The Book of Psalms

Word Study

"have mercy," Hebrew chonneni (חָנֵּנִי) from chanan, to show favor, be gracious. David begins the body of the psalm with a plea grounded not in his worthiness but in his weakness: "Have mercy upon me, O LORD; for I am weak." He does not say, "help me because I deserve it," but "have mercy on me because I am feeble." The proud, self-sufficient soul does not cry for mercy; only the one who knows he is weak and vexed appeals to grace.

"weak," umlal (אֻמְלַל), languishing, feeble, withered. Whether the affliction was sickness, the weight of sin, the assaults of enemies, or all together, David is at the end of his strength. And this very weakness is the ground of his appeal. There is deep wisdom here: our weakness is not a barrier to God's help but an occasion for His mercy.

"heal," refa'eni (רְפָאֵנִי) from rapha, to heal, mend. He casts himself wholly on God's mercy and asks to be healed. "The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit" (Psalm 34:18).

"vexed," nivhalu (נִבְהָלוּ), troubled, terrified, shaken. His whole being is undone: his bones are "vexed," shaken to the core, and his soul is "sore vexed" (v3). When we are weak, undone, and shaken, the right response is not despair but this cry: "Have mercy upon me, O LORD; for I am weak."

Explanation

One Hebrew word stitches this psalm together, and it is a word for terror, bahal. Here David's bones are "vexed" (v2), then his soul is "sore vexed" (v3), the same trembling running from the marrow to the inmost self until the whole man is shaking, and he asks the desperate question of the shaken, "how long?" (v3). But watch that word return at the very end. In verse 10 his enemies "shall be ashamed and sore vexed", the identical verb. The terror does not stay on David. By the close of the psalm the trembling that gripped the saint has recoiled onto his foes. This is the first of the seven penitential psalms, and already it shows the pattern of them all: the sufferer who brings his shaking to God does not keep it; God turns it back upon the enemy.

Gospel Focus

"Have mercy upon me, O LORD; for I am weak", this cry is the very prayer the Gospel answers, for Christ came for the weak and the sick, not the strong and the whole. "They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick... I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (Matthew 9:12-13). Jesus is the great Physician who heals both body and soul, and He responds to the cry for mercy: the blind men cried, "Thou son of David, have mercy on us" (Matthew 9:27), and He touched their eyes; the leper, the paralytic, the sinful woman, all found in Him the mercy they sought. And His power is made perfect precisely in our weakness: "My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). So our feebleness, far from disqualifying us, is the very place where Christ's mercy and power meet us. The Gospel is not for those who imagine themselves strong and deserving, but for the weak who cast themselves on grace. Jesus bore our infirmities and carried our sicknesses (Matthew 8:17; Isaiah 53:4), and He invites all who are weak and heavy laden to come to Him for rest (Matthew 11:28). So when your strength fails and your bones are vexed, do not hide from God; come to the Saviour who welcomes the weak, and cry with David, "Have mercy upon me, O LORD," for the Physician of souls delights to heal all who come to Him in their need.

Word Study

"weary," Hebrew yagati (יָגַעְתִּי), worn out, exhausted. David describes his grief in vivid, hyperbolic language: "I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears." Scripture does not censor such raw expressions of sorrow; it records them as the honest cries of God's people, and includes them in the inspired prayer book of the church. There is holy permission here to grieve deeply and to bring that grief openly to God.

"groaning," anchati (אַנְחָתִי), sighing, moaning. Faith is not the absence of tears; David, a man after God's own heart, wept through the night. The Psalms teach us that lament, honest, tearful, prolonged, is a legitimate language of faith, not its failure.

"make I my bed to swim," as'cheh be'khol-laylah mittati (אַשְׂחֶה בְכָל־לַיְלָה מִטָּתִי), I flood my bed every night. This is the language of deep, sleepless anguish, night after night of weeping until, poetically, the bed is flooded with tears. What matters is that David wept before God, pouring out his tears in prayer rather than in bitter isolation.

"water," amseh (אַמְסֶה), I dissolve, drench. "Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?" (Psalm 56:8). God treasures the tears of His people. He does not despise the sleepless, weeping sufferer; He keeps every tear. To water our couch with tears in the presence of a God who counts them is not weakness of faith but its honesty, and it is the path through grief toward the confidence that follows.

