Psalm 130:6

Psalm 130 opens with a cry: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O LORD” (Psalm 130:1). The depths may be the weight of sin and guilt, a time of suffering, or a disaster on the whole nation, such as oppression or the exile in Babylon. The psalm leaves them unnamed, so anyone in deep waters can pray it. Then the psalmist owns that if the LORD marked iniquities, no one could stand, and rejoices that “there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared” (Psalm 130:3–4). That forgiveness comes first, and it is what makes the waiting of verse 5 possible. A sinner who knows that God forgives can wait for him with hope.

Verses 5 and 6 are the turning point of the psalm, where the cry and the confession give way to settled trust. They are spoken in the first person, “I” and “my soul”, and right after them the psalmist turns to the whole people: “Let Israel hope in the LORD: for with the LORD there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption” (Psalm 130:7–8). What he has learned in his own waiting he commends to all of Israel.

Psalm 130 is one of the Songs of Ascents (Psalms 120–134), which were probably sung by pilgrims going up to Jerusalem for the feasts, so these words would have been a hope shared along the road. It is also one of the seven Penitential Psalms, long prayed in times of repentance and confession.

“I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait.” The verb is qâvâh, which means to wait for, to look for and to hope for. It is the word for someone looking out eagerly for a person who is coming, with every expectation that he will come. So the psalmist’s waiting is active and full of hope, a steady leaning toward God while he waits for him to act. It is filled with prayer, with thinking over God’s promises and with bringing his own will into line with God’s. You may hear that qâvâh pictures strands twisted together into a strong rope, but the lexicons give it only the senses of waiting, looking and hoping for. The sense “to be gathered” belongs to a separate word spelled the same way.

The one he waits for is the LORD, Yᵉhôvâh, God’s own covenant name, the self-existent and eternal God who has kept faith with his people all through their history. So the waiting has a person at its end. The psalmist fixes his expectation on God himself, whose character and past deeds give him every reason to wait.

“My soul doth wait” says the first clause again and deepens it. The word for soul, nephesh, comes from a root meaning to breathe, and it means a breathing creature, life, the self, the person, and even appetite and desire. When the psalmist says that his soul waits, he means that his whole self is waiting, with his desires, his will and his very life. Hebrew poetry often sets two lines side by side like this, the second echoing the first and making it stronger.

Waiting on the LORD runs through the Psalms and the prophets, and it is always joined to strength and help. David ends Psalm 27:14 with “Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.” Isaiah promises, “But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31). Lamentations, written out of national ruin, says, “The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD” (Lamentations 3:25–26). Those who wait can do so because God keeps his word to stay with his people: “he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee” (Deuteronomy 31:6).

“And in his word do I hope.” Here the psalmist names the ground his waiting stands on. The verb for hope is yâchal, which means to wait or to hope, so the hoping and the waiting are one act of patient trust. The word for word, dâbâr, means a word or speech, and the same noun can also mean a matter, an affair or a thing. In this verse it is what God has said: his promises, his commands, his covenant and all that he has made known of himself. For Israel that meant the law, the promises spoken through the prophets and the covenant declarations on which their life as a people rested.

That gives hope something firm outside the one who hopes. The psalmist’s feelings rise and fall, and his circumstances may be dark, while God’s word stays exactly as he spoke it. Psalm 119 says the same thing twice: “My soul fainteth for thy salvation: but I hope in thy word” (Psalm 119:81), and “Thou art my hiding place and my shield: I hope in thy word” (Psalm 119:114). Paul tells us where such hope ends: “And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Romans 5:5).

“My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning.” Verse 6 takes up the waiting of verse 5 and gives it a picture every Israelite knew. The watchmen were those who kept guard through the night: guards on the city walls, priests on duty in the sanctuary, shepherds keeping their flocks from wild animals. Their nights were long, dark and often dangerous, and the dawn meant the end of the watch, the passing of danger, and the return of light, safety and the day’s work. The verb for watch, shâmar, means to hedge about as with thorns, and so to guard, protect and attend to. A watchman is awake, alert and fixed on the thing he is waiting for.

The morning, bôqer, is the break of day, and the word is traced to a root meaning to cleave, the breaking of daylight through the dark. For the watchman, morning means relief. In the psalm it stands for what the psalmist longs for from God: his presence, his deliverance, his forgiveness and his favour after a long night of distress and sin. The Psalms use the morning this way elsewhere: “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). After the night the morning always comes, and so the picture carries the psalmist’s trust that God will act, though his timing calls for patience.

The one he waits for in this verse is “the Lord”, ʼĂdônây, the title that names God as the sovereign Lord. The watchman wants the morning so that his shift can end, while the psalmist wants God himself. Another psalm puts the same longing this way: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God” (Psalm 42:1–2).

The New Testament shows where this waiting leads. The word the psalmist hoped in was spoken at last in a person. John writes that “the Word was God” (John 1:1), and that “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Every promise the psalmist trusted finds its yes in him: “For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us” (2 Corinthians 1:20).

The morning came with him as well. Zacharias praised God for “the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us, To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:78–79). Jesus 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), and he calls himself “the bright and morning star” (Revelation 22:16). The forgiveness the psalmist longed for out of the depths is given in his name: “through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins” (Acts 10:43).

We still wait, in the same posture as the psalmist. Christ “was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation” (Hebrews 9:28). We are “looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Paul says that we groan within ourselves as we wait for the redemption of our body, and “if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it” (Romans 8:23–25). That morning will be the last. God says, “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:5), and of the city to come Scripture says, “there shall be no night there” (Revelation 22:5).

These two verses give us words to pray when God’s answer is slow in coming. We can take them as our own, “I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait”, and mean by them what the psalmist meant: a whole heart turned toward God and looking out for him. That kind of waiting keeps praying, keeps going back to what God has said in the Scriptures, and keeps obeying while he works in his own time. Our hope then rests on his promises and his faithful character, which stay the same however things look around us.

The watchman’s picture also shows us what to want most. The psalmist longs for the Lord himself, above any relief or answer, and we can ask God to make our desire for him the strongest desire we have.

And all of this waiting starts from forgiveness. The psalmist could look up out of the depths because “there is forgiveness with thee”, and in Christ that forgiveness is given to everyone who believes in him. The night may be long, and the morning is as sure as God’s word.