Ps. xl. 17. 7 amjioor and needy ; yet the Lord thinJceth upon me. THAT part of the Holy Scriptures which most fully opens the exercises of the heart is the book of Psalms. There we see a man of God unbosoming himself before his Maker, and declaring all his hopes and fears, his griefs and consolations. Sometimes he speaks in the person of the Messiah, and sometimes in his own person : sometimes his words are appli-
cable both to the one and the other. These varieties often appear in the very same psalm ; some parts of which exclusively relate to the type, or to the anti- type ; and other parts are common to both. It is thus in the psalm before us. That it refers to the Messiah, there can be no doubt ; because it is applied to him by God himself ''. Yet there are in it some expressions, which should rather be explained in reference to David only. The twelfth verse in par- ticular must be understood in this way : and the cir- cumstance of all the following verses being repeated in another place, and formed into a distinct psalm by themselves^, is a strong reason for referring them also to him principally, or perhaps to him alone. In the words of our text we notice,
I. His complaint —
David on some occasions was reduced to great straits and difficulties with respect to his temporal concerns : but he was also much tried in his spirit : and the complaint before us seems to have arisen from,
1 . A sense of his guilt —
[In ver. 12, he speaks of " his iniquities having taken such hold upon him, that he was not able to look up; that they were more than the hairs of his head, so that his heart failed him." It is very probable that he alluded in some measure to those dreadful enormities which he had committed in the matter of Uriah. But he would not consider those actions merely as insulated and detached, but rather as indi- cations of the extreme depravity of his heart "^i and in reference to that he might well say of himself, " I am poor and needy." Indeed, who that knows any thing of the spirituality of God's law, or of his own immediate departures from it, can use any other language than that in the text ? Was Adam poor when despoiled of the Divine image through the commission of one sin ; and are not we, whose iniquities are more in number than the hairs of our head ? Was he needy, when banished from Paradise, and doomed to eternal death ; and are not we, who from our very birth have been " treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath ? " Though God has forgiven us, it does not become us to forget what we are in ourselves, but to go softly before him all our days, repenting in dust and ashes.]
^ Compare ver. 6 — 8. with Heb. x. 5 — 7.
^ Ps. Ixx. c In this light he speaks of them in Ps. H. 5.