Psalm 6: Enter God’s Wrath

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Continuing the quick descent from the bright and confident promises of Psalms 1 and 2 to the sufferings expressed in Psalms 3-5,  Psalm 6 adds a further element: God’s wrath upon the righteous speaker. Psalm 2:4-5 and 9-12 reveals God’s wrath against the wicked; here we see that wrath causing the Righteous One to suffer.

Psalm 6:1 To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments; according to The Sheminith. A Psalm of David.

O LORD, rebuke me not in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath.
2 Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am languishing; heal me, O LORD, for my bones are troubled.
3 My soul also is greatly troubled. But you, O LORD– how long?
4 Turn, O LORD, deliver my life; save me for the sake of your steadfast love.
5 For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who will give you praise?
6 I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping.
7 My eye wastes away because of grief; it grows weak because of all my foes.
8 Depart from me, all you workers of evil, for the LORD has heard the sound of my weeping.
9 The LORD has heard my plea; the LORD accepts my prayer.
10 All my enemies shall be ashamed and greatly troubled; they shall turn back and be put to shame in a moment. 5 The arrogant cannot stand in your presence. You hate all who do wrong;

I. How do we know that the speaker of Psalm 6 is righteous?

A. We take a canonical, devotional view that presupposes all the psalms to be united with all Scripture and that unless otherwise directly noted, the first person singular speaker of all the psalms is none other than Messiah, the Son of God, God’s appointed King. By definition, God is righteous, and his Son is righteous, even during his incarnation as a human (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Discussion: First, can the above statement be proven from the Psalms themselves or other Scripture? In a legal sense, no. But neither can it be disproven. This is why commentaries are written. They all take a different point of view. The presuppositions stated in point A above can be reasonably and intellectually defended and demonstrated with quantities of biblical evidence, which is what the several posts in this blog are all about. But no person can provide an airtight proof one way or the other that the Psalter is largely spoken by Christ.

The world of biblical academia has not changed from Jesus’ day to our own. In the gospels, many conversations between Jesus and the “lawyers” of the law, the scribes and Pharisees, record Jesus’ attempts to pierce through combative academics to reach the hearts of people. I believe it safe to say that God does not care about a person’s intellectual understandings about his Word. God wants faith (Hebrews 11:6). Faith is like insight or like solving a mathematical word problem: there comes a point when a step must be made, no matter how small, over a gap that human logic and reason cannot bridge. God as Creator designed it to be so. Belief in God comes by his grace alone.

Second, taken on an individual basis, some psalms, such as Psalm 2, demonstrate the presence of Christ more readily than others. On the other hand, without faith, it appears impossible that a psalm such as Psalm 6 could be proven to speak words of Christ. However, as shown in prior articles on Psalms 1 and 2, it is literarily reasonable to suppose that all the psalms in the Psalter are about Christ or spoken by him. Therefore, it is not necessary to continually prove and demonstrate this point for each and every psalm. Over the five decades since Brevard Childs wrote his boldly conversation-opening book Biblical Theology in Crisis, academia has permitted a greater interconnectedness among the various portions of Scripture, including both the Old and New Testaments. (See, for example, works by Matthew W. Bates.)

B. Even though Psalm 6 is listed as the first of seven penitential psalms by the early church (The seven penitential psalms are 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143, C. Hassell Bullock, 207), no sins are mentioned (Craig C. Broyles, 63). Robert S. Hawker explains this feature.

“But the beauty of the Psalms is as it beholds Christ in his strong crying and tears, when taking upon him our nature, and becoming sin for the church, that the church might be made the righteousness of God in him. If we eye the Redeemer as the sinner’s surety, we shall then enter into a right apprehension of what he saith under the divine chastisement for sin.” (Hawker, 178, Psalm 6:2)

C. In spite of the wrath of God being displayed against the speaker (vss 1-3), God hears and responds to the psalmist’s cry for mercy and delivers from the grave and from a multitude of enemies (vss 8-10). Within the body of Psalms, God never comes to the aid of his enemies, but always favors the righteous. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

II. What does Psalm 6 add to the Psalter?

The psalms are prophetic. Their main purpose, or one of their main purposes, is to prophesy of the Christ. For the first time in the Psalter, Psalm 6 reveals the theme of God’s wrath against his Son, his Messiah, his King (if the reader connects this psalm with Psalm 2). Psalm 6 also reveals God’s deliverance after wrath.

III. Why read Psalms this way?

Why does this writer invest so much of her time and energy to communicate that the Psalms contain the words of Christ and of God his Father to him? For one reason only: to encourage the reader to pick up the Psalter in a quiet moment of devotion, to lay all academics aside, to ask God to speak to her personally, and to hear in a life-changing way the heart of God expressing itself in love for her the reader through the sacrificial death of his Son on the cross on her behalf: to experience God’s love for you, the reader.

I personally find that reading a psalm out loud when no one is present and there will be no opportunity for interruption is a good way to hear the voice of God through these living words.

 

 

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2 thoughts on “Psalm 6: Enter God’s Wrath

  1. This is an excellent suggestion! I personally find that reading a psalm out loud when no one is present and there will be no opportunity for interruption is a good way to hear the voice of God through these living words.

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