Psalm 18:18

Psalm 18 is David’s song of thanksgiving, sung “in the day that the LORD delivered him from the hand of all his enemies, and from the hand of Saul”, as its heading says (Psalm 18). The same song stands, with small differences, in 2 Samuel 22, so Scripture gives it to us twice, once in Israel’s hymnbook and once in the history of David’s reign. It opens with David’s love for the LORD (Psalm 18:1) and his declaration of trust in him (Psalm 18:2). Then David tells how death closed in on him and how he cried to the LORD in his distress (Psalm 18:4–6).

The “Then” that opens verse 7 follows straight from that cry. Verses 7 to 15 are a theophany, which is the name for an appearing of God marked by great signs in heaven and earth. Verses 16 to 19 tell what the appearing was for: the rescue of one man.

David had plenty of days that fit this song. Saul hunted him for years (1 Samuel 19), drove him at last to live among the Philistines (1 Samuel 27), and chased him, as David himself put it, like a partridge in the mountains (1 Samuel 26:20). After that came wars with the Philistines, the Amalekites and others, and trouble inside his own kingdom.

Israel already knew this way of speaking about God from Mount Sinai: “there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled... And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly” (Exodus 19:16–18). Israel also knew the LORD as the one who fights for his people. He brought them through the sea (Exodus 14), and they sang, “The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name” (Exodus 15:3). The nations around Israel gave thunder, lightning and rain to storm gods such as Baal and pictured their gods riding on clouds and chariots. David gives every part of the storm to the LORD alone, who uses it with purpose and justice for his covenant people and their anointed king.

The first thing to react is the ground. The earth, ʼerets, can mean the ground, a land or the whole world, and here it takes in all of creation. Two verbs pile up its movement: it “shook” (gâʻash) and “trembled” (râʻash). Then David goes deeper, to “the foundations also of the hills”. The word for foundations, môwçâdâh, is the base something is built on, and the hills, har, are the mountains, the Bible’s usual picture of what is old and fixed. Even these “moved” (râgaz) and “were shaken”, where gâʻash comes back a second time. When God rises to act, the most stable things we know give way.

The reason is given in four words: “because he was wroth.” The verb, chârâh, means to glow or grow warm, and so to blaze up in anger. It is the ordinary Hebrew verb for anger, used of people as well as of God, so the holiness of this anger lies in the one who is angry. The earthquake is purposeful. Creation shakes because its Lord is roused on behalf of a hunted man who called to him, as another psalm says: “The righteous cry, and the LORD heareth” (Psalm 34:17).

Other songs in Scripture describe the LORD’s coming the same way. Deborah sang that the earth trembled when the LORD marched out (Judges 5:4). Nahum says, “The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked: the LORD hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet”, and goes on to say that the mountains quake before him and to ask who can stand before his indignation (Nahum 1:3–6).

Verse 8 pictures the anger itself. Smoke, ʻashan, goes up from God’s nostrils, like the snorting of an enraged bull. Fire, ʼesh, comes from his mouth and devours, and since the mouth is the place of speech, the picture is of his word and decree going out as a force that consumes. Coals, gechel, are embers or burning coals, and they are “kindled by it”, so the fire spreads and keeps burning. The anger of the LORD is thorough.

Smoke and fire mark God’s presence elsewhere in Scripture. Sinai was wrapped in smoke when he came down on it, and when Isaiah saw the LORD on his throne the temple was filled with smoke (Isaiah 6:4). Moses told Israel that “the LORD thy God is a consuming fire” (Deuteronomy 4:24), and the letter to the Hebrews repeats it: “our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29). For David this fire was good news, because it burned against the people who were hunting him. The God who is a terror to his enemies is the deliverer of those who trust him, as David says in another psalm (Psalm 3:7–8).

God does the next thing himself. “He bowed the heavens also, and came down.” To bow, nâṭâh, means to stretch out, incline or bend, so the sky itself is bent low as he comes. “Came down”, yârad, is the plain word for descending. The God who is enthroned far above creation is willing to come down into the trouble of one of his servants, and David comes back to this later in the psalm, when he speaks of God stooping to help him (Psalm 18:35).

