Undoubtedly, the words are stern, and the temper they embody is harsh discord, when compared with the Christian spirit. But they are not the utterances of mere ferocious revenge. Rather they proclaim God's judgments, not with the impassiveness, indeed, which best befits the executors of such terrible sentences, but still less with the malignant gratification of sanguinary vengeance which has been often attributed to them. Perhaps, if some of their modern critics had been under the yoke from which this psalmist has been delivered, they would have understood a little better how a good man of that age could rejoice that Babylon was fallen and all its race extirpated. Perhaps, it would do modern tender-heartedness no harm to have a little more iron infused into its gentleness, and to lay to heart that the King of Peace must first be King of Righteousness, and that Destruction of evil is the complement of Preservation of Good.
1 I will thank Thee, Jehovah, with my whole heart, In presence of the gods will I harp to Thee. 2 I will worship toward Thy holy Temple, And will thank Thy name for Thy loving-kindness and for Thy truth, For Thou hast magnified Thy promise above all Thy name. 3 In the day [when] I called Thou answeredst me, Thou didst make me bold--in my soul [welled up] strength.
4 Jehovah, all the kings of the earth shall thank Thee, When they have heard the words of Thy mouth. 5 And they shall sing of the ways of Jehovah, For great is the glory of Jehovah. 6 For Jehovah is high, and the lowly He regards, And the lofty from afar off He knows.
7 If I walk in the midst of trouble Thou wilt revive me, Against the wrath of mine enemies Thou wilt stretch forth Thy hand, And Thy right hand shall save me. 8 Jehovah will complete [all] that concerns me; Jehovah, Thy loving-kindness [endures] for ever; The works of Thy hands abandon not.
This is the first of a group of eight psalms attributed to David in the superscriptions. It precedes the closing hallelujah psalms, and thus stands where a "find" of Davidic psalms at a late date would naturally be put. In some cases, there is no improbability in the assigned authorship; and this psalm is certainly singularly unlike those which precede it, and has many affinities with the earlier psalms ascribed to David.
In reading it, one feels the return to familiar thoughts and tones. The fragrance it exhales wakes memories of former songs. But the resemblance may be due to the imitative habit so marked in the last book of the Psalter. If it is a late psalm, the speaker is probably the personified Israel, and the deliverance which seems to the singer to have transcended all previous manifestations of the Divine name is the Restoration, which has inspired so many of the preceding psalms. The supporters of the Davidic authorship, on the other hand, point to the promise to David by Nathan of the perpetuity of the kinghood in his line, as the occasion of the psalmist's triumph.
The structure of the psalm is simple. It falls into three parts, of which the two former consist of three verses each, and the last of two. In the first, the singer vows praise and recounts God's wondrous dealings with him (vv. 1-3); in the second, he looks out over all the earth in the confidence that these blessings, when known, will bring the world to worship (vv. 4-6); and in the third, he pleads for the completion to himself of mercies begun (vv. 7, 8).
The first part is the outpouring of a thankful heart for recent great blessing, which has been the fulfilment of a Divine promise. So absorbed in his blessedness is the singer, that he neither names Jehovah as the object of his thanks, nor specifies what has set his heart vibrating. The great Giver and the great gift are magnified by being unspoken. To whom but Jehovah could the current of the psalmist's praise set? He feels that Jehovah's mercy to him requires him to become the herald of His name; and therefore he vows, in lofty consciousness of his mission, that he will ring out God's praises in presence of false gods, whose worshippers have no such experience to loose their tongues. Dead gods have dumb devotees; the servants of the living Jehovah receive His acts of power, that they may proclaim His name.