Psalm 54
O GOD, now save me by your name,
and by your strength me clear
O God, give answer to my prayer;
to my mouth’s words give ear,
For strangers up against me rise,
and fierce men seek my soul.
They have not set the thought of God
in front of them at all.
See, God a helper is to me;
the Lord sustains my soul.
He pays back evil to my foes;
in your truth slay them all.
I’ll freely sacrifice to you;
your good name, Lord, I’ll praise.
From trouble all he rescued me;
I’ve triumphed over foes
What Do You Do when Someone Seeks to Hurt You?
Have you ever been abandoned, rejected or betrayed by someone, especially someone you knew, even by someone you thought was your friend? If you have, then you’ve shared a similar experience to David in this psalm, and there are lessons for you from the psalm. The background to it is that King Saul, who had made himself an enemy of David, was set on killing him. David was in hiding in the Wilderness of Ziph. Certain people who dwelt there, Ziphites, went to Saul at Gibeah and told him David’s precise location. Saul and his men went to find him. Thankfully, for David, he had moved on from the Wilderness of Ziph to another nearby territory, the Wilderness of Maon. But Saul pursued David and came close enough to have him in his sights, and was encircling him and his men. At that point, David knew that the Ziphites had told Saul of his whereabouts. The Ziphites belonged to the same tribe as David, the tribe of Judah. Of all people, David would hardly have expected these people to betray him. But they did. How was he to respond to such a situation? This was no storm in a teacup. David’s life is at stake, and the lives of his army are at stake, because of this betrayal.
David Turned to God
This is what we see in the very first verse. David prays, “Save me, O God, by Your name, and vindicate me by Your strength.” David might have behaved rashly, but he didn’t. He didn’t turn to one of the surrounding nations for help. There was no one else he could turn to in his situation. He had raised a small army but it was no match for the might of Saul and his army. If the leader of the nation and all his men are against you, there’s nothing any man or group of men can do to help. But God is more powerful than the greatest army. David is a man of war, but he also is a man of faith. As an Old Testament believer, he knows that his God is powerful to help him, deliver him and save him from death, and he does the right thing. In his distress, he cries out to God, “Save me, O God, by Your name, and vindicate me by Your strength.” In v 2 he prays, “Hear my prayer, O God; Give ear to the words of my mouth.”
Can you see yourself in the Psalmist David? When trouble looms, when that betrayal leaves you numb, when you’re abandoned and lonely, and all human intervention to deliver you is insufficient, is this your response? Does your faith go into gear? Your faith is certainly being tested at such a time. Is it there? Is it real? Do you turn to God? Do you pray to God? Do you believe in God’s promises? Do you believe that at such a time God sees and knows all about your predicament and that He’s able to help you? Or do you turn inwards to self? Do you tend to turn to other ways to get through, that are in the end futile? Prayer is the great privilege the Christian has that most non-Christians don’t believe in.
David Told God His Problem
David says in v. 3, “For strangers have risen up against me, and oppressed me, and oppressors have sought after my life; they have not set God before them.” When you turn to God, God wants you to tell Him about your problem, just as we see David did here. Although God knows everything about you and knows all about your particular ordeal, it does you good to tell it to God. God isn’t like a machine that’s computer programmed to give you the desired response with the minimum amount of information. He’s a person, a very different kind of person from a sinful human being, but a person nonetheless. Just as you would talk to a close friend and tell them what you want to tell them, so too, you are to talk to God in prayer. There’s much truth in the adage, “A problem shared is a problem halved.” If someone else knows your problem, the weight of it to some degree is shed, and there’s no better person to share your problem with than God. When you unfold all the details of the cause of your pain in private to God, God listens. Tell Him about that oppressor, tell Him about that injustice and the pain, and believe that he hears, for He does hear you. Tell it just as it is. That’s what David did: “. . . strangers have risen up against me, and oppressed me, and oppressors have sought after my life; they have not set God before them.”
David Trusted in God
David was able to say in v. 4 “God is my helper; the LORD is with those who uphold my life.” David might have wallowed in his problems. It’s very easy to do that when you’re weighed down with a severe trial and you bring it before God in prayer. Instead of leaving it with God, and trusting God to deal with it, maybe you go over and over it in your heart. You get worked up about it, worry about it endlessly. You forget to trust God with it.
