To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David.
1 Do not keep silent,
O God of my praise!
2 For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful
Have opened against me;
They have spoken against me with a lying tongue.
3 They have also surrounded me with words of hatred,
And fought against me without a cause.
4 In return for my love they are my accusers,
But I give myself to prayer.
5 Thus they have rewarded me evil for good,
And hatred for my love.
6 Set a wicked man over him,
And let an accuser stand at his right hand.
7 When he is judged, let him be found guilty,
And let his prayer become sin.
8 Let his days be few,
And let another take his office.
9 Let his children be fatherless,
And his wife a widow.
10 Let his children continually be vagabonds, and beg;
Let them seek their bread also from their desolate places.
11 Let the creditor seize all that he has,
And let strangers plunder his labor.
12 Let there be none to extend mercy to him,
Nor let there be any to favor his fatherless children.
13 Let his posterity be cut off,
And in the generation following let their name be blotted out.
14 Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the Lord,
And let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.
15 Let them be continually before the Lord,
That He may cut off the memory of them from the earth;
16 Because he did not remember to show mercy,
But persecuted the poor and needy man,
That he might even slay the broken in heart.
17 As he loved cursing, so let it come to him;
As he did not delight in blessing, so let it be far from him.
18 As he clothed himself with cursing as with his garment,
So let it enter his body like water,
And like oil into his bones.
19 Let it be to him like the garment which covers him,
And for a belt with which he girds himself continually.
20 Let this be the Lord’s reward to my accusers,
And to those who speak evil against my person.
21 But You, O God the Lord,
Deal with me for Your name’s sake;
Because Your mercy is good, deliver me.
22 For I am poor and needy,
And my heart is wounded within me.
23 I am gone like a shadow when it lengthens;
I am shaken off like a locust.
24 My knees are weak through fasting,
And my flesh is feeble from lack of fatness.
25 I also have become a reproach to them;
When they look at me, they shake their heads.
26 Help me, O Lord my God!
Oh, save me according to Your mercy,
27 That they may know that this is Your hand—
That You, Lord, have done it!
28 Let them curse, but You bless;
When they arise, let them be ashamed,
But let Your servant rejoice.
29 Let my accusers be clothed with shame,
And let them cover themselves with their own disgrace as with a mantle.
30 I will greatly praise the Lord with my mouth;
Yes, I will praise Him among the multitude.
31 For He shall stand at the right hand of the poor,
To save him from those who condemn him.
This Psalm and the 110th are both Messianic and very closely related. The 109th Psalm reveals Christ in His humiliation, but the 110th presents Him exalted at the right hand of God the Father, as well as His coming glory. In the 109th Psalm, we not only see His coming glory, we also see the fate of those who oppose Him, hate Him, betray Him, and reject Him. — Phillips, page 268.
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These verses (vs.1-5) present a prophetic vision of Messiah’s agony. … He may have used the very words of these verses when He retired alone in the mountains to pray. … In spite of all their hatred He loved them, and expressed His love by healing their sick and feeding their hungry multitudes. … In these verses His answer to their hatred was, “I give myself to prayer” (v.4). When they nailed Him to the cross He prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” — Phillips, pages 268-269.
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It will be noticed that from verse 6 through verse 19 the personal pronoun is used of “a wicked man” who stands by Satan to persecute the “meek and lowly ONE,” who helped all mankind. From the 20th verse, “the” is used to include all who hate the “Lowly ONE.” Man believe that the “wicked man” of verses 6 was Judas Iscariot because of the reference in Acts 1:20, which appears to have reference to verse 8 of our Psalm. …
What Christ said of Judas can be said of all His adversaries, “It would have been better if that man had not been born.” This is also true of all who turn away from Christ. This Psalm is a solemn warning to all who despise and reject God’s salvation, which is in Christ Jesus Himself, the Lamb of God. They do what we see in the 4th verse of our Psalm, “for my love they are my adversaries.” — Phillips, page 270.