“Darkness was under his feet.” This darkness, ʻărâphel, is gloom, thick darkness, the dense black of a storm cloud. It lies under his feet like a floor or a footstool, which shows that the most frightening things in creation are beneath him and serve him. Moses reminded Israel that the mountain burned with fire at Horeb amid darkness, clouds and thick darkness (Deuteronomy 4:11), and Habakkuk saw the same march of God: “Before him went the pestilence, and burning coals went forth at his feet. He stood, and measured the earth: he beheld, and drove asunder the nations; and the everlasting mountains were scattered, the perpetual hills did bow: his ways are everlasting” (Habakkuk 3:5–6).

Verse 11 describes how God comes: hidden. “He made darkness his secret place.” The word for darkness here, chôshek, is a different word from the storm gloom of verse 9 and means obscurity or deep shadow. A secret place, çêther, is a cover or hiding place. His pavilion, çukkâh, is the word for a hut, booth or tent, used here for the canopy that surrounds him as he moves. That tent is made of “dark waters and thick clouds of the skies”, the heavy rain clouds of a storm. The waters that threaten us are the walls of his tent.

The darkness is the veil over a glory too great for human eyes. At Sinai the LORD told Moses that he would come in a thick cloud (Exodus 19:9), and “Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was” (Exodus 20:21). Solomon said at the dedication of the temple that the LORD had said he would dwell in the thick darkness (1 Kings 8:12). Job says that God spreads his cloud over the face of his throne (Job 26:9), and Psalm 97 sings that clouds and darkness are round about him while his lightnings light the world (Psalm 97:2–4).

People ask whether this darkness means that God is evil or is hiding himself from us. The darkness speaks of his majesty and of how far his ways are above our understanding. Paul says that he dwells “in the light which no man can approach unto” (1 Timothy 6:16), and that his judgments are unsearchable and his ways past finding out (Romans 11:33). God shows us what we need in order to know him and be saved, and he remains greater than we can take in. So when his hand is hidden from us, as it must often have been hidden from David in the caves, he is still present and at work inside the cloud.

Out of the darkness comes light. “At the brightness that was before him his thick clouds passed.” Brightness, nôgahh, is brilliance or shining, the radiance of God’s own presence. The thick clouds, ʻâb, are dense, dark clouds, and they give way before that radiance. Then the weapons of the storm come through: “hail stones and coals of fire.” Hail, bârâd, is one of God’s weapons throughout the Old Testament. He sent hail mingled with fire on Egypt (Exodus 9:23–24), rained fire on Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:24), and cast great hailstones on the Amorites as they fled from Joshua at Gibeon (Joshua 10:11).

Verse 13 adds the sound. “The LORD also thundered in the heavens, and the Highest gave his voice.” To thunder is râʻam, and the second half of the line says the same thing in other words: he “gave”, nâthan, his “voice”, qôwl. The thunder is God speaking. The name “the Highest”, ʻelyôwn, means high or upper and is the title “Most High”, the God who is above every power on earth and in heaven, including every storm god the nations feared. The line “hail stones and coals of fire” closes this verse as it closed the one before, with the same words for hail and for coals, gechel, that verse 8 used.

Scripture often hears God’s voice in thunder. Psalm 29 says that “the voice of the LORD is upon the waters” and describes it breaking cedars and shaking the wilderness (Psalm 29:3–9). When the Philistines attacked Israel in Samuel’s day, the LORD thundered against them with a great thunder and threw them into confusion (1 Samuel 7:10). Habakkuk saw the mountains tremble and the sun and moon stand still at the light of God’s arrows and his glittering spear (Habakkuk 3:10–11).

In verse 14 the storm becomes a battle. “He sent out his arrows, and scattered them; and he shot out lightnings, and discomfited them.” An arrow, chêts, comes from a root meaning to pierce, and the second half of the verse explains the first: God’s arrows are his lightnings. To scatter, pûwts, is to dash in pieces or disperse, so the enemy’s ranks break up and run. To discomfit, hâmam, is to put into commotion, to disturb or destroy, and it describes panic and confusion, an army that has lost its nerve as well as its formation. David’s enemies were defeated by the LORD. This is the prayer of another psalm answered: “Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered” (Psalm 68:1).

