STUDIES IN THE PSALMS No. 4

“Psalm 3”

January 25, 2004

Review

Last time we argued that the “king” – both Israel’s human king and the promised messianic king – figure more largely in the Psalter than has often been appreciated. Many psalms are, in fact, this king at prayer. They take their particular character from that fact. Woven together in the typology of kingship are features in which the temporal king of Israel or Judah is similar to Jesus Christ the eternal, messianic king, is in fact an enacted prophecy of the coming king, and features in which he is dissimilar to Jesus Christ. That fact helps us to understand how the same psalm may have statements about the king that the NT applies directly to Christ while, in the same psalm, there are statements we would never apply to Christ. In any event, the Psalter is shot through with Christology, it has more of Christ and about Christ in it than almost any other book of the Old Testament. The realization that the personal subject of the psalm, the one speaking or praying the psalms, is the king is an important prerequisite in understanding the psalms and in applying them to our own circumstances and our own time.

Now, this evening, we have before us an instance of such a psalm, a psalm of the king at prayer.

Psalm 3

Psalm 3 has a title. In the Hebrew Bible the titles are actually the first verse of the text (or the last) though there is little doubt that they are not original to the psalm. So in the psalms that have titles, the verse numbering in the Hebrew text is out of step with ours. For example, in some psalms the title’s account of the historical circumstance out of which the psalm originated indicates clearly that the title was added after the psalm was composed. The title of Psalm 51 is a case in point. In the title we find David being referred to in the third person, though the psalm itself is his own prayer of confession. The title, therefore, is clearly an editorial comment. “A Psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.” Here in Psalm 3 we have the same third person editorial comment: “When he fled from his son Absalom.” Further, psalms which originated in very personal and individual circumstances are, by their titles, numbered among the hymns of the church, indicating once again that time had passed between the composition of the poem and the addition of the title. Finally, titles often include musical directions that also indicate that the psalm has gained a formal place in the hymnbook of the church. The information in the title, therefore, was not original to the poem. Nevertheless, they are part and have always been understood to be part of the sacred text, they were treated as part of Holy Scripture in the New Testament, and, if they were not written at the same time as the poem was originally written, they are nevertheless very ancient. The technical terminology contained in them was already unintelligible to the 3rd and 2nd century Jews who translated the Psalter into Greek. They didn’t know what the terms meant and so simply transliterated them into Greek. Those terms have since been simply transliterated into English. Still today no one knows what a maskil is, or a miktam. What that indicates is that these terms were placed in the titles of psalms long before the 3rd century B.C.

In Habakkuk 3, which is a psalm but outside of the Psalter, you also find a title. “A Prayer of Habakkuk the prophet. On shigionoth.” The last is also a term found in the Psalter and is one of those technical terms that no one is sure of the meaning of. However, at the end of the psalm we have “For the director of music. On my stringed instruments.” It is true of other ANE hymns that genre, authorship, and historical notations come at the head of the poem and musical notations come at the end. That has led some to suggest that the musical notations that one finds in a number of psalm titles really belong to the previous psalm. So, for example, “For the director of music. With stringed instruments.” which we find in the title to Psalm 4, is really the subscription ending Psalm 3 and only “A psalm of David” is the title for Psalm 4. There are arguments pro and con. It is a question more interesting than important.

v.1 Remember, we said last week that the prominence of “enemies” in the psalms is the direct result of so many of the psalms being the prayers of the king. There are always many who opposed a king’s reign, his plans and projects, the establishment of his kingdom – foes both foreign and domestic – and there have always been a world of enemies facing the kingdom of Jesus Christ. In this particular case, as you remember, the opposition, the threat to David’s throne came from within his own family, from his charismatic but alienated son, Absalom.

v.2 “deliver” is the key word of this psalm. You have it here in the opening; you have it again in vv. 7 and 8 at the end. It is a hymn of trust in God for deliverance.

