The thought of God's sovereign power carries the psalmist beyond remembrance of his immediate outward needs, and stirs higher desires in him. Hence spring the beautiful and spiritual petitions of ver. 11, which seek for clearer insight into God's will concerning the psalmist's conduct, breathe aspirations after a "walk" in that God-appointed way and in "Thy troth," and culminate in one of the sweetest and deepest prayers of the Psalter: "Unite my heart to fear Thy Name." There, at least, the psalmist speaks words borrowed from no other, but springing fresh from his heart's depths. Jer. xxxii. 39 is the nearest parallel, and the commandment in Deut. vi. 5, to love God "with all thine heart," may have been in the psalmist's mind; but the prayer is all his own. He has known the misery of a divided heart, the affections and purposes of which are drawn in manifold directions, and are arrayed in conflict against each other. There is no peace nor blessedness, neither is any nobility of life possible, without whole-hearted devotion to one great object; and there is no object capable of evoking such devotion or worthy to receive it, except Him who is "God alone." Divided love is no love. It must be "all in all, or not at all." With deep truth, the command to love God with all the heart is based upon His Unity--"Hear, O Israel: The Lord thy God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart" (Deut. vi. 4). The very conception of religion requires that it should be exclusive, and should dominate the whole nature. It is only God who is great enough to fill and engage all our capacities. Only the mass of the central sun is weighty enough to make giant orbs its satellites, and to wheel them in their courses. There is no tranquillity nor any power in lives frittered away on a thousand petty loves. The river that breaks into a multitude of channels is sucked up in the sand without reaching the ocean, and has no force in its current to scour away obstructions. Concentration makes strong men; consecration makes saints. "This one thing I do" is the motto of all who have done anything worthy. "Unite my heart to fear Thy Name" is the prayer of all whose devotion is worthy of its object, and is the source of joy and power to themselves. The psalmist asks for a heart made one with itself in the fear of God, and then vows that, with that united heart, he will praise his delivering God. As in many other psalms, he anticipates the answers to his prayers, and in ver. 13 speaks of God's loving-kindness as freshly manifested to him, and of deliverance from the dismal depths of the unseen world, which threatened to swallow him up. It seems more in accordance with the usage in similar psalms to regard ver. 13 as thus recounting, with prophetic certainty, the coming deliverance as if it were accomplished, than to suppose that in it the psalmist is falling back on former instances of God's rescuing grace.
In the closing part (vv. 14-17), the psalmist describes more precisely his danger. He is surrounded by a rabble rout of proud and violent men, whose enmity to him is, as in so many of the psalms of persecuted singers, a proof of their forgetfulness of God. Right against this rapid outline of his perils, he sets the grand unfolding of the character of God in ver. 15. It is still fuller than that in ver. 5, and, like it, rests on Exod. xxxiv. Such juxtaposition is all that is needed to show how little he has to fear from the hostile crew. On one hand are they, in their insolence and masterfulness, eagerly hunting after his life; on the other is God with His infinite pity and loving-kindness. Happy are they who can discern high above dangers and foes the calm presence of the only God, and, with hearts undistracted and undismayed, can oppose to all that assails them the impenetrable shield of the Name of the Lord! It concerns our peaceful fronting of the darker facts of life, that we cultivate the habit of never looking at dangers or sorrows without seeing the helping God beside and above them.