Psalm 70:4

The title of Psalm 70 gives it to David. It opens with a cry for God to make haste and rescue him, and it asks that those who seek his ruin be put to shame and confusion (Psalm 70:1–3). Verse 4 turns from those enemies to God’s own people and prays for their joy. Verse 5 brings the prayer back to David’s own need and ends with the same cry for speed with which verse 1 began. So the whole psalm is framed by urgency, and in the middle of it stands a prayer for the gladness of everyone who belongs to God.

Almost the whole psalm also appears, nearly word for word, as the close of Psalm 40:13–17. Why the prayer stands twice in the Psalter we are not told. It may have been taken from the longer Psalm 40 to stand on its own as a short prayer for urgent need, or both psalms may draw on a prayer for deliverance that God’s people already knew well and could take up again as they needed it. Either way, the repetition shows how often God’s people have needed these very words.

The psalm names no occasion. It fits any time of serious personal or national danger, such as the rebellion of Absalom, when David faced fierce opposition and had to look to God alone.

“Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee” is a prayer to God for his people, and it is also a call to the people themselves. The verb for seek, bâqash, means to search out or seek, and it can also mean to require. In the Psalms it often describes seeking God’s face, his favour or his justice. In Israel, seeking God was at the heart of a faithful life. It could mean going up to the temple, asking a prophet for the word of the LORD, or crying to God in prayer, especially in a crisis or before a hard decision. To seek God is to want him: his presence, his guidance and his help. God promises that those who seek him with all their heart will find him (Jeremiah 29:13).

The joy David asks for is joy “in thee.” It comes from God himself, from his character, his faithfulness and his saving power, and so it can last when everything around is hard. Habakkuk resolves to rejoice in the LORD even when all else has failed (Habakkuk 3:17–18), and Paul tells the church at Philippi, “Rejoice in the Lord alway” (Philippians 4:4).

David prays this while he is still in danger. His rescue has yet to come, and already he asks gladness for all who seek God. The shame he asks for his enemies in the verses before is set against the joy he asks for God’s people, and the prayer of a man under pressure opens out into hope and worship.

The second half of the verse names the same people from another side: “such as love thy salvation.” Hebrew poetry often says one thing twice in different words, and here seeking God and loving his salvation belong together as one devotion, while being glad in him leads naturally into magnifying him.

The word for salvation, yᵉshûwʻâh, is a noun meaning deliverance, something saved. In Israel’s life it took in rescue from enemies, from illness and from oppression, which were constant dangers, and it reaches to God’s saving acts that deliver from sin and its consequences and bring his people to welfare. Scripture can use the word of a rescue brought about by men, and it traces every deliverance in the end to the LORD. To love God’s salvation is to treasure his rescue with a grateful heart, with feeling as well as understanding.

Such people are to “say continually, Let God be magnified.” The verb gâdal is the ordinary word for being or growing great, and in other forms of the verb it means to make great. God’s greatness is already complete, so to magnify him is to acknowledge it and declare it aloud, so that he is honoured as great by the one who praises him and by everyone who hears. Mary’s song opens in this spirit: “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour” (Luke 1:46–47). David calls others to join him in the same praise: “O magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together” (Psalm 34:1–3).

“Continually” makes this the steady speech of a whole life, kept up when feelings change and circumstances press. Set in a prayer for rescue, the words also look ahead. When God answers, his people will have fresh cause to say how great he is, and the distress of one man becomes a reason for all of them to praise him.

With “But” David turns from the gladness of God’s people to his own condition. He uses two words. ʻânîy means afflicted, lowly or poor, and it comes from a verb meaning to press down or afflict. ʼebyôwn means needy or destitute, even a beggar. Together they describe a man with no resources or power to help himself. In Israel a person’s safety often rested on his standing, his family and his tribe, and the poor and needy were those who had no such protection, so their one hope was God.

The words can include a lack of money, and in the Psalms they reach further, to anyone afflicted, oppressed or overlooked, and to the humble heart that knows it depends on God. God takes up the cause of such people. In another psalm David tells how a poor man cried and the LORD heard him (Psalm 34:6).

This honest confession is where the prayer begins. David places all his hope in God because he knows he has no other. Paul learned the same truth when the Lord told him that his strength is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).

The verb chûwsh means to hurry or make haste, and here it is a command, a strong and urgent request for God to act at once. At the end of the verse David asks the same thing again in other words: “O LORD, make no tarrying.” The two pleas together show a danger close at hand and a man who needs relief now.

In the middle of his plea David states what he knows of God, and the prayer rests on it. ʻêzer means help, aid or support, and it speaks of God standing by his servant. The word for deliverer comes from pâlaṭ, which means to slip out or escape, and in its causative sense to deliver. God is the one who brings his servant out of danger and gets him safely away. Together the two words show God as an active rescuer who steps in to save. Both are “my.” David speaks of a God he has known through earlier rescues, and that knowledge gives him confidence even now. A psalm of praise calls God his people’s refuge and strength (Psalm 46:1).

David also calls on God by two names. “O God” is Elohim, the Creator whose power reaches every circumstance. “O LORD” is Yᵉhôvâh, the covenant name of the God who keeps his promises to his people. That name recalls the LORD’s own proclamation of his mercy and his justice to Moses (Exodus 34:6–7), and with it David appeals to God’s steadfast love and his faithfulness in times past.

The salvation that God’s people love and praise him for is given most fully in Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). His deliverance is greater than any rescue from earthly enemies, because it frees us from sin and from the power of death. We seek God now by coming to him through Christ, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Our gladness in God rests on his finished work, his resurrection and the living hope he gives, and Peter writes of the joy of those who believe in him and receive the salvation of their souls (1 Peter 1:8–9). We magnify God by making known the good news of what he has done through his Son, “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

Verse 5 points to Christ as well. Though he was rich, for our sakes he became poor (2 Corinthians 8:9), and he humbled himself to take on human form (Philippians 2:7). On earth he lived in constant dependence on his Father, and in his agony in Gethsemane he prayed with the same urgency as this psalm (Luke 22:42). He knows from the inside what it is to be in need. He is also the great helper and deliverer, who through his death destroyed the power of the devil and set free those held in fear of death (Hebrews 2:14–15). The cry “make no tarrying” finds its answer in his promise to come quickly (Revelation 22:20), and meanwhile in his promise to be with his people always, to the end of the world (Matthew 28:20), through the Holy Spirit who dwells in all who call on him.

These two verses set the joy of all God’s people beside the need of one man, and David prays for both in the same breath. The God who is to be magnified by everyone who loves his salvation is the same God who hears a poor and needy man asking him to hurry. His greatness and his nearness belong together.

The psalm gives us words for both kinds of day: a song of gladness in God, and a cry for help when trouble is close. Even the cry is full of trust, because the man who asks God to make haste also calls him “my help and my deliverer.” Those who seek God find joy in him, and those who are in need find him ready to help.