Psalm 71:8

Psalm 71 is the prayer of a man who has grown old and is beset by enemies. It opens, “In thee, O LORD, do I put my trust: let me never be put to confusion” (Psalm 71:1), and calls God his rock and his fortress (Psalm 71:3). Soon after these verses he prays, “Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth” (Psalm 71:9), and later he asks God to stay with him “when I am old and greyheaded” (Psalm 71:18). The psalm comes without a title naming its writer. Its prayer fits David in his later years, when he faced rebellion such as Absalom’s revolt (2 Samuel 15), and it may well be his, though Scripture leaves the setting unnamed. Whoever he was, he may have been a leader whose age left him exposed to challenges, failing strength and the loss of allies, at a time when the old were honoured for their wisdom and yet were vulnerable.

Verse 5 begins with “For”, the Hebrew ki, which gives the reason for the pleas that came before it. He asks God to rescue him because God has been his hope all along.

The word for hope, tiqvâh, comes from the root qavah, to wait or to look eagerly for something, and the same noun can also mean a cord or a line, something to hold on to. Hope of this kind is a confident expectation of what God will do, resting on who God is and on what he has promised. The word for trust, mibṭâch, comes from bâṭach, to be confident, and it means the thing a person relies on and feels secure in. The psalmist names God himself as both. His hope is a person, and all his confidence rests on him, where others put theirs in armies, treaties or their own strength.

He calls on God as “Lord GOD”, ʼĂdônây Yᵉhôvih. The first word, an emphatic form of adon, means “my Lord” or “my Master”, the one with authority over him and over all things. The second is the personal covenant name of God, the name the KJV usually prints as LORD, and after “Lord” it prints it GOD in capitals. Together they address God as the sovereign ruler and as the God who has bound himself to his people in faithfulness, which makes him the right one to hope in. Jeremiah says, “Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is” (Jeremiah 17:7–8), and Proverbs calls us to “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).

Verse 6 takes his trust back further still, to a time he cannot remember. “By thee have I been holden up from the womb.” The verb çâmak means to prop up, to support, to uphold or to sustain, the way a firm support bears what leans on it. From the first moments of his life, before he was aware of anything, God was holding him up and keeping him alive. Some translations read the line from the other side, “Upon you I have leaned from birth”, and both readings say that he has rested on God for as long as he has lived.

“Thou art he that took me out of my mother’s bowels” names God as the one who brought him to birth. The verb behind “took”, gâzâh, is given as meaning to cut off or to portion out, and here, with the words that follow, it describes God bringing him out of the womb. The word for bowels, mêʻeh, means the inner parts or the belly, and by extension the womb, which is its sense here. It can also be used figuratively of tender feeling. “Out of my mother’s bowels”, mim’ei immi, is the Hebrew way of saying “from my mother’s womb”.

Scripture speaks of God’s hand in every birth. Job speaks of God’s hands fashioning him, clothing him with skin and flesh and preserving his spirit (Job 10:8–12). David says that God formed him and covered him in his mother’s womb, and saw him there before any of his days had come (Psalm 139:13–16). Isaiah calls the LORD the one “that made thee, and formed thee from the womb, which will help thee” (Isaiah 44:2), and God’s servant says, “The LORD hath called me from the womb” (Isaiah 49:1). God told Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee” (Jeremiah 1:5).

That is why this memory gives the psalmist courage. If God upheld him when he was helpless and knew nothing, he can surely be trusted with the troubles of a man who is old and knows exactly how weak he is. The God who brought him into the world will carry him to the end of it.

In verse 7 the psalmist turns to how others see him. “I am as a wonder unto many.” The word môwphêth means a wonder, a miracle, a sign or a token, and it is used of persons as well as events, of someone who stands before others as a sign. His troubles have made him conspicuous, a man people look at and talk about, and “unto many” shows how wide that gaze is. Since enemies are watching and speaking against him (Psalm 71:9–10), the look he gets is most likely one of curiosity, pity or scorn. In Israel, suffering, especially in old age, was often taken as a sign that God had turned against a person, and so the people watching him could question his righteousness or God’s justice. Job and Jeremiah also knew what it was to be exposed and misunderstood in their suffering.

