Psalm 31 (NASB)
A Psalm of Complaint and of Praise.
For the music director. A Psalm of David.
Have you ever stopped to think about how Jesus knows all the Psalms? Scripture tells us that even though He is God, Jesus prays, and at least during His time on earth, He prayed using the Psalms as a basis of His prayers. Even the last words of Jesus on the cross seem to be taken from Psalm 31, the Psalm we are looking at today. The words, “Into Your hand I entrust my spirit,” is also translated as “into Your hand I commit my spirit” which is what Jesus is quoted as saying as His last words on the cross before He died. Luke 23:46 tells us: Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last.
That tells me that we, too, should use the Psalms to pray. Especially if we ever find ourselves not knowing quite what to pray, a quick read through some of the Psalms will probably result in finding one that expresses our present situation.
This particular Psalm, Psalm 31, is a psalm of David. He wrote this while he was king. We know from reading the accounts of his life that when he wrote this, he was in a dire, extremely stressful situation. People were trying to kill him. He had been slandered and people were turned against him. His children were out of control. He was suffering the guilt and shame of his own sin. All that to say, he was under immense stress. Yet, in the midst of all that stress, David does not abandon his faith. This Psalm shows us what we should do when we are facing stressful situations: we should bring our troubles to the One who can help us.
Starting in verse 1, David prays, “1 In You, Lord, I have taken refuge;
Let me never be put to shame;
In Your righteousness rescue me.
2 Incline Your ear to me, rescue me quickly;
Be a rock of strength for me,
A stronghold to save me.
Did you notice how David starts off the Psalm with a prayer for help? He is making his request to the Lord. He is saying: please listen to me, rescue me and be a rock of strength for me. Then, he proclaims in a statement of faith:
3 For You are my rock and my fortress;
For the sake of Your name You will lead me and guide me.
4 You will pull me out of the net which they have secretly laid for me,
For You are my strength.
5 Into Your hand I entrust my spirit;
You have redeemed me, Lord, God of truth.
6 I hate those who devote themselves to worthless idols,
But I trust in the Lord.
7 I will rejoice and be glad in Your faithfulness,
Because You have seen my misery;
You have known the troubles of my soul,
8 And You have not handed me over to the enemy;
You have set my feet in a large place.
After making those statements of faith, declaring the faithfulness of God; that God will lead him and guide him, and God will pull him out of the net, and after declaring that he will rejoice and be glad in God’s faithfulness, you would think that now David will say ‘amen’ and go on his way, full of faith, stress-free and calm. That’s not what happens though. Let’s read the next section:
9 Be gracious to me, Lord, for I am in distress;
My eye is wasted away from grief, my soul and my body too.
10 For my life is spent with sorrow
And my years with sighing;
My strength has failed because of my guilt,
And my body has wasted away.
11 Because of all my adversaries, I have become a disgrace,
Especially to my neighbors,
And an object of dread to my acquaintances;
Those who see me in the street flee from me.
12 I am forgotten like a dead person, out of mind;
I am like a broken vessel.
13 For I have heard the slander of many,
Terror is on every side;
While they took counsel together against me,
They schemed to take away my life.
David is stressing out! What happened? Didn’t he declare that God was his rock and his fortress? He just finished saying that he trusts in the Lord. He said that God would not give him over to the enemy. If he believes all those things, why is he in distress still? Why does he say he is still grieving? Why is he weighed down by guilt and like a “broken vessel?” This section must be why the NASB titled this Psalm, “A Psalm of Complaint and Praise.” This is the complaining part.
Can you relate to David? I know that I can. To be honest, so far this Psalm sounds like the kind of prayer I pray a lot. I start off praying, stating the things I know to be true. I tell God that He is faithful, I thank Him for helping me, I tell Him that I believe in Him and know that He won’t fail me. And then almost while I am saying those things, all of my needs and all the feelings of frustration or worry crowd themselves into the prayer, and I list off the things that I need God to help me with. Sometimes the problems I am bringing to God are so big that they overwhelm the things that I know to be true. Sometimes the stress is so great, the prayer times turns into complaining and pleading, just like we see here in David’s prayer. Have you been there?