Verse 15 is the peak of the storm, and here David turns and speaks to God directly: “at thy rebuke, O LORD.” The “channels of waters” are the deep beds of streams and torrents, ʼâphîyq, which normally lie hidden under the water, and now they “were seen”. The “foundations of the world” use the same word for foundations as verse 7, now joined to têbêl, the world, and they are “discovered”. In the KJV that word has its older sense of uncovered. The Hebrew verb, gâlâh, means to denude, uncover or lay bare. The deepest and most hidden parts of creation are exposed.

What does it is a word and a breath. A rebuke, gᵉʻârâh, comes from a verb meaning to chide, and God’s rebuke is a command that things obey. The “blast”, nᵉshâmâh, is a puff of wind or breath, angry or life-giving, and “nostrils” is ʼaph, a word that often carries the sense of anger. God’s displeasure alone is enough to empty the sea.

Israel had seen this. At creation God gathered the waters so that the dry land appeared (Genesis 1:9–10). At the Red Sea the waters piled up at his breath, and Israel sang of it (Exodus 15:8). Job says that the pillars of heaven tremble at him (Job 26:11).

The uncovering has a second meaning. What God lays bare in the earth he can lay bare in people, including the hidden plans of those who oppose him. Isaiah saw men going into the holes of the rocks for fear of the LORD when he rises to shake the earth (Isaiah 2:19). Hebrews says that “all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do” (Hebrews 4:13). And John saw a great white throne, before which earth and heaven fled away (Revelation 20:11).

After nine verses of earthquake and storm, the song suddenly becomes quiet and personal. “He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters.” Each clause begins with “he”, and each verb brings God closer. He “sent”, shâlach, which means to send or to stretch out, as one stretches out a hand, and he did it “from above”, from his own height. He “took”, lâqach, which is to take hold of, to grasp. He “drew”, mâshâh, which is to pull out. All the power of the storm was for this: one hand reaching down to one drowning man.

That last verb is the one used when Pharaoh’s daughter named the child she had found in the river, “Because I drew him out of the water” (Exodus 2:10). David describes his own rescue with the word that gave Moses his name. Like the baby in the basket, he could do nothing to save himself.

“Many waters” is one of the Bible’s regular pictures of overwhelming danger: enemies, chaos, the nearness of death, anything that closes over a person’s head. It reaches back to the deep that lay in darkness before God ordered the world (Genesis 1:2). David prays elsewhere, “Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul” (Psalm 69:1–2), and Jonah, sinking in the real sea, says that the floods surrounded him and that God brought his life up from the pit (Jonah 2:3–6). To his people God promises, “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee” (Isaiah 43:2).

Verses 17 and 18 say plainly what the waters were. “He delivered me from my strong enemy, and from them which hated me.” To deliver here is nâtsal, to snatch away or pull out, a quick and forceful rescue. The enemy, ʼôyêb, comes from a verb meaning to be hostile. The one “strong enemy” is most naturally Saul, who is named in the psalm’s heading, and “them which hated me” widens the circle to all David’s foes.

Then David gives his reason: “for they were too strong for me.” The verb, ʼâmats, means to be strong, to be courageous, to prevail. This is the confession of a seasoned soldier. David was a great warrior, and he says here that the victory was God’s, since his enemies had the upper hand. His weakness is the very place where God’s power shows, as the Lord later told Paul: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). The same confidence fills another of David’s psalms, where an army camped against him leaves his heart unafraid because the LORD is his light and his salvation (Psalm 27:1–3), and God says it to all his people through Isaiah: “Fear thou not; for I am with thee” (Isaiah 41:10).

The rescue ends in open country. “He brought me forth also into a large place.” To bring forth, yâtsâʼ, is to go out, and here to bring out. A large place, merchâb, is a broad, open space, room to move, and so a picture of liberty. Israel knew what it was to be hemmed in by enemies and by narrow valleys, and David knew it better than most, having lived in caves and strongholds. God took him out of every tight corner and gave him room to live. Psalm 119 speaks of walking in the same kind of wide place (Psalm 119:45). For us the large place is often freedom and peace of heart while the circumstances are still hard, and sometimes it is a plain rescue from them.

“He delivered me” uses a different Hebrew verb from the “delivered” of verse 17. This one, chalats, means to draw off or pull out, to rescue. The two together cover the whole rescue: snatched from the enemy, and drawn out to safety.