Selah occurs 71x in the Psalter and three more times in the psalm in Habakkuk 3. No one knows what this word means. It is another of those technical terms, so old by the 3rd century B.C., that its meaning had been lost and could not be recovered by the translators of the Hebrew Bible, the biblical scholarship of the day. The ancient versions disagree about its meaning, so do the rabbis of that period, and modern scholarship, on the basis of possible cognates from ancient languages related to Hebrew, have proposed no fewer than 60 etymologies for the word. It could signal a musical interlude, or a change in musical accompaniment. Or it could have nothing to do with the music.

v.3 The Lord had bestowed glory on David, had given him weight or status by the word of the prophet Samuel by which David was chosen to succeed Saul as King of Israel, by the anointing of the Spirit that was given to him when Samuel anointed him king, and by the works that God enabled him to perform. We could say the very same thing about Jesus Christ. The Father gave him glory by the Word pronounced about him, by the anointing of the Spirit at his baptism, and by the great works that the Spirit enabled him to perform before men. [Waltke] And, of course, that is how God gives us glory also: by the word he speaks to and about us, by the gifting of the Holy Spirit, and by the works he enables us to perform in his name.

v.4 David prays toward the presence of God, more than merely symbolized by the sanctuary. Remember Solomon at his prayer of dedication would speak of people praying “toward” the temple. Daniel faced toward Jerusalem when he said his prayers in Babylon. But remember that Zion, the holy hill, was both the location of the temple literally, and the symbol of heaven. Now we have no sanctuary to pray toward, so we do the same thing as they did – we embody our consciousness of praying toward the presence of God by the upward reach of the soul and the body. We lift our souls upward, we say, to heaven, and lift our hands in the same direction. We close our eyes to fix our attention on God alone.

Note that he cries aloud. We typically praise God and thank him publicly, but cry privately. Perhaps we are too proud. But David is sure of his deliverance and so that God might get the glory for it he cries out publicly for it.

v.7 To strike on the jaw means to humiliate; to break their teeth means to render powerless.

v.8 At the very end the king identifies himself with the people. His fortunes are their fortunes. When the Lord delivers and empowers the king, the people prosper.

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You know that there are different types of psalms. Even if you have never studied the matter, you instinctively recognize the difference between types of psalms as you read in the Psalter. Years ago, when I first gave a series of Sunday evening studies in the psalms, I gave you the classification or categorization of psalms that I had been taught in seminary. There were, you may remember, messianic psalms, penitential psalms, royal psalms, historical psalms, psalms of complaint, imprecatory psalms, and so on. The classification was based on the content of the hymns themselves. I now am convinced that such a classification is utterly artificial and does not do justice to the nature of the psalms. We made the point last week that a very large number of psalms are royal psalms, not because they talk about kingship and kingdom but because they are the king himself at prayer. Similarly many more psalms are messianic than simply those that are cited in the NT as containing some prediction of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. The king being the primary speaking subject in so many psalms, many psalms, such as Psalm 3 are messianic even though there is no statement from it cited in the NT as referring to Jesus Christ. It is messianic in its character, in its kingly typology. David is a type of Christ, that is, an embodied prophecy of the coming king, and his life and experience, in certain comprehensive and general ways, anticipate the life and ministry of Jesus.

Nevertheless, with this caution, there are still certain kinds of psalms. However, I am more comfortable using the Bible’s own classification. We find it in 1 Chronicles 16:4 where we read:

“[David] appointed some of the Levites to minister before the ark of the Lord, to make petition, to give thanks, and to praise the Lord, the God of Israel.”

So we have psalms of petition, of thanksgiving, and of praise. The psalms of petition are also called “lament” psalms in modern biblical scholarship because they characteristically arise out of some crisis in the psalmist’s life, at time of great difficulty and sadness. He lifts his petition to God in the midst of that crisis. [Waltke]

Well, as is true of the other types of psalms, the lament psalms, of which Psalm 3 is an example, are characterized by certain elements. In these petitionary or lament psalms we have these elements.

1. First, there is direct address to God. “O Lord, how many are my foes.” It is, of course, the glory of our Christian faith that, in Christ, in our King, we have direct, immediate access to the living God! “O Lord…”

2. Second, there is the lament itself, an account of the problem with usually an honest venting of emotion. “…how many are my foes! How many rise up against me! Many are saying of me, God will not deliver him.” In the lament psalms the psalmist says frequently that his enemies are too powerful for him.