You are to trust Him. With this trust in God David prays in v 5, “He will repay my enemies for their evil. Cut them off in Your truth.” Here we see David praying for God to destroy his enemies. Verses like this are troubling to some people. Did Christ not say that we are to love our enemies and we are to pray for them? He did. But that doesn’t mean we are to stop caring about the cause of righteousness and truth, or that we shouldn’t pray that justice should be done by God. David himself doesn’t go after his enemies. He doesn’t try to hurt them. In fact, after the Ziphites had betrayed David to Saul, David had opportunity to kill Saul, but wouldn’t do it. He didn’t desire to hurt him. And we ought not to desire to hurt our enemies, but that doesn’t mean we can’t desire that God would deal with them, for God to exercise His justice towards them if they will not repent.
God did answer this prayer of David’s concerning his enemies. We know that they didn’t succeed in killing David. Saul was eventually killed in battle when his army was fighting against the Philistines in 1 Sam. 31. When mortally wounded, he took a sword, fell on it, and died. David’s prayer: “He will repay my enemies for their evil. Cut them off in Your truth,” was answered. It was Saul who had made himself an enemy of David. David never did him any harm. If someone has made you their enemy, you are not to avenge yourself (see Rom. 12:19.) God in His own time and way will deal with them.
David’s Trouble Was Removed
In v. 6 we find David in a very different frame of mind than he was at the beginning of his prayer. He tells God that he’s going to offer up to Him a sacrifice, a thank offering and that He will praise God’s name for it is good. He has a firm confidence that God not only hears his prayer but will act so that he says in v. 7 that God has already delivered him out of all trouble and his eye has seen his desire upon his enemies. David hadn’t tried to force an outcome. He did everything humanly possible in his situation. He gathered together a makeshift army for protection, he got his family into safety, he fled from danger, he tried to subdue Saul, and then he left the result up to God. God preserved him and removed the trouble, and in time David became king of the whole nation. His patient trust in God was rewarded.
It’s worth noting that whilst this psalm isn’t directly a Messianic psalm we see David’s experience reflected in the Messiah. The Lord Jesus Christ was oppressed by many enemies who wanted to hurt Him. If He had taken matters into His own hands He could have defeated them all, but that wouldn’t have achieved anything for mankind. Instead, like David in this psalm, Christ turned to God and told God about the great burden he was bearing. He prayed in Gethsemane that if it was God’s will that His cup of suffering be removed from Him that it might be removed; yet, not His own will, but God’s (Matt. 26:39). God didn’t remove it, wouldn’t remove it, and Christ submitted to His Father’s will, trusting in His Father, knowing that His will is best. Christ went on to the cross to die. It was a painful, cruel death. Why did God not remove that great trouble from His own Son? God had a very good, and loving reason for not doing so. Something great was about to be achieved. Yes, Christ would have to die. But God wasn’t being unmindful of His own Son. Christ would rise from the dead, victorious over death and sin, and He would be exalted to the right hand of the Father, with all authority in heaven and on earth being given to Him. But even more, by dying on the cross, Christ would achieve something wonderful for the world. He would make it possible for sinners to be saved to eternal life.
Through Christ’s work of redemption on the cross, the troubles of every follower of Christ will one day be removed. As for the enemies of Christ and of His people, many of whom seem so free from trouble, one day they will have trouble upon trouble piled upon them in a lost eternity with no end to hardship and adversity. For anyone who’s not for Christ, and for His people, you are against the rightful King and against His people, just as Saul and his men were against the rightful king and those with David. As their day of trouble came, so that day will come to all who are against Christ, and it will be an eternal day of trouble.
Believer, when your time of trouble comes, as it does at some time for most of those who belong to Christ; when you’re abandoned, or you’re rejected or betrayed by someone close to you, your best course of action is not to turn in and away from God, but turn to Him in prayer. Let your faith rise up, believing that God cares for you, is willing to help you, and will give you sufficient grace to bear up under your trouble. One day He will deliver you from all your troubles. In the meantime, He has promised that He will never leave you or forsake you (Heb. 13:5).