Let the Redeemed Say So

vv. 1–3Say it: his mercy endureth for ever

The first word is a command, and it is not feel grateful. הֹדוּ is from ידה, which means to acknowledge, to own publicly, to confess. It is the verb David uses for confessing sin — “I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD” (Ps. 32:5) — and the verb Solomon uses for Israel, beaten in battle or shut up in drought, turning back to “confess thy name” (1 Kgs. 8:33, 35). Thanksgiving in Hebrew is confession facing the other way. In the one, a man says out loud what he has done; in the other, he says out loud what God has done. The noun is תּוֹדָה, which gives Psalm 100 its title and will turn up in this psalm as an offering (v. 22). The Psalm 32 lesson studies the first kind of confession; this psalm is the second.

What they are to acknowledge is a sentence Israel already knew by heart. For he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever is not this psalmist’s composition. It was sung when the ark came up to Jerusalem (1 Chr. 16:34); at the dedication of Solomon’s temple, when the house was filled with the cloud while the singers were still singing it (2 Chr. 5:13); in front of Jehoshaphat’s army (2 Chr. 20:21); and over the foundation of the second temple (Ezra 3:11). Psalm 136 says it twenty-six times. Psalm 107 opens with it because it is the church’s oldest confession of what God is like, and the next forty verses show why it is true.

Then the second command, and the Authorised Version’s italic so is worth a look. יֹאמְרוּ is simply let them say; the object is supplied, and it points backwards. What the redeemed are told to say is verse 1, in the Hallel’s construction: “Let Israel now say, that his mercy endureth for ever” (Ps. 118:2; cf. Psalm 124, “now may Israel say”). The redeemed are not first asked for their story. They are asked for the confession, and their stories — the four that follow — are the evidence for it. Book IV ended with the people told to say Amen; Book V tells the redeemed what the Amen was to.

Who are they? גְּאוּלֵי יְהוָה, the redeemed of the LORD, and the verb is גָּאַל, the kinsman’s verb. In the law a גֹּאֵל is the nearest male relative, and he redeems because he is family: he buys back the field a poor brother has had to sell (Lev. 25:25), or the brother himself if he has sold himself to a stranger (Lev. 25:47–49). At the Exodus the LORD takes the word for himself — “the people which thou hast redeemed” (Exod. 15:13) — and Isaiah makes it a name: “I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine” (Isa. 43:1). The exact phrase of verse 2 is Isaiah’s title for the restored people, “The holy people, The redeemed of the LORD” (Isa. 62:12). To be the LORD‘s redeemed is to have been claimed by next of kin.

That is why the New Testament describes the incarnation in exactly these terms. A redeemer must be a kinsman, and so “it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren” (Heb. 2:17); the Son was “made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law” (Gal. 4:4–5). The song of the redeemed at the end of the Bible is verse 2 in the plural of every nation: “thou … hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation” (Rev. 5:9).

Redeemed from what? From the hand of the enemy, מִיַּד־צָר. Here צַר means adversary; in each of the four cries the same spelling means trouble — they cried בַּצַּר לָהֶם, in the narrow place they were in. The lexicons count two words, but the psalm writes them alike, and the effect is plain: the enemy and the trap are one narrowness, and the God who redeems from the one hears from inside the other. Zacharias keeps the pair together: God “hath visited and redeemed his people” that we should be “saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us” (Luke 1:68, 71).

Last, verse 3, which is Isaiah’s promise kept: “I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back” (Isa. 43:5–6). (The Hebrew’s fourth point is actually the sea, יָם, which in Israel usually means the west; having already said west, the Authorised Version reads it as south.) Our Lord takes the four quarters and fills them with Gentiles: “they shall come from the east, and from the west, and from the north, and from the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God” (Luke 13:29). John says the cross was for that — “that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad” (John 11:52). The gathering of verse 3 did not stop at the Jordan. It is still going on.

vv. 10–16Prisoners in darkness and iron

The second scene is the dungeon, and it is the darkest place in the psalm. Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death — צַלְמָוֶת, the word Psalm 23 used for its valley. There the sheep walked through it with the Shepherd. Here men sit in it, which is what prisoners do, bound in affliction and iron. Job used the word for the land of the dead (Job 10:21–22), and Isaiah for the people on whom a great light would shine (Isa. 9:2). Here it is a cell.

