Psalm 68:4

The psalm is headed “To the chief Musician, A Psalm or Song of David,” and its first line is one Israel already knew. Whenever the ark set out in the wilderness, Moses said, “Rise up, LORD, and let thine enemies be scattered; and let them that hate thee flee before thee” (Numbers 10:35). The ark stood for God’s presence going before his people. David takes up that cry and speaks it of God: “Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered: let them also that hate him flee before him.” Because of this echo, the psalm may well have been written for a great occasion for the ark, such as the day David brought it up to Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6, 1 Chronicles 15), or for a great campaign in war.

The rest of the psalm tells the story this cry begins. God marches before his people through the wilderness (Psalm 68:7), chooses the hill he desires to dwell in (Psalm 68:16), and ascends on high, leading captivity captive (Psalm 68:18). These first six verses tell us who the God of that procession is.

Verse 2 gives two pictures everyone in Israel had seen. Smoke, ʻâshân, rises thick and dark, and then the wind thins it and it is gone: “As smoke is driven away, so drive them away.” Wax, dôwnag, keeps its shape until it comes near a fire, and then it softens, runs and loses its form: “as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.” The first picture shows how easily God removes the wicked, and the second how completely. Psalm 1 uses a picture of the same kind: “The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away” (Psalm 1:4). Nahum joins melting and fire in the same way: “The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt,” and “his fury is poured out like fire” (Nahum 1:5–6).

What undoes the wicked is “the presence of God”. The word is pânîym (panim), face. It is plural in form and always used as a singular, and from the face itself it comes to mean the front of a thing and a person’s presence. So the wicked perish when they come before God’s face, in the full sight of his holiness and power. The wicked, rasha, are those who are guilty before God, who rebel against his law and set themselves against his people and his ways. Scripture’s last word on their perishing is the lake of fire, “the second death” (Revelation 20:14–15).

This verse carries comfort for the righteous who suffer under the wicked, because God sees and he will act. It also carries a warning to everyone who goes on defying him, because the power of the wicked lasts only as long as smoke.

“But let the righteous be glad.” With that “But” the psalm turns from those who perish to those who rejoice. The righteous, tsaddîyq (plural tsaddîyqîm), are those who are just and stand right with God. They are sinners too, and their righteousness is God’s declaring them right as they trust him, with lives set toward seeking him and pleasing him. Psalm 1 sets the two companies side by side and ends with their two ways: “Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the LORD knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish” (Psalm 1:5–6).

The verse climbs in three steps. “Be glad” is śāmach, to rejoice, to feel and show great joy. “Rejoice” is ʻâlats, to jump for joy, to exult. In “exceedingly rejoice” the KJV’s “exceedingly” stands for the noun simchâh, gladness or glee, which here heightens the verb. Each line says more than the one before, and the joy grows until it overflows.

What makes this joy holy is where it happens: “before God”. The verb śāmach is used elsewhere even of gloating over another’s ruin, so the place and the object of the joy matter. Here the righteous rejoice in God’s presence, at the triumph of their God. It would have been a public joy, the whole people celebrating together at a festival, as Israel did after God gave victory. “In thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Psalm 16:11), and “the joy of the LORD is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10).

Verse 4 is a burst of commands. “Sing” is shîyr, to sing, and “sing praises” is zâmar, to sing praise: “Sing unto God, sing praises to his name.” The repetition presses the call home. Praise goes to his name, to God as he has made himself known. “Extol” is çâlal, to mound up, to raise, to exalt, and the praise lifts God high before everyone. The last command, “rejoice before him”, carries on the joy of verse 3. The Psalms call God’s people to this again and again: “O come, let us sing unto the LORD” (Psalm 95:1–2), and “Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing” (Psalm 100:2). If the psalm was sung as the ark came up to Jerusalem, this is the scene of that day: “David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the LORD with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet” (2 Samuel 6:15).

The God who rides upon the heavens turns at once to the weakest people in Israel. “A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.”

The fatherless, yâthôwm, are orphans, children who have lost their fathers. Strong’s traces the word to an unused root glossed “to be lonely”. In Israel the father provided for the household, protected it and spoke for it at law. A child without a father and a woman without a husband had no one to stand up for them and were easily exploited and passed over. So the law of Moses commanded care for them again and again: “Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child” (Exodus 22:22). The law grounds that command in God himself, who “doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment” (Deuteronomy 10:18). Where a father is missing, God takes his place, providing, protecting and giving the child a place to belong.

A judge, dayân, is one who decides cases, an arbiter and an advocate, from a root meaning to rule or to contend. God as “a judge of the widows” takes up their cause, defends their rights and puts right the wrongs done to them. A widow who has no one to plead for her in court has God himself.

