NOTES for Psa 143

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¹Hear my prayer, O LORD, give ear to my supplications: in thy faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteousness.

²And enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified.

³For the enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath smitten my life down to the ground; he hath made me to dwell in darkness, as those that have been long dead.

⁴Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my heart within me is desolate.

⁵I remember the days of old; I meditate on all thy works; I muse on the work of thy hands.

⁶I stretch forth my hands unto thee: my soul thirsteth after thee, as a thirsty land. Selah.

⁷Hear me speedily, O LORD: my spirit faileth: hide not thy face from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into the pit.

⁸Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee do I trust: cause me to know the way wherein I should walk; for I lift up my soul unto thee.

⁹Deliver me, O LORD, from mine enemies: I flee unto thee to hide me.

¹⁰Teach me to do thy will; for thou art my God: thy spirit is good; lead me into the land of uprightness.

¹¹Quicken me, O LORD, for thy name's sake: for thy righteousness' sake bring my soul out of trouble.

¹²And of thy mercy cut off mine enemies, and destroy all them that afflict my soul: for I am thy servant.

The psalmist cries out for the Lord to hear him according to His righteousness, although he himself understands that if He truly judges according to righteousness, no one will be able to justify himself before Him. But why appeal to righteousness when you understand in advance that you will not withstand it?

The very fact that we trust God and want to follow His commandments means that we are interested in knowing about ourselves the truth that He will reveal to us. And although we have already learned that the Lord is merciful and that His judgment is not formal and superficial, as human judgment often is, nevertheless, before asking Him for mercy, we must obtain a sober view of ourselves and of the things we so often get up to. To understand and feel all this properly, it can be useful to see how our actions, so familiar to us, look from the outside. And then we are appalled.

But the Lord, unlike people, not only allows us to be appalled; He also saves us. He saves us from what distorts us, but what we often quite wrongly regard as an inseparable part of ourselves.

Other notes

For

¹Hear my prayer, O LORD, give ear to my supplications: in thy faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteousness.

²And enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified.

³For the enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath smitten my life down to the ground; he hath made me to dwell in darkness, as those that have been long dead.

⁴Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my heart within me is desolate.

⁵I remember the days of old; I meditate on all thy works; I muse on the work of thy hands.

⁶I stretch forth my hands unto thee: my soul thirsteth after thee, as a thirsty land. Selah.

⁷Hear me speedily, O LORD: my spirit faileth: hide not thy face from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into the pit.

⁸Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee do I trust: cause me to know the way wherein I should walk; for I lift up my soul unto thee.

⁹Deliver me, O LORD, from mine enemies: I flee unto thee to hide me.

¹⁰Teach me to do thy will; for thou art my God: thy spirit is good; lead me into the land of uprightness.

¹¹Quicken me, O LORD, for thy name's sake: for thy righteousness' sake bring my soul out of trouble.

¹²And of thy mercy cut off mine enemies, and destroy all them that afflict my soul: for I am thy servant.

Psalm 144 is a typical example of the genre of a "new song," or "song of renewal." This was a special, prophetic genre: after all, prophets were usually both poets and singers, and improvisers at that... Read more

Psalm 144 is a typical example of the genre of a "new song," or "song of renewal." This was a special, prophetic genre: after all, prophets were usually both poets and singers, and improvisers at that, able to deliver a poetic sermon or a new hymn composed on the spot right in the Temple courtyard during some great feast. Their inspired performances were received by their listeners as divinely revealed, confirming the status of the authors as prophets, people of God. Here it was not always easy to distinguish simple inspiration from genuine revelation; there were always more ecstatic prophesiers in Israel, and later in Judah, than true prophets. A true prophet was distinguished above all by a special vision of reality, by perceiving it as God's world and God's Kingdom.

So it is here: the author of the psalm understands perfectly well what a human being is not only before God, but even before the universe, that he is only a grain of sand, and before God no more than a light breath. The matter here is not only that fallen humanity is mortal and that its span, by the measure of the universe, is not long at all, but that after the fall a person ceased to have a direct and immediate relationship to God's reality, to the reality of the world created by God and to the reality of God's presence in the world He created. Meanwhile, only God is fully and truly real, and everything else receives its being and becomes real as a consequence of the action of His will.

After the fall, however, the human being fell out of the sphere of the action of God's will; this, in fact, is the spiritual meaning of the fall. Now a person can participate in authentic reality only if he returns again to the realm of God's will and God's providence. When something like this happens to a person, he usually experiences what is happening as a kind of eschatological experience, during which the world disappears for him and the person remains alone with God, who "bows the heavens and comes down," drawing near to the person and opening to him the reality of His own, God's world.

It is then that both the surrounding world and the person's own life are renewed for him. Then there will be no place in his life for anything accidental or for anything that happens contrary to God's will, while in the fallen world there is much that God does not want but permits, allowing it to exist out of respect for the fallen person's choice. The "new song," the "song of renewal," is witness to this newly opened reality, to the reality of the Kingdom that God gave him to see, even though the time of the Kingdom's active entry into the world had not yet come.

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