The Book of Psalms

Word Study

"Keep not thou silence," Hebrew al-domi-lakh (אַל־דֳּמִי־לָךְ). The psalm opens by begging God to break His quiet. The enemies are loud and God seems to say nothing, and it is that silence, more than the danger, that the psalmist cannot bear.

"hold not thy peace," al-techerash (אַל־תֶּחֱרַשׁ). The plea comes again in different words. The psalm pleads three times over that God would not be silent, piling the requests one on another as men do when they are desperate to be heard.

"be not still," al-tishqot (אַל־תִּשְׁקֹט). The third plea asks not only for a voice but for movement: "hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God." What is wanted is a God who speaks and acts while His enemies rage.

"make a tumult," yehemayun (יֶהֱמָיוּן), roar, rage. "For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult." Against God's silence stands their noise; they roar like a rising sea while heaven says nothing.

"lifted up the head," nas'u rosh (נָשְׂאוּ רֹאשׁ). "And they that hate thee have lifted up the head." The phrase pictures open defiance, the head raised in confidence by men who believe there is no one above them to answer to.

"crafty counsel," ya'arimu sod (יַעֲרִימוּ סוֹד). The rage is not only loud but clever. They "have taken crafty counsel against thy people," plotting to blot out Israel altogether: "let us cut them off from being a nation."

"thy hidden ones," tzefunekha (צְפוּנֶיךָ), thy treasured, protected ones. They have "consulted against thy hidden ones." The word answers their scheming with a quiet assurance: the people being plotted against are God's own treasure, stored away under His protection.

Explanation

Two things here go deeper than the surface of a war-prayer. First, notice whose enemies these are. The nations are massing against Israel, yet the psalm does not call them "Israel's enemies", it calls them "thine enemies... they that hate thee." The attack on God's people is, at root, an attack on God Himself; those who set themselves to destroy His people have really lifted up their heads against Him. This is why the threefold cry for God to break His silence, "keep not thou silence... hold not thy peace... be not still", is not merely a request for rescue but an appeal to God's own honour: Your people are under assault, and that means You are. Second, look at the tender name God gives His people in the very breath the enemy plots their extinction. The nations say, "let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance", they see a people to be erased. But God calls them "thy hidden ones" (tzefunekha), a word used for treasure carefully tucked away, precious things stored in secret. Here is the whole comfort of the psalm in one contrast: what the enemy sees as a nation ripe for blotting out, God sees as His hidden treasure, guarded in the secret of His keeping. The plotters forget that the people they mean to destroy are the very treasure of the Almighty, and no counsel, however crafty, can pluck God's treasure out of His hand.

Gospel Focus

"They that hate thee have lifted up the head", the truth that to attack God's people is to attack God Himself is spoken plainly by the risen Christ. When Saul was hunting down the church, the Lord met him with the words, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" (Acts 9:4), not "why persecutest thou my people," but "me." Christ is so joined to His own that their wounds are His wounds; He counts every blow against them as a blow against Himself. And His people are still "hidden ones," now hidden in Him: "ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3). The world could not erase Israel, and it cannot erase the church, for the Lord has said, "upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18). Every age has seen its confederacy sworn to blot out the name of God's people, and every one has failed, because the treasure is hidden in the hand of God. So when God seems silent while His people suffer, His silence is not absence; He is keeping His treasure, and He will not keep still for ever.

Word Study

"like a wheel," Hebrew kaggalgal (כַגַּלְגַּל), like whirling chaff, a tumbleweed. The psalm asks God to scatter the proud enemies: "O my God, make them like a wheel." The men who lifted up the head are to be sent rolling and spinning across open ground, with no root and no weight of their own.

"as the stubble," kekash (כְּקַשׁ). Stubble is what is left in the field after the harvest, dry and worthless and fit only for burning. That is the estimate the psalm puts on the enemies' strength.

"before the wind," lifnei-ruach (לִפְנֵי־רוּחַ). "As the stubble before the wind." Nothing so light can stand where the wind blows; the enemies are not fought down so much as simply carried away.

"tempest," sa'ar (סַעַר). "So persecute them with thy tempest." The wind is God's own, and the pursuit is His: what scatters them is not chance weather but a storm sent after them by name.

"storm," sufah (סוּפָה). "And make them afraid with thy storm." Alongside the scattering comes terror; those who made a tumult against God are themselves put in fear by His.

"fill their faces with shame," malle feneihem qalon (מַלֵּא פְנֵיהֶם קָלוֹן). The heads once lifted up in defiance are to be covered with disgrace. The prayer aims squarely at the pride that made them enemies in the first place.

"that they may seek thy name," vivaqshu shimkha (וִיבַקְשׁוּ שִׁמְךָ). Then the petition ends with a startling purpose: "that they may seek thy name, O LORD." The shame is not asked for as revenge but as the thing that might finally turn them to God.

