A well-nourished body was a sign of health and blessing, and gauntness a sign of distress. David’s flesh, his whole body, has grown lean and wasted under his trouble.

People also ask whether fasting still belongs to believers today. Jesus taught his disciples how to fast, speaking of it as something they would do, and told them to fast before their Father who sees in secret, with no show for others (Matthew 6:16–18). Fasting humbles us before God and gives our prayers their full attention, in repentance, in mourning, and in seeking his help, and it is to be done with wisdom about our own bodies, since its aim is to draw near to God. David’s weakness came from his enemies’ cruelty and his own earnest response to it. God uses such trouble for our good, as Paul says that tribulation works patience, experience and hope (Romans 5:3–5).

Verse 25 brings the onlookers in. “I became also a reproach unto them” uses cherpâh, disgrace or shame, a public dishonour as much as a private feeling. The word “also” adds this to everything else he has suffered. In Israel a person’s honour shaped his standing in the community, so to become a reproach was to lose his place among his people.

“When they looked upon me” uses râʼâh, the ordinary verb for seeing, and here they stare at his suffering as at a spectacle. Then “they shaked their heads”. The verb nûwaʻ means to waver or shake, and the word for head, rôʼsh, apparently comes from a root meaning to shake as well. Shaking the head at someone was a gesture of contempt and gloating over his misfortune. Job felt the same scorn from his friends (Job 16:20), those who passed by mocked ruined Jerusalem (Lamentations 2:15), and the faithful of old endured cruel mockings (Hebrews 11:36). David asks elsewhere that God judge him according to his righteousness (Psalm 7:8–9), plead his cause against those who strive with him (Psalm 35:1–8), and let those who rejoice at his hurt be ashamed (Psalm 35:26). That is the prayer that follows here.

David hands his cause to God, the righteous Judge, and asks him to do justice, which leaves vengeance where the law puts it, with the LORD (Deuteronomy 32:35). Paul quotes that same truth when he tells believers to repay no one evil for evil and to overcome evil with good (Romans 12:17–21), and Jesus tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:43–48). On the cross he prayed for the men who crucified him: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

Believers differ on how the prayers of this psalm carry over into Christian prayer. Some hold that they still give God’s people words to cry out to him against unrepentant evil, laying their pain and their longing for justice before him so that they need never take revenge themselves, while they also pray for their enemies to repent. Others hold that with Christ the believer’s prayer moves from calling down judgment to asking that God’s will be done, his mercy and his justice together, so that these psalms now chiefly teach us that God is a just Judge whose justice will prevail. Both agree that God sees every wrong, that judgment belongs to him, and that Scripture ends with heaven praising him for his true and righteous judgments (Revelation 19:1–3).