Explanation

Read one line further, into verse 7, and the grief moves from the bed to the face: "Mine eye is consumed because of grief; it waxeth old because of all mine enemies." Sorrow does not stay hidden inside; it wears on the body, dims the eyes, and ages a man before his time. David is describing what long weeping actually does, the swollen, exhausted eye of one who has cried too many nights. Scripture is unembarrassed by this. It does not tidy grief up or hurry it along, but writes the sleepless, tear-worn face straight into its prayer book. And it sets these very words beside the promise that God keeps our tears in His bottle (Psalm 56:8), so that the God who seems silent in the night is in fact collecting every tear that falls.

Gospel Focus

"I water my couch with my tears", the God who counts the tears of His people entered our weeping in Jesus Christ and promises finally to wipe every tear away. Jesus was "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:3); He "wept" at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35), and "in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears" (Hebrews 5:7). Our Saviour is no stranger to the tear-soaked couch; He knows our grief from the inside and is "touched with the feeling of our infirmities" (Hebrews 4:15). And because He entered our sorrow and conquered it, our tears are not the end of the story. "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy" (Psalm 126:5); "weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning" (Psalm 30:5). The Gospel holds out a day when God "shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying" (Revelation 21:4). So bring your tears to the Christ who wept, and who keeps every one. Do not be ashamed to grieve before God; He treasures your tears, He shares your sorrow in His Son, and He has promised that the night of weeping will give way to the morning of everlasting joy. The couch watered with tears now will be exchanged, in Christ, for a home where every tear is wiped away for ever.

Word Study

"heard," Hebrew shama (שָׁמַע), to hear, hearken, heed. The psalm turns on a hinge, and it is one of the most striking turns in all the Psalms. In verse 8 David suddenly addresses his enemies with new boldness: "Depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity; for the LORD hath heard the voice of my weeping." The weeping sufferer of verse 6 has become the confident believer of verse 9. Nothing in his outward circumstances has necessarily changed, but a divine assurance has broken in: God has heard. Notice what God heard: not eloquent words, but "the voice of my weeping", the tears themselves were a prayer God understood. Sometimes we cannot form our prayers into words; we can only weep. But God hears the voice of weeping.

"supplication," techinnati (תְּחִנָּתִי), my plea for grace. And then, twice for emphasis: "The LORD hath heard my supplication; the LORD will receive my prayer." This is the confidence that transforms lament into peace: the certainty that God has heard. Faith does not always wait for the answer to be visible; often it rests in the assurance that God has heard, and that is enough to change everything.

"receive," yiqqach (יִקָּח), take up, accept. Having heard, He "will receive," accept and act upon, the prayer. The tears are not yet dried, the trouble not yet gone, but the soul is at peace, because "the LORD hath heard."

Explanation

Two things change at the hinge. First, the direction of David's speech. For eight verses he has spoken only to God; now, the moment assurance breaks in, he wheels around to address his enemies for the first time, and it is to dismiss them: "Depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity." Confidence turns a man from pleading with God to commanding his foes. Second, the drumbeat of a single word. Three times over he insists God has heard, "the LORD hath heard the voice of my weeping... the LORD hath heard my supplication; the LORD will receive my prayer." He hammers "heard" as insistently as he had hammered his groaning, meeting the tripled anguish of the first half with a tripled assurance in the second. The tears are not yet dry, but the case is already won.

Gospel Focus

"The LORD hath heard the voice of my weeping", the assurance that God hears the cry of His people is made unshakable in the Gospel, for in Christ our prayers are always heard. Jesus said, "Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always" (John 11:41-42), and through Him we too are heard: "whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you" (John 16:23); "this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us" (1 John 5:14). Our prayers rise to God through our great High Priest who "ever liveth to make intercession" for us (Hebrews 7:25), so that even our wordless groanings are heard, for "the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered" (Romans 8:26). God hears the voice of our weeping because Christ has opened the way to the throne and pleads for us there. This is why the believer can move, as David did, from weeping to peace even before the trouble lifts: not because we see the answer, but because we know, in Christ, that we are heard. The tear-soaked prayer of the weakest saint reaches the Father's ear through the Son. So weep if you must, but weep in hope, for the LORD hath heard the voice of your weeping, and He who hears in Christ will surely receive and answer your prayer in His perfect time.