“But thou art my strong refuge.” The word for refuge, machăçeh, means a shelter, a place of protection where someone is safe from danger. Israel knew strongholds, fortresses and cities of refuge, and the psalmist sees in God all that those places offered. The word for strong, ʻôz, means strength or might, and it can also mean a stronghold, so God’s own strength is the shelter he runs to. The many see a strange sight, and God knows him as his own.

Scripture is full of this confidence. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1). “I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust” (Psalm 91:2). “The name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe” (Proverbs 18:10). “The LORD is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him” (Nahum 1:7). God promises to be with his people when they pass through the waters and the fire (Isaiah 43:2).

Verse 6 ends with a vow: “my praise shall be continually of thee.” The word for praise, tᵉhillâh, comes from hâlal, to praise, to boast or to shine, and it means praise or a hymn, a song that tells of God’s character and his mighty deeds. The word for continually, tâmîyd, means always, regularly or constantly, of something that goes on or is repeated again and again. Praise is the fitting answer to a life of God’s care, and the psalmist means it to run through all his days. Another psalm says, “I will bless the LORD at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth” (Psalm 34:1).

Verse 8 turns that vow into a prayer: “Let my mouth be filled with thy praise and with thy honour all the day.” The verb mâlêʼ means to fill, to be full, and the psalmist asks that God’s praise take up his whole mouth, so that it becomes the main theme of all he says. The mouth was the instrument by which a person expressed what was inside, in blessing or cursing, prayer or lament, so a mouth filled with praise speaks of a heart full of God’s goodness. The word for honour, tiphʼârâh, means beauty, glory or ornament, the state of being worthy of honour. “Thy honour” is God’s own glory and majesty, the honour that is his due, as when we are told to “Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name” (Psalm 29:2, 1 Chronicles 16:28–29).

“All the day” carries praise from morning to night, into the ordinary and the hard hours as well as the set times of worship. The New Testament asks the same of us: “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and “let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name” (Hebrews 13:15).

He prays this as an old man in distress, and while he still lives he wants his mouth to praise. Another psalm says that in the grave no one gives God thanks (Psalm 6:5). His vow also looks ahead to the deliverance he is asking for, in the spirit of “The LORD is my strength and song, and is become my salvation” (Psalm 118:14). So his praise looks back on God’s faithfulness and trusts him for what is still to come.

Everything the psalmist found in God, we find in Jesus Christ. Paul calls him “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27), and Peter says that God has begotten us “again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3). The hope we hold is “an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast”, because Jesus has entered within the veil for us (Hebrews 6:19–20), and as Hebrews says, “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8). The trust that lasted the psalmist from youth to old age rests on one who never changes, and so “hope maketh not ashamed” (Romans 5:5).

The psalmist was held up from the womb, and Jesus was brought into the world by God’s power, conceived by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35). The God who gave us natural birth also gives new birth, by water and the Spirit, to all who believe (John 3:3–5), and Paul calls Christ the Deliverer who comes out of Sion (Romans 11:26).

Jesus also became a wonder unto many. “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3), and on the cross he was mocked and made a spectacle, suffering for the sins of the world. In that hour his Father was his refuge, and he cried, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). Now he is our refuge, and we are those “who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us” (Hebrews 6:18).

His whole life honoured the Father. As a boy he spoke of being about his Father’s business (Luke 2:49). He said, “I honour my Father” (John 8:49) and “I do always those things that please him” (John 8:29), and he was obedient unto death, even the death of the cross (Philippians 2:8). Through him our mouths too can be filled with God’s praise, and we will join the song of heaven, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain” (Revelation 5:12), on the day when every tongue confesses “that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:11).

These verses look back over every season of a life, from the womb to old age, and find God faithful in each one. If you came to trust God when you were young, the psalmist shows you what that trust becomes after many years: a store of remembered faithfulness to lean on when strength fails. If your faith is newer, the God who held you up before you knew him has been at work in your life all along. Either way, the right answer to his care is the psalmist’s own, a mouth filled with his praise and his honour all the day.