But David doesn’t stay there, stuck in a place of stress. Let’s read what he wrote next:
14 But as for me, I trust in You, Lord,
I say, “You are my God.”
15 My times are in Your hand;
Rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from those who persecute me.
Rather than staying in a place of complaining and despair, David declares again what is true. Despite how he feels or even what is happening, he knows this simple thing to be true and he declares it. He says: You are my God and my times are in Your hand.
This was true for David, and this can be true for us. No matter what is happening in our immediate situation, we can still trust in the Lord. We can say, “You are my God.” If the Lord is our God, our times are in His hands. If our times are in His hands, then what do we have to fear?
When David states that his times are in God’s hands, I think he means more than just the length of his life. The word is plural, and it means circumstances or seasons. It makes me think of the idiom, “It’s out of my hands.” If we can’t control the outcome of something, we might say, “It’s out of my hands,” meaning there isn’t anything that can be done to fix something.
David is saying to God: because You are my God, my times are in Your hands. Because You are my God, I know You can intervene. You can help me. There is nothing that You cannot help me with. There is nothing that is too complicated or big for You. Nothing is outside of Your hands.
In my grandfather’s bible, he has handwritten the words, “my times are in Your hand” off to the side in the margins. I think he rewrote it so he could memorize it. We, too, would be wise to memorize that short sentence. Put together with the sentence right before it, it becomes a refrain we could memorize and recite daily, reminding ourselves of this truth: “You are my God, my times are in Your hand.” That should bring us peace, assuring us that whether God caused the times we are in, or we caused the circumstances we are in, as believers, we can trust that all of our times are in God’s hands. Everything that happens, He has these happenings in His hands. There is nothing that is outside the limits of His help.
It is worth noting, too, the rest of verse 15. It says, “My times are in Your hand; Rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from those who persecute me.” Did you notice that there are two sets of hands being mentioned? Since his times are in God’s hand, David prays that God will rescue him from the hand of his enemies. David doesn’t want his circumstances or seasons of his life to be determined at the hand of his enemies. He wants God to shape his circumstances and seasons of life.
The thing is, all people are subject to that very thing happening. Either a person has made Jesus the Lord of their life, and so they can say, like David, You are my God and my times are in Your hand. Or, they are at the mercy of their own hand, the world’s hands, or the devil’s hands against them. Which hands do we want to be subjected to? Which hand do we want guiding us?
Returning to the Psalm, we see David continuing His prayer. He has more requests for help, but the complaining and despair are gone. He prays:
16 Make Your face shine upon Your servant;
Save me in Your faithfulness.
17 Let me not be put to shame, Lord, for I call upon You;
Let the wicked be put to shame, let them be silent in Sheol.
18 Let the lying lips be speechless,
Which speak arrogantly against the righteous
With pride and contempt.
The footnote in the NASB states that the word Sheol can also be translated as “the netherworld.” Fans of the video game Minecraft know that the nether is what Minecraft calls the hell-like dimension where there is fire and lava and lots of monsters. David is inferring that his enemies are not following God, and that it’s the wicked dwellers of hell who are trying to destroy him. He is praying that the Lord will silence the wicked and lying evil doers. We, too, can pray that prayer.
In fact, we should often pray that prayer. As Ephesians 6:12 says, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Because of that, we should do spiritual warfare. The foundation of spiritual warfare is prayer. We should pray specifically for God to silence the devil’s lies, put the wicked to shame, and protect Christians from slander and attacks. We should pray that prayer for ourselves, our family, and for the Church at large. When we pray those prayers, we can be confident that we are praying along with the will of God, knowing that He will be faithful to answer it, for He has shown us in this Psalm that this is a prayer we are to pray.