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The language of this Psalm is judicial and prophetic. Enemies of the Messiah, the Word of God, will be judged (vs.6-7); and the righteousness of their punishment and the grounds for it, are set out in verses 8-20. — Williams, page 383.
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The Messiah recognizes that the hatred shown to His people is shown to them because they belong to Him. It is really directed against Him. In return for the love which He and they show to men, men recompense hatred (vs.1-5). Therefore is their punishment just (vs.6-20). … He was the poor and needy Man; His was the wounded heart (v.22); at Him they shook their heads as He hung upon the tree (v.25); but God stood at His right hand, and in resurrection delivered Him from the power of those who sought to eternally destroy Him (v.31). As to Judas, Satan stood at his right hand (v.6), and then entered into him (Luke 22:3).— Williams, pages 383-384.
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Acts 1:20 makes it very clear that the oppressor in this psalm is Judas. And, since the person Judas oppressed was Jesus Christ, this has to be a Messianic psalm. Wechsler (below), makes no mention of that theme but instead considers how one can worship in the midst of persecution. I think both levels of interpretation work, the first on a prophetic level, the second on a practical level. But I also think the fact that the Messiah is calling for God’s judgment on those who oppressed and killed the Son of God is all the answer needed to explain why the psalmist doesn’t love his enemies—He did, and they killed Him. All that’s left to them is judgment. In other words, love for your enemies before they finally and ultimately reject Christ, judgment afterwards.
David here provides us with a model for transforming, as it were, the black coals of unjust persecution into the brilliant diamonds of worship. One way (vs.1-20) in which we can do this … is by petitioning God to manifest His justice in bringing retribution upon the wicked and deceitful (v.2) who oppress us. Though this may initially seem to contradict Christ’s emphasis on loving one’s enemies (cf. Matthew 5:44), several considerations, both from the immediate and larger Scriptural context of the psalm, bear out its absolute consistency with New Testament teaching—to wit: (1) throughout this psalm (as typically in the other “imprecation” psalms), the psalmist appeals to God to bring just retribution on his oppressors, rather than expressing the intention to take the matter of vengeance into his own imperfect, human hands—a point which is in fact an integral part of the Second Greatest Commandment itself (see Leviticus 19:18; Deuteronomy 32:35; Romans 12:19); (2) building on the previous point, nowhere in this psalm (or any other “imprecation” psalm) does the psalmist demand God’s retribution upon his oppressors, but rather he leaves the “when” and “how” up to God—for worship, which is exclusively in our “court” as God’s creations, entails only the affirmation of and appeal to God’s attributes, whereas the expression of those attributes is entirely in God’s “court”; and (3) encompassing the previous two points, David affirms that the same standard of divine justice applies equally to both believers like himself as well as to the wicked who oppress them, and that under this perfect standard all men stand justly condemned to God’s severest retribution. In the present section this point is vividly made in verse 6, the imagery and even phraseology of which is parallel to that in Zechariah 3:1 where Joshua the High Priest (representing Israel) stands before the LORD (in the role of judge), with Satan (“the accuser” in v.6b) standing at his right hand to accuse him (justly so because of his sin, represented by his filthy garments). The only reason that Joshua (i.e., sinful Israel) escapes God’s retribution is because of God’s choice to show mercy and grace—divine gifts that, because they are based solely on God’s sovereign will and not the merits of man, He might choose to extend to the wicked who are presently at enmity with us, just as He extended them previously to us when we, in our wickedness, were at enmity with Him (Romans 5:8-10). — Wechsler, pages 260-261.
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Another way (vs.21-29) in which we can turn our oppression at the hands of the wicked into worship is by appealing to God to express His lovingkindness (vs.21 and 26) by relieving us of the oppression. David—though fervently desiring (as is natural) God’s immediate relief—ultimately leaves the “how” and “when” up to God, for whatever might happen throughout the course of his present life, God has already bestowed upon him the greatest and most precious of all expressions of divine lovingkindness: the confidence of knowing that he will one day awake to everlasting life (Daniel 12:2) and dwell in the unveiled light and full joy of God’s presence (see Psalm 16:9-11). — Wechsler, pages 261-262.
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