And this time the psalm says why they are there. Because they rebelled against the words of God, and contemned the counsel of the most High. The verb הִמְרוּ is the wilderness verb for defiance. Moses’ summary of forty years is “ye have been rebellious against the LORD” (Deut. 9:7), and Asaph’s is “they sinned yet more against him by provoking the most High in the wilderness” (Ps. 78:17) — the same verb both times. The Hebrew has a play the English cannot keep: they himru the imre of God, they defied his sayings. This is not ignorance. It is men who heard the word of God and said no to it.

So the LORD humbled them. Therefore he brought down their heart with labour; they fell down, and there was none to help. וַיַּכְנַע, he brought down, is the verb of the covenant’s own provision for exiles. Leviticus foresees Israel in the land of its enemies and says what will happen next: “if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled, and they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity: Then will I remember my covenant with Jacob” (Lev. 26:41–42). And the history books give this stanza a face. Manasseh, the worst king Judah ever had, was bound “with fetters” — the Hebrew word is bronze — and carried to Babylon; “and when he was in affliction, he besought the LORD his God, and humbled himself greatly”, and the LORD “heard his supplication, and brought him again to Jerusalem” (2 Chr. 33:11–13). The psalm does not name him. It describes what God did for him.

There was none to help is the bottom of it, and Scripture uses those words for the moment just before God acts alone: “I looked, and there was none to help … therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me” (Isa. 63:5). The Westminster Confession, describing how God deals even with his own children, says that he oftentimes leaves them for a season, to chastise them for their former sins, so that they may be humbled and brought to a closer dependence on himself (WCF 5.5). Being brought down is not the opposite of the mercy in this scene. It is the first part of it. “No chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness” (Heb. 12:11).

Then the cry — וַיִּזְעֲקוּ this time — and the rescue is complete. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and brake their bands in sunder. The Hebrew of that last clause, וּמוֹסְרוֹתֵיהֶם יְנַתֵּק, is the second Psalm turned inside out. There the kings of the earth set themselves against the LORD and his Anointed and say, “Let us break their bands asunder” (Ps. 2:3) — the same verb and the same noun. The rebels of Psalm 2 wanted to break God’s bands, and rebels like them end up in iron. Here the rebels are in iron, and God breaks their bands. His are the only bands that leave a man free; every other kind ends in a cell. Psalm 116 uses the same noun for its own release: “thou hast loosed my bonds” (Ps. 116:16).

And the reason is a line Isaiah also has: For he hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron in sunder. The Hebrew says doors of bronze — the leaves of a city gate — and bars of iron, the beams that lock them, and the LORD promises Cyrus, the king he would use to send the exiles home, the same pair in the same words (Isa. 45:2). The return from exile was not a negotiated release. It was the owner of the prison breaking it open from outside.

The New Testament reads this stanza as the shape of the gospel. Isaiah’s Servant is given “to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house” (Isa. 42:7), and when Jesus stands up in the synagogue at Nazareth he reads the companion passage and says it is fulfilled “this day”: “he hath sent me … to preach deliverance to the captives” (Luke 4:18, 21; Isa. 61:1). Zacharias’ song ends with the dayspring come “to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Luke 1:79), in words that echo Isaiah 9:2 and this verse together. Paul says the Father “hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Col. 1:13). And Acts shows it happening to the letter in a Philippian prison, where at midnight “all the doors were opened, and every one’s bands were loosed” (Acts 16:26) — just after two prisoners had been singing praises to God in the dark (Acts 16:25).

vv. 17–22Fools, and the word that heals

The third scene is the sickbed, and like the second it names a cause. Fools because of their transgression, and because of their iniquities, are afflicted. אֱוִלִים, fools, is not a remark about intelligence. In Proverbs the אֱוִיל is the man who knows better and will not have it: “fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Prov. 1:7); “Fools make a mock at sin” (Prov. 14:9). And the two nouns for what they did are the two great Old Testament words for sin. פֶּשַׁע, transgression, is rebellion, the breaking of a bond; עֲוֹנוֹת, iniquities, is the crooked, twisted kind — the word the Psalm 130 lesson followed from that psalm’s third verse to its last. This is the second scene running to name sin, and the second to say that the trouble came, at least in part, from what the sufferers did.

The sickness is described from the inside. Their soul abhorreth all manner of meat; and they draw near unto the gates of death. Elihu describes the same patient to Job — “his life abhorreth bread, and his soul dainty meat … his soul draweth near unto the grave” — and then a ransom found, a prayer heard, and a man who confesses, “I have sinned, and perverted that which was right” (Job 33:20–27). Hezekiah, “sick unto death,” said “I shall go to the gates of the grave,” and when he was healed he wrote, “thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back” (Isa. 38:1, 10, 17). The Psalter sets the two gates against each other: “thou that liftest me up from the gates of death: That I may shew forth all thy praise in the gates of the daughter of Zion” (Ps. 9:13–14). That is this scene in two lines.

