Psalm 124

⁶ Blessed be the Lord
Who has not given us as prey to their teeth.

⁷ Our soul has escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowlers;
The snare is broken, and we have escaped.

⁸ Our help is in the name of the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.

In considering what might have happened had the LORD not been on their side (v.1), David is not expressing an unhealthy pessimism (i.e., “dwelling” on the negative), but rather a sincere realism that serves to highlight and encourage, by contrast with what did happen. In other words, seeing that Israel should have been completely overwhelmed and destroyed by her much more powerful enemies (here portrayed via the imagery of unstoppable waters that would engulf and sweep over them—just as the much more powerful Assyrian forces are in fact portrayed in Isaiah 8:6-8), that they were not so destroyed—and, indeed, that her more powerful enemies were (like the aforementioned Assyrian forces; see Isaiah 37:36-37)—serves as historical proof of God’s past faithfulness to His unconditional promise to Israel through Abraham, which in turn serves as a tangible historical precedent to expect the same continued faithfulness both now and in the future (hence the focus in v.8). — Wechsler, pages 298-299.

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[God] did not permit (rather than “given”) Israel to be torn by the enemy’s teeth (vs.6-7), but rather enabled them to escape intact as a bird out of the snare of the trapper (which imagery is also applied by David to himself in 1 Samuel 26:20). — Wechsler, page 299.

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Reviewing what God has done serves only to reinforce David’s confidence in what God will do—indeed, what He must do, for God, though sovereign over all created authority is nonetheless bound (by Himself) to do what He has said, for even “if we are faithless, He remains faithful; for He cannot deny Himself” (2 Timothy 2:13). In this confidence David closes by affirming that Israel’s help is in the name of the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth—employing the same phraseology as in Psalm 121:2 and, insofar as this repetition is intended as an “inclusio,” marking not only this psalm, but also the two others intervening (Psalms 122 and 123), and an elaboration of the notion of the transcendent Creator as the “help” of His people. — Wechsler, pages 299-300.

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Messiah (v.1), when calling to remembrance past victories (vs.2-6) animates Israel to trust for present ones (vs.7-8); and as faith makes actual the escape trusted for, so it is here regarded as an accomplished fact. …

Israel’s escape from Sennacherib in the time of Hezekiah illustrates the Psalm; but is message belongs to the future. In a vain-glorious cylinder of Sennacherib’s now in the British Museum, the proud monarch records that he shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem “as a bird in a cage.” But the Scriptures of truth relate that the snare of the fowler was broken and the bird escaped! — Williams, page 401.