Then, picking back up in verse 19, David begins to praise God. He says:
19 How great is Your goodness,
Which You have stored up for those who fear You,
Which You have performed for those who take refuge in You,
Before the sons of mankind!
20 You hide them in the secret place of Your presence from the conspiracies of mankind;
You keep them secretly in a shelter from the strife of tongues.
21 Blessed be the Lord,
For He has shown His marvelous faithfulness to me in a besieged city.
22 As for me, I said in my alarm,
“I am cut off from Your eyes”;
Nevertheless You heard the sound of my pleadings
When I called to You for help.
David is able to pray and praise the Lord in the middle of an immensely stressful situation, because he knows the Lord. He is not someone who, in a moment of crisis, finally decides to cry out to God. He knows the character of God. He has worshiped God. He has experienced the mercy and forgiveness of God. David has seen God work in his life. In this section of this Psalm, David is remembering times that God has shown His “marvelous faithfulness” to him. He’s recounting to himself that God helped him in the past, and He will help now.
When we are in stressful situations, we will be able to stand in faith better if we can remember all the many ways God has shown His marvelous faithfulness to us in the past. We should remind ourselves of how God has come through for us before, and remember that He loves us and cares for us still today. If we are daily reading the Bible, daily talking with Him in prayer, and daily seeking to follow Him, then when trouble comes, we will be ready to hand over the problems to God. Our former faith will be the foundation that we trust God with today. For tomorrow’s troubles are more easily faced, if we already have faith in God. David could declare all this truth about God’s faithfulness to him because he’d already experienced God’s faithfulness. He had trusted God before and knew He was trustworthy. If we want to have faith to trust God in our greatest hours of need, we must build that faith beforehand.
The most simple way that faith is built in us is when we read His word. Scripture says about itself, in Hebrews 4:12, that it is “alive and active.” We need to make every effort to hear God’s word every day so the Holy Spirit can work it into the very core of our beings. In the same way that yeast must be worked into all the dough so the bread will rise, God’s word must be worked into our hearts and minds so our faith will rise. If we never read His word or spend time in prayer, then why would we trust Him when faced with problems? Rather, we should study His word, spend time with Him, getting to really know Him, so that when stressful situations arise, we can rest in peace, knowing that our times, even our most stressful times, are in His hands.
David knew this from experience. And so he ends this Psalm by encouraging others. He says:
23 Love the Lord, all His godly ones!
The Lord watches over the faithful
But fully repays the one who acts arrogantly.
24 Be strong and let your heart take courage,
All you who wait for the Lord.
No matter what we are facing, no matter how alarming things become, if we call upon Jesus, He will help us. We should not be arrogant, and take matters into our own hands, thinking we can help ourselves. That is what the world does, and they are repaid for their arrogance. For the consequence of not having faith in Jesus will always ultimately end in disaster. For those of us who follow Him, who have been forgiven and saved by faith, then even the most disastrous of situations can be faced with faith in God’s goodness. For the Christian, even persecution or death is not the end. We can be strong and encouraged, no matter what, because our hope is in the Lord. As verse 24 says, let us “Be strong and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord.”
Let us be encouraged today, knowing that we can go to the Lord in prayer. We don’t need to hide our emotions of worry or fear from Him. We can give Him all our complaints and problems and know that He will receive them. Let us daily read His word, letting the Holy Spirit work it into our hearts and minds, so when we are stressed He can bring those words to our mind, reminding us again of His continued marvelous faithfulness to us. Then we can say: You are my God, my times are in Your hand.
Pray: Heavenly Father, thank You for loving us so much that You have given us Your word so we might know You. Please give us the desire to want to read it every day. By Your Holy Spirit, please work faith into our hearts as we read it, so faith will rise up greater inside of us each day. Please forgive us for the times we haven’t gone to you and have tried to handle problems ourselves thinking we don’t need You. We confess that we do need You, and we rejoice that we can rest, knowing our times are in Your hands. We love You and praise You, through Your Son You gave to save us, amen.
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