3. Third, we find an expression of confidence in God. In Psalm 3 that is found in vv. 3-6. Here we find the assertion of the psalmist’s faith. Though it may look to others that he is cursed, he knows his identity, that he is in covenant with God, and he knows his God!

4. Fourth, there is the petition itself which we find in Psalm 3 in verse 7. “Arise, O Lord! Deliver me, O my God!”

5. Finally, we find a concluding expression of praise in prospect of the Lord’s hearing and answering the prayer. That we find in 3:8.

These elements are not always in the same order and are not invariably present, but they are very characteristic of these lament psalms as a class or type. You can find them quite easily, for example, in two more psalms of the same type that immediately follow Psalm 3, Psalms 4 and 5. And, as we said, most of these psalms are psalms of the king and use vocabulary appropriate to a king, as, for example, Psalm 3:6 and David’s description of his confidence in God in the face of thousands being drawn up against him on every side. There was, after all, a civil war, and he was personally the focus of the attack being made against his kingdom.

Now we can begin to appreciate what we might call the “thickness” of this text. It is, of course, the account of a man, David the king, in the great crisis of his kingdom, the rebellion of his son Absalom and the civil war that followed. We can read all about the historical context of Psalm 3 in 2 Samuel 15-19 and the account of the civil war that is given there in the history of David’s reign. We can study David in that crisis as a man of faith.

See what he does! As a believer, he instinctively turns to God in his time of trouble. “O Lord, how many are my foes!” To turn anywhere else is unbelief, a betrayal of the covenant that God has made with his king and with his man. As David would write in another of his psalms:

“Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.” [20:7]

Now, remember, David used means in putting down the rebellion. He sent the high priest back to Jerusalem in order to collect intelligence. He very cleverly sent his advisor, Hushai, back to Absalom in order to undermine the brilliant advice that Absalom was getting from Ahithophel, and so on. But David did not trust in these means, he did not depend upon them. He put his trust in God and looked to him for deliverance. He fully understood that the cleverest strategy would be of no consequence without God’s blessing. Remember, his advisors had told David to take the ark with him as he fled Jerusalem but David sent it back where it belonged. He was seeking the Lord’s favor and obviously did not want to do anything that was displeasing to the Lord.

But, you can see the psalm so clearly as the prayer of Christ as well. It fits at virtually any point of his terribly difficult life and particularly well at such a crisis as that in Gethsemane the night of his betrayal.

Jesus Christ, our king, was also and still much more a man of prayer. He spent nights in prayer even though his days had been full of exhausting labor from morning to night. He was surrounded by enemies at every turn. It is hard thing to live one’s life knowing that powerful men want you dead and that your message, once it is really understood, is bound to be deeply unpopular with many more than will receive it gladly. But that was our Savior’s lot. But day after day he put his confidence in the Lord and day after day God delivered him. His enemies were humiliated and rendered powerless – first by his miracles and the authority of his teaching; then by his resurrection and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

And, then, in the same psalm, we find our own life and our own experience as followers and imitators of Jesus Christ. We have enemies in so far as Christ’s enemies are ours. They make very difficult our life, whether we think of them as the world, the flesh, and the devil, or as death itself, or as the actual human and spiritual enemies of the kingdom that Christ is at work now establishing in our hearts and in the world. And we must face our trials and our attacks as he did, with living trust in the Lord, by the declaration of our confidence in him, and by the power of worship and praise.

When was the last time, in your own voice and as a means of asserting your own faith, you expressed your confidence in the Lord as David does here in vv. 3-6. I know some of you do this, but we all should do it very often. We should say, out loud, to ourselves and to others:

“You, are a shield around me, O Lord; you bestow glory on me and lift up my head. To the Lord I cry aloud, and he answers me from his holy hill. I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the Lord sustains me. I will not fear the tens of thousands drawn up against me on every side” – and if we could see the spiritual kingdom that lives to oppose the kingdom of Christ we would see tens of thousands to be sure!

This is what David did; this is how he bested his enemies and established his kingdom. This is what Jesus did more perfectly still and to a far more glorious result. And this is what we must do if we are to fight the Lord’s battles and win his victories in our own lives day by day.

It is with this confidence in the Lord, expressed, spoken, shouted indeed, that we hurl back the opposition and lay in the dust the enemies of God. “Resist the Devil and he shall flee from you.”