Then the cry, and a rescue unlike the other three. He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions. Elsewhere in the psalm God acts with his hand; here he acts by speaking. The Psalter knows the habit — “He sendeth forth his commandment upon earth: his word runneth very swiftly” (Ps. 147:15) — and Isaiah makes it a promise: “it shall not return unto me void” (Isa. 55:11). And at Marah, three days past the Red Sea, the LORD had told Israel what kind of God he is in this respect: “I am the LORD that healeth thee” (Exod. 15:26), with the verb of verse 20.

There is a pointed irony in setting this scene after the last. The prisoners rebelled against the words of God; the sick are healed because God sent his word. The Hebrew words differ — אִמְרֵי there, דְּבָרוֹ here — and the scenes concern different people, but it is the same God speaking. You do not get a different word from God when you are sick. You get the same one, sent.

Christian readers have long heard more in verse 20 than a figure of speech, and the Gospels give them the right. The centurion asks Jesus to “speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed” (Matt. 8:8); Peter sums up the whole ministry as “the word which God sent unto the children of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ” (Acts 10:36), in language close to the Greek of this verse; and John says the Word God sent “was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

The response this time is not a reason but a sacrifice. And let them sacrifice the sacrifices of thanksgiving, and declare his works with rejoicing. The זִבְחֵי תוֹדָה were peace offerings brought “for a thanksgiving,” with unleavened cakes, wafers and leavened bread, and the flesh had to be “eaten the same day that it is offered” (Lev. 7:11–15). It was not an offering you could quietly finish on your own; in practice it meant a meal, and a meal meant company. And verse 22 adds the words that go with the meat: declare his works, וִיסַפְּרוּ, recount them, tell the story — with rejoicing, with a ringing shout.

Our Lord once watched this verse kept and watched it neglected on the same road. Ten lepers were cleansed; “one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks: and he was a Samaritan.” Jesus’ question is the psalm’s refrain asked as a complaint: “Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine? There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger” (Luke 17:15–18). Ten were healed by his word. One declared his works with rejoicing. The church has no altar now and needs none: “By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name” (Heb. 13:15). But it still has the nine and the one.

vv. 23–32Sailors at their wit’s end

The fourth scene is the longest, and the only one in which nobody is lost, guilty, or ill. They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters — מְלָאכָה, ordinary work, a trade. These are men doing their jobs. Israel was not a seafaring people, and the sea in Scripture is the picture of everything that will not be ruled — the waters that “roar and be troubled” in Psalm 46 (Ps. 46:3). Yet the psalm says these men see something out there that nobody sees on land: the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep — מְצוּלָה, the word for where Pharaoh’s army “sank into the bottom as a stone” (Exod. 15:5), and where Jonah was thrown (Jonah 2:3).

Then the storm, and the psalm says plainly where it comes from. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind. The Hebrew is simpler and more startling: וַיֹּאמֶר, he said. In the third scene God sent his word and the sick were healed; in the fourth he speaks and the sea stands up. Psalm 148 calls the weather to praise in the same terms, “stormy wind fulfilling his word” (Ps. 148:8), with the same two Hebrew words for the storm. Jonah’s book begins the same way: “the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea” (Jonah 1:4). The trouble in this scene is sent, not earned.

It is the most vivid writing in the psalm. They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths … They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man — the verb and the comparison Isaiah uses for the whole earth on the day of the LORD (Isa. 24:20). And then the clause the Authorised Version renders so memorably, and are at their wit’s end: וְכָל־חָכְמָתָם תִּתְבַּלָּע, and all their wisdom is swallowed up. The חָכְמָה of a sailor is his seamanship — Ezekiel calls the pilots of Tyre her “wise men” (Ezek. 27:8) — and these are professionals whose skill has been swallowed the way the sea swallows. Jonah’s crew “rowed hard to bring it to the land; but they could not” (Jonah 1:13). Mark the word, because the psalm will come back to it. Its last verse begins, Whoso is wise.

