Psalm 86:11-17 Commentary

In one of her novels Anne Tyler shows a woman named Maggie attending a funeral.  In the course of the service the pastor reads a psalm, and Maggie found it to be a lovely poem full of warmth and hope.  This was a relief to her since ordinarily she thought of the psalms as often a bit neurotic with psalmists going on and on about attacking enemies and foes and evildoers intent on mayhem along with imprecatory pleas for these people to have the teeth broken off within their mouths and other unhappy fates.

Well, such a view of the psalms generally would be admittedly a caricature.  Then again, there can be no denying that in Psalms of Lament and obviously in the more Imprecatory Psalms there is a fair amount of talk about stalking foes, cynics and wicked people intent on mocking and thwarting the righteous of the earth.  This sub-theme in the Book of Psalms is set already in the very first psalm that neatly divides humanity into two groups: the righteous and the wicked.  Whether or not there are lots of people who occupy some middle ground between those two opposing poles of humanity the psalms do not generally so indicate.

But whether a given psalmist thinks his very life is on the line or whether he is more concerned in a given instance about his reputation being besmirched, these thoughts crop up a lot, including in the final verses of Psalm 86.  In this particular instance the psalmist does not appear to be asking God to rain down death and destruction on his foes, even though in verse 14 he does indicate these enemies are trying—literally we would have to assume—to kill him.  Instead he asks God to come through for him on some level that will humiliate his enemies, show them perhaps that their every allegation against this person was incorrect.

The poet asks for God to flash some strength but also to send signs of his goodness to this person.  What’s more, he wants this to be public enough that others will see it and find their own efforts to thwart, demoralize, or maybe literally attack and kill this person to be futile.  Who knows what this psalmist thought this might look like.  He is pretty vague on the specifics and maybe just leaves it up to God to figure out that part.  But that he needs divine help and vindication is clear.

We have often noted in the sermon commentary articles here on the CEP website that most of the psalms stay pretty generic and generalized.  We don’t get detailed descriptions of the precise circumstances out of which comes sometimes praise and sometimes lament, sometimes thanksgiving and sometimes imprecation.  Though we might wish we could get such specifics once in a while, mostly the generalized nature of these poems is advantageous to us in that we can more easily see ourselves inside these psalms without getting distracted by all the ways our own circumstances don’t really line up 1:1 with what the psalmist was experiencing.

But in the case of the kinds of sentiments we get about enemies out to destroy us, when in our lives do we experience anything akin to this?  Of course at any given moment and all throughout history there is literal persecution of the church, actual physical threats to the lives of believers on account of their faith.  These are people whose enemies have names and faces and often these are believers who could provide you with a list of friends and family they have lost to death at the hands of oppressive regimes.  For sisters and brothers like these, psalms like Psalm 86 need no translation, no herculean effort to make these words fit inside their present moment.

For those of us blessed not to face such literal persecution, we need to be careful.  We have all upon occasion witnessed people who actually have a fair amount of privilege, position, and power in their society take to their fainting couches over alleged harassment or opposition just because they were not successful in lobbying to have a certain law changed that would further enhance their position in a society already pretty comfortable for these folks as it is.  It might be frustrating and disappointing to some if a public school board somewhere says they will not teach only biblical creationism in biology classes but also various other theories including evolution.  But for anyone to say that this is active persecution in a world where believers literally lose their lives for their faith seems an egregious example of a false equivalency.

Even so, many people—though recognizing they are not being physically assaulted or imprisoned or hanged—have had experiences with people who assassinate their characters, who use even disagreements within the community of faith as reasons to impugn the faith of others or who suggest that if anyone believes X, Y, or Z on a certain topic, their very salvation is in question.  Now there are indeed beliefs a person could have that actually indicate their faith is false or that their salvation is in question.  But too often such assessments get lobbed around a bit too freely and over things that are by no means clearly central to the faith.  And when you find yourself in the crosshairs of such accusations, well, sentiments along the concluding verses of Psalm 86 come to mind.

Then we do ask God to defend us, to show us some sign of his goodness toward us and if possible, we ask God to do this in a way our opponents will witness and be ashamed.  This, too, is dangerous: if we respond to the attacks of our enemies by adopting their same tactics in reverse, no one’s situation is improved.  Ultimately as New Testament followers of Jesus reading Psalm 86, what we mostly want to ask God is to come through for us on some level AND at the same time keep us Christ-like in imitating the Savior who told us to forgive our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.  And we can be pretty sure that when Jesus tells us to pray for those who persecute us, he did not mean praying, “O God, wipe ‘em out!”

Our lives often can be seen inside the closing descriptions of something like Psalm 86.  Not easily perhaps, not too neatly but we do know what it is like to pray for God to come through for us in the face of critiques or attacks or accusations.  And when this happens, then we can say the words of Psalm 86:12: “I will praise you, O God, with all my heart; I will glorify your name forever.”

Illustration Idea

In the 1980s and about five or six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of socialist East Germany, I became acquainted with the pastor of Martin Luther’s church in Wittenberg, which at that time was a part of East Germany or the DDR (Deutsche Democratische Republik).  Although the government’s oppression of the church did not typically take the form of physical harm, the governing forces did find a myriad of ways to make life harder for those who belonged to the church and professed faith in Christ Jesus as Lord.

And they kept watch.  The secret police, known as Die Stasi, were rumored to be everywhere.  What made die Stasi the more dreaded is that it was not as though you could know who was working for them from something obvious like their wearing a certain uniform.  Die Stasi were good at recruiting ordinary citizens to spy on their neighbors.

For my pastor friend in Wittenberg and for his wife, after the Berlin Wall fell they eventually learned that neighbors of theirs who lived right across the street from them—and who they regarded as friends and good neighbors—had actually been spying on them for years and turning over anything they found to die Stasi.  Their experience of disbelief, sorrow, and disorienting shock over this discovery was repeated all through East Germany once it began to come to light who had been spying on whom.  For this pastor and his wife, they had known for years they had actual enemies in the government who shunned, pooh-poohed, and ridiculed their religious faith.  They just had not known how extensive that network of enemies had actually been.

Of course, over the years of their being so observed, they and so many other faithful East German Christians had prayed for an end to oppression, prayed along the lines of Psalm 86 for God to come through with a sign of goodness.  And although the socialist governing elite had long dismissed as harmless and useless the prayers of all those little old ladies who huddled in church, in the end their prayers were answered and it was the spying enemies whose reputations fell into disrepute.