Psalm 70 Commentary

The odd and curious words “Aha! Aha!” occur four times in the Hebrew Psalter.  Twice in Psalm 35, once in Psalm 40, and then here in Psalm 70.  It is a translation of the Hebrew הֶאָח / he-ach and near as anyone can tell, a derisive “Aha!” seems to be a pretty good rendering of the Hebrew.  As I noted three years ago when we were last in Psalm 70, those who are called upon to read Scripture in public or at a worship service clearly have to decide their intonation on those words.  On the one hand there is a temptation to ham it up to the point that this could come off almost comically.  On the other hand it is clear that these “Aha” sneers are painful for the psalmist and there’s nothing funny about it.

Indeed, there is nothing funny about the whole of this short psalm.  This is a cry for help, a lament, a desperate set of pleas.   The poet is in a bad place in his life, is enduring a difficult season and whether or not it was literally true that his perceived enemies wanted to kill him, it sure felt that way.  As Jesus made clear in Matthew 5, you don’t have to slip a knife between someone’s ribs to be guilty of murder.  Anger, name-calling, belittling, and insulting make one liable for violating the sixth commandment too.  And if the perpetrator of such things does not feel particularly like a murderer, the one on the receiving end of it all knows that it surely does feel a bit like a living death.

As I pondered Psalm 70 and that “Aha! Aha!” part that leaps out at you, it struck me that this fits our socio-political and cultural moment pretty well.  On social media and on the split-screens of cable news shows, it seems like people are eager to look for opportunities to say, in essence, “Aha! Aha!” to some opponent.  We live in a “Gotcha!” culture.  Whether it is someone on the political right who wants to “own the libs” or someone on the political left engaging in serious eye-rolling over the perceived dimness of hyper-conservative figures, “Aha! Aha!” sums it all up pretty well when you think about it.

It goes without saying—better said: it should go without saying—that this is not the posture of the followers of Jesus.  But as church and politics, worship and culture blur in some places these days, it’s not always clear that believers are avoiding participating in this smack-down moment.  But of course Psalm 70 is not calling on us to identify with the enemies but with the put-upon psalmist who is feeling devastated by the attacks he is enduring.  We invoke Psalm 70 as our own prayer whenever we also feel like we’re the target of critiques and attacks of various kinds.

Although the psalmist is urging God to act with a bit more dispatch than seems to have been the case when this prayer was penned, it is clear the psalmist knows that God does hear him in his season of distress.  God does see.  God does care.  God will act.  Eventually.  And when that happens, the psalmist is clear that both before and after God intervenes, the cry of “The Lord is great!” will be on his lips even during the time of lamenting.  

This is, of course, a hallmark of basically all of the Psalms of Lament.  Even the psalms that clearly lament the apparent absence of God do so before the very presence of God.  The psalmists complain that God seems invisible but they do so into the face of that same God.  God’s seeming passivity is not cause to stop praying but to pray harder and louder.  And not louder in the sense of the prophets of Baal at Mt. Carmel whose volume level and shrillness increased as a way to catch the attention of a god they were having a hard time getting a hold of.  God hears even the quietest whisper of a lament.  But we pray more vigorously in the sense that, like Jacob wrestling with God at the River Jabbok, we are clinging fiercely to God even as we as much as say, “I will not let go of you until you bless me!”

In the United States, Psalm 70 is appointed for what will be the first Sunday after the 2026 midterm elections.  Although we can hope and pray that there will not be a reason to cry to God in lament and fear due to some fallouts of whatever happens in this election, we do live in a sufficiently riven moment that one way or another a prayer like we find in the 70th psalm and in other similar lament psalms may be needed as we come before our God in prayer and in worship.   God will hear us if and when we do so.  But even then, our bottom line and the reason why we pray in the first place is because of the truth of that line, “The Lord is great!”

Illustration Idea

In a recent week-long summer seminar on “Preaching and Grief,” we read C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed.  At one point Lewis was musing on the seemingly open-ended promise of Jesus “Knock and the door will be opened to you.”  But after the death of his beloved wife, Lewis said he had been knocking on God’s door until his knuckles were bloodied but from the other side of the door all he could hear was the bolting and double-bolting of the door’s locks.  

Lewis must have paused his writing for some hours after writing that last line because the next thing he wrote was, “I wrote that last night.  It was more of a yell than a thought.”  

A lot of the Psalms of Lament are a bit of a yell.  Psalm 70 also bears some marks of a yell, of a desperate call for assistance in a season of life during which too many people were deriding the psalmist and his plight through their sneering “Aha! Aha!” insults.  But the good news is that God does not stop listening to us when we yell at him a bit.  Although some Christians are very hesitant to engage in the more robust laments that characterize nearly one-third of the Book of Psalms, all those lament prayers remain in the Bible as testament that our God can take it when we pray this way.  Indeed, the New Testament in places like The Book of Hebrews assures us that our God in Christ fully sympathizes with our weakness and our hurts, having endured all of that personally himself for us and for our salvation.