Psalm 108 “Back by Popular Demand”

Psalm for Today 108:5-6, 11-12

⁵ Be exalted, O God, above the heavens!

    Let your glory be over all the earth!

⁶ That your beloved ones may be delivered,

    give salvation by your right hand and answer me!

Comments:

Psalm 108 is the collective prayer of a post-Exilic Israel for God’s restoring justice to be accomplished. It consists of the last half of two previous psalms (57:7-11 & 60:6-12) recast for use in a new context. The people had been betrayed by their neighbors, abused, and exiled. Now that they had been returned to the land they were again surrounded by the hostility of the neighboring nations, but would they take things into their own hands or trust their justice into God’s hands?

We find Israel’s answer of faith in the last two verses of the psalm,

¹¹ Oh, grant us help against the foe,

    for vain is the salvation of man!

¹² With God we shall do valiantly;

    it is he who will tread down our foes.

So what can we glean from this psalm for our situation today? Are we surrounded by people who despise the ways of God? Those who mock us for actually trusting Christ Jesus to establish and deliver us? I think probably so. We then are faced with the same question as post-exilic Israel, will we fight to regain control by our own hand or will we trust God to take care of the treading down of our foes? Perhaps our “doing valiantly” with God is following Christ into the valley of humiliation and suffering. As it is written, “…the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly,” (2 Cor. 10:4) but they are powerful nonetheless.

Another thing I find encouraging is those who had returned to rebuild the city of God found a new encouragement, a new voice by which to express their need honestly to God, in the old scriptures. May we find that voice of trust and hope in God’s word as well. To that end, let me quote a passage from an old Bible Commentary:

“The combination of earlier psalms illustrates the vitality of older scriptures as they were appropriated and applied to new situations in the experience of God’s people. Evidently, Psalm 60 had harked back to a promise already old: over and over again God’s word speaks to the hearts of his people.”[1]

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[1] Leslie C. Allen, Word Biblical Commentary Psalms 101-150 (Word, 1983), 70.