Four times this psalm tells almost the same short story, and it never tires of telling it. Wanderers lost in the desert, prisoners in irons, fools brought low by their own folly, and sailors thrown about by a storm at sea are four kinds of trouble, and each time the same sentences resolve it. 6"Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress." The refrain returns at verses 13, 19, and 28, and each time a second refrain follows, a summons to thanks for his steadfast love and his wondrous works. The wanderers and the sailors suffer through no fault of their own, and the prisoners and the fools suffer because of their own rebellion. Guilty or innocent, the deliverance is the same and so is the call to give thanks.
The psalm most likely grew out of Israel's return from exile, an answer to the prayer that closes Psalm 106 for God to gather his people from among the nations. Verse 3 answers it at once. 3"gathered in from the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south." Each of the four pictures suits some facet of that return. The wanderers recall the trek home across wilderness, the prisoners recall exile pictured as imprisonment, the fools recall a nation disciplined for rebelling against God's words, and the sailors recall the disorientation of exile and return.
Underneath all four pictures sits one Hebrew word the psalm will not let go of, chesed, God's steadfast covenant love. It opens the poem in verse 1 and closes it in verse 43, and the refrain repeats it four times in between. Every deliverance in this psalm is finally an expression of one unchanging love, four rescues with one love wearing four faces.
The final movement pulls the camera back to God's ordinary providence over the created order. Rivers turn to desert because of a land's wickedness, and deserts turn to springs where the hungry are settled, sow fields, and multiply. 40"he pours contempt on princes," and 41"he raises up the needy out of affliction." The language echoes Hannah's song (1 Samuel 2:6-8) and Mary's Magnificat (Luke 1:53). What the psalm describes in four vignettes is God's way with the whole world.
Each of the four pictures finds its truest rescuer in Christ. He is the bread of life to the hungry and the living water to the thirsty, and he was sent to proclaim liberty to the captives (Luke 4:18). His word alone heals the sick. And when his disciples were caught, terrified, in a storm on the Sea of Galilee, he did what this psalm says the LORD does. He rebuked the wind and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" (Mark 4:39), and the psalm's own line, "He made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed" (verse 29), found its answer.
The psalm opened with the summons 2"Let the redeemed of the LORD say so," and it closes with a wisdom appeal. 43"Whoever is wise, let him attend to these things; let them consider the steadfast love of the LORD." What it asks us to attend to is a pattern proven four ways in one poem and proven again, completely, in the one who fulfills every picture at once.
Which of the four is yours today, the desert, the prison, the sickness, or the storm? Cry to him in it, and then tell someone else that he answered.
Prayer
Father, we thank you for your steadfast love, which has met us in whatever wilderness, prison, sickness, or storm we have carried to you. Thank you that your rescue does not wait to sort out whether the trouble was our doing. When we wander, lead us by a straight way. When we are tossed, still the storm. In the name of Jesus, who stilled our storm himself, amen.