Psalm 72:14

Psalm 72 is a royal psalm, linked with Solomon, that prays for the king and describes the reign it hopes for. It asks God to give the king judgment so that he will “judge thy people with righteousness, and thy poor with judgment” (Psalm 72:2). It says that he “shall save the children of the needy” and break the oppressor (Psalm 72:4), and it looks for a dominion stretching “from sea to sea” (Psalm 72:8). Verse 12 opens with “For”, which ties the rescue of the needy to the righteous reign described before it. Caring for the lowly is the mark of his rule and the ground of his greatness.

“Deliver” translates nâtsal, a verb whose basic sense is to snatch away. The form in this verse, yaṣṣîl, means “he shall deliver”. The one the verb acts on is the person rescued, so it is the needy man himself whom the king takes out of the danger he is in.

He is delivered “when he crieth”. The verb shâvaʻ means to cry out, to halloo for help, and the king’s rescue is his answer to that call. He hears, and he acts. God did the same for Israel in Egypt. He heard their groaning (Exodus 2:24), and he told Moses that he had seen the affliction of his people and “heard their cry” (Exodus 3:7). A king who listens for the cry of the poor is showing his people the attentiveness of God himself.

“Spare” in verse 13 is chûwç. Its first sense is to cover, and from there it means to pity, regard and spare. The king’s pity moves him to protect, so that the weak are shielded from harm and from harsh treatment. Here the poor man is dal, a word that properly means dangling and so weak, thin or lean. He shares the English word “poor” with the man of verse 12, though the Hebrew differs. “Needy” stands twice in verse 13, and both times it is ʼebyôwn, the same word as in verse 12.

“Save” is yâshaʻ. Its root sense is to be open, wide or free, and so to be safe, and when it is used of what one person does for another it means to free or succour them. Here the king’s saving is the fuller act that follows his pity: he brings the needy out of their distress into safety.

“Redeem” in verse 14 is gâʼal, the verb of Israel’s law of kinship. It means to act as next of kin, and as such to buy back what a poor relative had lost. The man who did this was the goel, the kinsman-redeemer, who stepped in for his relative to restore his freedom, his property or his honour, often at cost to himself. The king takes up that part for the poor. He treats them as his own family and acts for them as their nearest relative would. God used the same language of himself when he promised to redeem Israel from Egypt (Exodus 6:6). “Their soul” is nephesh again, the same word as in verse 13, so it is their lives that the king buys back.

He redeems them “from deceit and violence”. Tôk means oppression, deceit or fraud, and it comes from a root with the sense of cutting to pieces. Châmâç means violence, wrong, cruelty and unjust gain. The two words name the dangers the poor faced in every age: fraud and exploitation that work quietly, and the open cruelty of the strong. God charged the judges of his people to defend the poor and fatherless and to rid them out of the hand of the wicked (Psalm 82:3–4), and Amos longed for judgment to run down as waters (Amos 5:24). The king of this psalm does what those words ask.

The last line gives the reason for all his care: “and precious shall their blood be in his sight.” The verb yâqar properly means to be heavy, and so to be valuable or rare. The word for blood, dâm, is blood as that which, when it is shed, causes death. “In his sight” is literally “in his eyes”, from ʻayin, the eye. So when the weak are robbed of their lives, the king counts the loss as heavy. Their deaths are a serious matter to him, and he will act to stop them and to answer for them.

Scripture says the same of the LORD. “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints” (Psalm 116:15). He told Israel that they were “precious in my sight” (Isaiah 43:4). Human blood carries this weight because man is made in God’s image, which is why God required a reckoning for the one who sheds it (Genesis 9:6). Jesus taught that the Father notices even a sparrow’s fall and that his people are of more value than many sparrows (Matthew 10:29–31). The lives of the poor and the unknown are held at that worth in the sight of God and of his King.

Jesus opened his ministry in Nazareth by reading that the Spirit of the Lord had anointed him “to preach the gospel to the poor”, to heal the brokenhearted and to set at liberty them that are bruised (Luke 4:18–19), words from the mission of the Anointed One in Isaiah 61:1–3. When John the Baptist asked whether he was the one to come, Jesus pointed to his works, ending with “the poor have the gospel preached to them” (Matthew 11:5). He touched lepers, healed the lame, fed the hungry and welcomed outcasts. He sought out the needy as well as hearing them.

He went further than any king could. “Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). He is the true kinsman-redeemer, who took our flesh to become our near relative and redeemed us from sin, the deepest deceit, and from death. The psalm says that the blood of the poor is precious to the king. In Christ the King gave his own blood for them. “In whom we have redemption through his blood” (Ephesians 1:7), and we are redeemed “with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:18–19). Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13), and God commends his love toward us in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8). When his reign is complete, God will wipe away all tears, and death, sorrow and pain will be gone (Revelation 21:4).

These verses give us a King who hears when the poor cry to him, who counts their lives as precious, and who has paid the price of their redemption. Everyone who calls on him in helplessness is heard by a ruler like this.

They also show the people of this King what his kingdom values. Jesus taught that what is done for one of the least of his brethren is done for him (Matthew 25:31–46), and he blessed the merciful, who shall obtain mercy (Matthew 5:7). Proverbs tells the king to speak up for the voiceless and to plead the cause of the poor and needy (Proverbs 31:8–9), to rescue those being drawn to death (Proverbs 24:11), and it says that “he that giveth unto the poor shall not lack” (Proverbs 28:27). Those who belong to a King who spares and saves the weak learn his pity, and in Christ’s own time every wrong done to the poor will be put right.