Psalm 138 Commentary

The honesty of the psalms is always refreshing.  In the case of Psalm 138, such honesty comes through most especially in the final line of the poem.  Mostly this psalm brims with enthusiasm for God.  Whole-hearted praise begins the psalm followed by joyful observations about how he will continue to worship God, how God always answers pleas for help, how all the kings of the earth should join Israel’s choir of praise.  A nice note gets sounded in verse 6 about how despite the lofty grandeur of Israel’s God, he always finds it possible to stoop down to notice us in all our littleness.  (We have noted often here in CEP sermon commentaries how that facet of God always left the Israelite psalmists gob smacked!)

Near the end there are highly confident statements about how God will protect the psalmist in times of trouble, how he will be vindicated in front of his enemies, whom God will also vanquish in the end.  It is all very lyric and lovely and redolent of a strong faith.

And then come the last line: “Don’t abandon the works of your hands!”  That is the honest part.  After all the effervescent confidence of the earlier verses, in the end it’s not a bad idea to call out one last time to ask God really and for sure to do all this.

What is this like?  Well, picture a nervous parent talking to their teenaged child before she goes out driving in the car alone for the first time after getting her drivers license.  The parent goes over the standard list of safety tips one time, two times, maybe three times.  The teenager keeps nodding her head.  “I know, I know, I will be careful.  I promise.”  Finally the parents says, “I know you are responsible, honey, and I know you will be careful.”  “Yes, I will.”  “OK,” the parent then says, “have a good time.”  And then just before the child closes the car door there is one last plea: “NOW YOU BE SURE TO BE CAREFUL!”

It’s one last urgent request.  Despite all the assurances and the prior conversation, you just cannot quite resist the urge to say it one more time.  Just to be sure.  Just to be clear.  It’s not that you didn’t believe the child the first, second, and third times you went over everything but, well, you know: the stakes are high here so let’s add a little more insurance.

That is how the final line of Psalm 138 strikes me.  Everything that came before is true, and the psalmist is utterly sincere in all that had been expressed in terms of his utter confidence in God’s ability to protect him and in his willingness to protect and vindicate him.  And yet the last line.  “Don’t forget, God!”

It’s a reminder that the people who wrote the Bible under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit were not plastic saints.  They were real flesh-and-blood people with all the same foibles and struggles we all face.  “I believe!  Help, Thou, my unbelief!”  That line from the Bible sums us all up as well as anything.  And there is a sense in which something of that sentiment gets encapsulated by that final line from this song.

Frederick Buechner once wrote that he could not think of anything more likely to be doomed to failure than setting out to write a story or a novel about a plastic saint.  Such a portrayal would be not only unrealistic but in the end likely very boring too.  Sainthood, after all, is not something you are given at one fell swoop.  You don’t wake up one morning and become some instant saint and you don’t achieve sainthood by following four easy steps to holiness or some such.  No, people are not born saints (Jesus excepted!) but they become holy people through the usual series of ups and downs on life’s journey, through failures as much as through spiritual successes.  Saints become saints despite their besetting sins and weaknesses, not on account of their never having had such wrinkles to their character to begin with.  If you have read Buechner’s novels about Bebb and Godric, you know how this played out for him.

Maybe this seems to be making a lot out of one closing line in a longer psalm but this dynamic really does seem to be present.  Similarly the admission just prior to that last line that despite everything else that gets expressed in this psalm, nonetheless the psalmist does not say “IF I walk through troubles” nor does he claim “Because of you, O God, I will NEVER walk through troubles.”  No, it is “WHEN I walk through troubles.”  Again, an honest reflection of how real life goes.

The Hebrew Psalter has functioned for millennia as the prayer book of God’s people, Jews and Christians alike.  One of the things that gives this collection of 150 psalms that kind of durability and staying power is the honesty of the songs and how they cover such a broad spectrum of life experiences such that no matter what season of our lives we happen to be in, we can find a psalm that will give voice to what we are feeling, what we need, what we are trying to pray for and pray about.  And that is a great gift of God.

Illustration Idea

Anne Lamott has written that she has basically just two prayers.  One says “Help me, help me, help me!” and the other says “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”  And if we think about it, that probably sums up the prayer life of a lot of us.  I worry sometimes that my “Help me” prayers outnumber my “Thank you” prayers.  Ideally I’d like to have closer to a 1:1 correlation between each request and a corresponding prayer of gratitude when God comes through for us.  But probably I have prayed for things that I did receive but for which I did not give due acknowledgment.  I suppose it counts as a bit of irony that the failure to offer a prayer of thanksgiving becomes the occasion to utter a prayer of confession of sin!

In Psalm 138 we see a nice balance between asking for help and expressing profound thanks and praise for all that.  God’s goodness and faithfulness, God’s providential loving care—all of that is like the foundation on which our edifice of faith gets built.  Our every prayer ultimately springs from that foundation.  Or as Psalm 138 puts it, “I will praise you with all my heart!”