The last clause is the heart of the passage: “because he delighted in me.” The verb, châphêts, means to be pleased with, to like, to desire. It is a word of affection. Behind the earthquake, the thunder and the outstretched hand there was this: God was fond of David. David traces his rescue to God’s pleasure in him and takes none of the credit for his own strength or skill. God had bound himself to David and his house by covenant (2 Samuel 7), and David’s deliverances showed that he was the LORD’s chosen king. In the verses that follow, David goes on to speak of God’s righteousness and of his own integrity before him.

God speaks of all his people this way. He told Israel that he set his love on them because he loved them and kept his oath to their fathers, and for no greatness of theirs (Deuteronomy 7:7–8). “I have loved thee with an everlasting love,” he says through Jeremiah (Jeremiah 31:3). Isaiah tells Zion that she will be called by a name that means the LORD delights in her (Isaiah 62:4), and Zephaniah says that he will rejoice over his people with joy and with singing (Zephaniah 3:17).

David’s rescue points ahead to a greater one. In this psalm God bows the heavens and comes down for one man. In the Gospel he comes down for the world. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1), and “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The Son, who was in the form of God, “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:6–7). God sent him so that the world might be saved through him (John 3:17).

The God whom David saw veiled in cloud is seen in Christ. 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 light that broke through the thick clouds in verse 12 shines in him: “the light shineth in darkness” (John 1:5), and he calls himself the light of the world (John 8:12). All things were made by him and hold together in him (Colossians 1:16–17), so the power over wind and water that this psalm gives to the LORD is the power Jesus used when he rebuked the storm and it was still (Mark 4:39) and when he walked on the sea (Matthew 14:25).

The anger of verse 7 meets us at the cross. There God set forth Christ as the propitiation for our sins (Romans 3:25), so that the wrath our sins deserved fell on him, and God showed his love for us in that Christ died for us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8). He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). When he died the earth quaked and the rocks split (Matthew 27:51).

Jesus also entered David’s place. He had his own day of calamity, betrayed, surrounded by enemies, and crying from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). He went under the many waters of death, and the Father was his stay and drew him out, for he was declared to be the Son of God with power by his resurrection from the dead (Romans 1:4).

By that death and resurrection he dealt with the enemies that are too strong for us. He disarmed the powers and triumphed over them openly (Colossians 2:15). He destroyed the one who had the power of death, the devil, and freed those who lived all their lives in fear of death (Hebrews 2:14–15). Death itself is swallowed up in victory, and God gives us that victory through our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:54–57). God has delivered us from the power of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of his dear Son (Colossians 1:13–14). That is our large place: life, and life more abundantly (John 10:10), with no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1–2). He is the rock on which a life can be built and stand through the storm (Matthew 7:24–25), a high priest who is touched with the feeling of our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15–16), and the one who says, “be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

The storm of this psalm will be seen in full when he returns. He will come “in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” (Matthew 24:30), and “every eye shall see him” (Revelation 1:7). He will be revealed from heaven in flaming fire (2 Thessalonians 1:7–8) and will consume the lawless one with the breath of his mouth (2 Thessalonians 2:8). John saw him riding out as King of kings and Lord of lords to judge and make war in righteousness (Revelation 19:11–16). God has promised to shake the earth and the heavens once more, so that only what is unshakable remains (Hebrews 12:26–27), and after that come the new heaven and the new earth, where God wipes away every tear (Revelation 21:1–4).

This passage shows who God is when one of his people is in trouble. He hears, and he comes. The scale of what David describes, with mountains shaking and the sea bed exposed, is the measure of how seriously God takes the cry of a single servant. The same power that is terrible to those who fight against him is the safety of those who call on him.

It also gives us words for our own weakness. David, the best soldier of his age, said of his enemies that “they were too strong for me”, and that honest sentence stands in Scripture beside “the LORD was my stay”. The song lets us say both. A trouble that is too strong for us has met the God for whom the foundations of the world are a small thing.

The darkness of verse 11 belongs here too. There are days when God’s work is hidden and the clouds are all we can see. David sang that the cloud was God’s own tent, and that the hand came out of it at the right time.

Most of all, the passage gives the reason. God rescued David “because he delighted in me”. All the thunder had affection behind it. In Christ that delight rests on us, and it is the ground under every other comfort the psalm holds out.