He does all this “in his holy habitation”. The word mâʻôwn means a dwelling, and it is used of God’s dwelling, of a person’s home and of an animal’s den. With qôdesh, holiness, the Hebrew phrase me’on qodsho names the holy place where God lives. His care for the orphan and the widow comes from the highest and purest place there is, so it is part of who he is. Care for the fatherless and widows became a test of true righteousness among his people, and James says the same: “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world” (James 1:27).

Verse 6 carries God’s care further and ends with a warning. “God setteth the solitary in families.” The solitary, yâchîyd (yachid), are those who are alone. The word means one, sole and only, by implication beloved, and also lonely, and it is plural here, so it takes in every such person. They are the orphans and widows of verse 5 and anyone else without kin or support. The word behind “families” is bayith, house, used widely of a household and family. God gives the lonely a household where they belong, where there is support, a name and a place. Israel’s law made room for such people, leaving the forgotten sheaf and the gleanings of olive and vine “for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow” (Deuteronomy 24:19–21). In Christ this household is God’s own family, where believers are “fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19) and “the body of Christ, and members in particular” (1 Corinthians 12:27).

“He bringeth out those which are bound with chains.” Israel’s memory of freedom began in Egypt, when God brought his people out of slavery on the night of the Passover (Exodus 12). The prophets carry the promise forward: the Servant of the LORD is sent “to bring out the prisoners from the prison” (Isaiah 42:7), and the Spirit-anointed one comes “to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound” (Isaiah 61:1). God breaks the chains of captives, and the chains of sin as well.

“But the rebellious dwell in a dry land.” The rebellious are those who resist God’s rule and go on in disobedience. Their home is a tsᵉchîychâh (tsechichah), a parched region, a desert, the opposite of the land flowing with milk and honey that God gave his people. Deuteronomy sets the blessings of obedience beside the curses of rebellion (Deuteronomy 28), and Proverbs says, “the way of transgressors is hard” (Proverbs 13:15), and “the turning away of the simple shall slay them” (Proverbs 1:32). The lonely are brought into a house and the prisoner is brought out into freedom, and the one who refuses God is left in the dry place he has chosen.

The God who arises in verse 1 is revealed in Jesus Christ. Christ rose from the dead, and by his cross and resurrection he defeated sin, death and the devil: “having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15). His return will complete the scattering of his enemies, when he comes on a white horse as “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS” (Revelation 19:11–16), when every knee shall bow and every tongue confess “that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:10–11), and when “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ” (Revelation 11:15).

The presence of God at which the wicked perish has come near in Christ to save. He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and he bore the judgment due to the wicked, so that all who believe can come before God’s face and live. When he is revealed from heaven “in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God” (2 Thessalonians 1:7–9), his presence will end all wickedness for good.

Christ is the perfectly righteous one, and in him God’s righteousness comes “unto all and upon all them that believe” (Romans 3:22). So the joy of the righteous in verse 3 is ours in him, a joy he promised “no man taketh from you” (John 16:22), and it will be full at the marriage of the Lamb: “Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him” (Revelation 19:7).

The one who rides upon the heavens in verse 4 is seen in the Son of man who comes “with the clouds of heaven” (Daniel 7:13), whom all shall see “coming in the clouds with great power and glory” (Mark 13:26). The name JAH, the name of the God who is, sounds in Jesus’ own words, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). Risen, he has been given “All power ... in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18) and sits “on the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Hebrews 1:3), so the praise of verse 4 belongs to him.

In his ministry Jesus cared for the lowly, the sick, the hungry and the outcast, and he counts what is done for the least of his brethren as done to himself (Matthew 25:31–46). He told his disciples, “I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you” (John 14:18), a word other translations render “orphans”. He is the advocate “who also maketh intercession for us” (Romans 8:34) and the judge to whom the Father “hath committed all judgment” (John 5:22). In him the God of the holy habitation came to dwell among us (John 1:14).

He also fulfils verse 6. He shared our loneliness as “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3), and he gathers the solitary into his household. He breaks the chains of sin so that we “walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4): “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36). The dry land remains for those who refuse him, for “he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him” (John 3:36).

These six verses put two things about God side by side and refuse to separate them. The God whose rising scatters armies and melts the wicked like wax is the same God who sees the orphan, pleads for the widow, finds the lonely a home and opens the prison door. His power is the reason his care can be trusted, and his care shows what his power is for.

So the psalm gives the righteous a joy that rests on him, and a name to sing, JAH, the God who is and who keeps faith. It gives the weak a Father and a Judge in the highest place there is. It also tells the truth about rebellion, that it ends in a dry land. If you are without a father, alone or bound, verse 5 and verse 6 name God as the one who stands in that place for you, and the “let them” of verse 3 is his invitation to rejoice before him.