Explanation

There is a deliberate reversal woven through this prayer, and then a turn that transforms the whole thing. First the reversal: back in verse 2 the enemies "lifted up the head", proud, massive, immovable. Now the psalm prays that these very heads be made weightless: "make them like a wheel", a whirling tumbleweed, "as the stubble before the wind." The imagery is all of things with no root and no weight, chaff, dry stalks, dust, snatched up and driven off by the first strong gust. The men who seemed too mighty to move are asked to be shown for what they are: rootless things God's tempest can scatter in a moment. The proud head is brought to the dust of the whirlwind. But now the turn, and it is everything: the psalm does not stop at "scatter them" or "destroy them." Its final petition is, "Fill their faces with shame; that they may seek thy name, O LORD." The aim of the shame is not their ruin but their repentance. God is asked to bring them so low, to strip away their proud self-sufficiency so completely, that they finally look up and seek the very God they defied. Even here, in the fiercest prayer against enemies in the psalm, mercy is the goal. The tempest is meant to drive them, not merely into the ground, but to their knees. This is the surprising heart of biblical imprecation: judgment sought not for judgment's sake, but so that proud men, emptied and ashamed, might at last seek the name of the LORD.

Gospel Focus

"Fill their faces with shame; that they may seek thy name, O LORD", this is the very pattern by which God saves. He often brings a proud man low, filling his face with the shame of his own failure, precisely so that, emptied, he will seek the name he once despised. The prodigal had to come to himself amid the shame of the far country before he rose and went to his father. And no case shows it more brightly than the man who was breathing out threatenings against the church: Saul, struck to the ground and blinded on the Damascus road, his proud head brought to the dust, rose to seek and preach the name of Jesus he had set out to destroy. The shame that fills the face can be the mercy that turns the heart. And the name they are brought to seek is the name now given for salvation, for "God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow" (Philippians 2:9-10). One day every proud head will be brought low and every knee will bow, some in willing worship, some in forced submission, but the psalm's prayer is that shame would lead men, while there is time, to seek the saving name of the Lord.

Word Study

"That men may know," Hebrew veyed'u (וְיֵדְעוּ). The whole psalm comes to rest on this word. The goal of every dealing of God with the nations is not their ruin but their knowledge; He acts so that men may finally know who He is.

"thou, whose name alone," ki-attah shimkha levaddekha (כִּי־אַתָּה שִׁמְךָ לְבַדֶּךָ). The little word "alone" excludes every rival. Among all the gods the raging nations served, one name stands by itself, and the psalm means it to be known as such.

"JEHOVAH," YHWH (יְהוָה), the covenant name of the one God. This is the name God gave to His own people, the name bound up with His promises to them; and it is this name, not a general idea of deity, that the nations are to come to know.

"the most High," Elyon (עֶלְיוֹן). The title answers the enemies who "lifted up the head." However high they raise themselves, there is One higher, and the psalm asks that they be brought to see it.

"over all the earth," al-kol-ha'aretz (עַל־כָּל־הָאָרֶץ). His rule is not local: He is "the most high over all the earth." The very nations that conspired against His people live and plot within the territory He governs.

Explanation

This closing verse lifts the whole psalm out of one ancient battle and reveals what God is after in all of history. The prayer was never merely that Israel would survive or that her enemies would fall; it was "that men may know", that the nations themselves, having done their worst and been scattered, would come to know the truth about God. And the truth is stated with a precision worth weighing word by word: "thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth." Mark the word "alone" (levaddekha). It is emphatic and exclusive: there is one, and only one, whose name is JEHOVAH. The confederacy of verses 6 to 8 gathered many peoples, and behind each stood its own god, Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre, Assyria, each with its idols. Against that whole crowd of so-called deities the psalm plants its banner: JEHOVAH, and JEHOVAH alone, is God; He alone is Most High, and His dominion is not over one land but "over all the earth." This is the great confession of the oneness of God, that the LORD is one, that there is no other beside Him, that every rival is a nothing. And note the name itself: the King James translators, who almost everywhere render the covenant name as "the LORD," here spell it out in full, JEHOVAH, one of only a handful of places they do so (with Exodus 6:3 and Isaiah 12:2), as if to underline that this personal, covenant name belongs to God alone. The final purpose of God in all His judgments and rescues is that every man on earth would come to know this one, true, only LORD.

Gospel Focus

"Thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth", this one LORD, JEHOVAH, is the God who has made Himself known to us in Jesus Christ. There is no other God, no second person alongside Him; "the LORD our God is one LORD" (Deuteronomy 6:4), and that one LORD, the JEHOVAH of Psalm 83, is the very One who was manifest in the flesh as the Lord Jesus. The name "Jesus" itself means JEHOVAH-is-salvation, and Isaiah declares it: "the LORD JEHOVAH is my strength and my song; he also is become my salvation" (Isaiah 12:2), JEHOVAH Himself become our salvation in Christ. So when the New Testament confesses "one Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 8:6) and gives Him "a name which is above every name," it is not adding a rival to JEHOVAH; it is announcing that JEHOVAH has come, and His saving name is Jesus. The day the psalm longs for, when all men shall know the LORD, is the day when "every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Philippians 2:11). For the LORD whose name alone is JEHOVAH, Most High over all the earth, is the Lord Jesus Christ, and beside Him there is no other.