God's deliverance gives occasion for fresh praise. The psalmist has to add his voice to the great chorus, and this sense of being but one of a multitude, who have been blessed alike and therefore should bless alike, occasions the significant interchange in ver. 3 of "my" and "our," which needs no theory of the speaker being the nation to explain it. It is ever a joy to the heart swelling with the sense of God's mercies to be aware of the many who share the mercies and gratitude. The cry for deliverance is a solo; the song of praise is choral. The psalmist did not need to be bidden to praise; a new song welled from his lips as by inspiration. Silence was more impossible to his glad heart than even to his sorrow. To shriek for help from the bottom of the pit and to be dumb when lifted to the surface is a churl's part.
Though the song was new in this singer's mouth, as befitted a recipient of deliverances fresh from heaven, the theme was old; but each new voice individualises the commonplaces of religious experience, and repeats them as fresh. And the result of one man's convinced and jubilant voice, giving novelty to old truths because he has verified them in new experiences, will be that "many shall see," as though they behold the deliverance of which they hear, "and shall fear" Jehovah and trust themselves to Him. It was not the psalmist's deliverance, but his song, that was to be the agent in this extension of the fear of Jehovah. All great poets have felt that their words would win audience and live. Thus, even apart from consciousness of inspiration, this lofty anticipation of the effect of his words is intelligible, without supposing that their meaning is that the signal deliverance of the nation from captivity would spread among heathens and draw them to Israel's faith.
The transition from purely personal experience to more general thoughts is completed in vv. 4, 5. Just as the psalmist began with telling of his own patient expectance and thence passed on to speak of God's help, so in these two verses he sets forth the same sequence in terms studiously cast into the most comprehensive form. Happy indeed are they who can translate their own experience into these two truths for all men: that trust is blessedness and that God's mercies are one long sequence, made up of numberless constituent parts. To have these for one's inmost convictions and to ring them out so clearly and melodiously that many shall be drawn to listen, and then to verify them by their own "seeing," is one reward of patient waiting for Jehovah. That trust must be maintained by resolute resistance to temptations to its opposite. Hence the negative aspect of trust is made prominent in ver. 4 _b_, in which the verb should be rendered "turns not" instead of "respecteth not," as in the A.V. and R.V. The same motion, looked at from opposite sides, may be described in turning to and turning from. Forsaking other confidences is part of the process of making God one's trust. But it is significant that the antithesis is not completely carried out, for those to whom the trustful heart does not turn are not here, as might have been expected, rival objects of trust, but those who put their own trust in false refuges. "The proud" are the class of arrogantly self-reliant people who feel no need of anything but their own strength to lean on. "Deserters to a lie" are those who fall away from Jehovah to put their trust in any creature, since all refuges but Himself will fail. Idols may be included in this thought of _a lie_, but it is unduly limited if confined to them. Much rather it takes in all false grounds of security. The antithesis fails in accuracy, for the sake of putting emphasis on the prevalence of such mistaken trust, which makes it so much the harder to keep aloof from the multitudes and stand alone in reliance on Jehovah.