The cry comes a fourth time — וַיִּצְעֲקוּ, as in the first scene — and the rescue is told in three movements. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still: יָקֵם סְעָרָה לִדְמָמָה, literally he makes the storm stand to a whisper. דְּמָמָה is a rare and lovely word; its best-known other appearance is the “still small voice” Elijah heard on Horeb, after the wind and the earthquake and the fire (1 Kgs. 19:12). Then are they glad because they be quiet — יִשְׁתֹּקוּ, the verb Jonah’s shipmates used when they asked what they must do “that the sea may be calm unto us” (Jonah 1:11–12). So he bringeth them unto their desired haven — and he bringeth is וַיַּנְחֵם, from נָחָה, the pillar-of-cloud verb the Psalm 23 lesson studied in “he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness.” The Shepherd of the hill country is also the pilot of the sea.

Then the response, the most public of the four. Let them exalt him also in the congregation of the people, and praise him in the assembly of the elders. וִירֹמְמוּהוּ, let them exalt him, is from the same root as verse 25’s which lifteth up the waves: at his word the storm lifted up the waves, and now the rescued are to lift up him. The place is named twice — the קְהַל, the gathered people, and the seat of the elders, where the town’s business was done. A rescue at sea ends in the assembly and in the council.

Every reader of the Gospels knows where this goes. A storm on the lake, a boat filling, and the disciples’ cry: “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” Jesus “arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm” (Mark 4:38–39). Their response was the right one for men who knew this psalm: “they feared exceedingly, and said one to another, What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:41). The psalm had already told them. The one who maketh the storm a calm is the LORD, and Psalm 89 says the same: “when the waves thereof arise, thou stillest them” (Ps. 89:9). On another night he came to them walking on the water, and “they that were in the ship came and worshipped him, saying, Of a truth thou art the Son of God” (Matt. 14:33) — verse 32 kept in a fishing boat — and “immediately the ship was at the land whither they went” (John 6:21), which is verse 30. And Paul, on a ship where all hope of being saved had gone, “took bread, and gave thanks to God in presence of them all” — before the rescue, not after it (Acts 27:20, 35, 44).

vv. 33–38Rivers to desert, desert to pools

At verse 33 the psalm changes its voice. There are no more companies of people, no more cries, no more refrains. The verbs become a hymn’s verbs — he turneth, he turneth, he poureth — describing what the LORD habitually does, and the canvas widens from four boatloads of people to whole landscapes and nations. Some commentators treat verses 33 to 43 as a separate poem added later; whatever their history, the psalm as we have it offers them as the lesson of the four scenes. What God did for wanderers, prisoners, the sick and the sailors, he does with rivers and deserts, peoples and princes.

He works in both directions, and the psalm says so before it says anything comforting. He turneth rivers into a wilderness, and the watersprings into dry ground; a fruitful land into barrenness, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein. Isaiah has the first line in the LORD‘s own mouth: “at my rebuke I dry up the sea, I make the rivers a wilderness” (Isa. 50:2). And the AV’s barrenness is in Hebrew מְלֵחָה, a salt land — Jeremiah’s word for where the man who trusts in man ends up, “in a salt land and not inhabited” (Jer. 17:5–6). Every Israelite knew which fruitful land had turned to salt: the plain of Jordan, “well watered every where … even as the garden of the LORD” before Sodom fell (Gen. 13:10), which Moses held up to an unfaithful Israel as “brimstone, and salt, and burning” (Deut. 29:23). Providence includes judgment. A psalm of thanksgiving says so out loud, so that nobody mistakes the next verse for a guarantee.

Then the reverse. He turneth the wilderness into a standing water, and dry ground into watersprings. Isaiah has this line too, in almost the same Hebrew, as a promise to the exiles: “I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water” (Isa. 41:18). It is one of the prophets’ great pictures of what God does when he restores his people: “in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert” (Isa. 35:6). Our Lord stood up on the last day of the feast and claimed it: “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me … out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” — and John explains, “this spake he of the Spirit” (John 7:37–39). The Bible’s last chapter opens with a river (Rev. 22:1).

Notice who is settled by the new water. And there he maketh the hungry to dwell, that they may prepare a city for habitation. The hungry are the רְעֵבִים of the first scene (vv. 5, 9), and the city for habitation is the עִיר מוֹשָׁב they could not find (v. 4) and were led to (v. 7). Verse 36 tells the first scene again at the size of a nation. Then the settled life of a blessed people: they sow the fields, and plant vineyards; He blesseth them also, so that they are multiplied greatly; and suffereth not their cattle to decrease. This is the creation blessing — “God blessed them … Be fruitful, and multiply” (Gen. 1:28) — and the covenant blessing of Deuteronomy, “the increase of thy kine” (Deut. 7:13). It is also what Jeremiah told the exiles to do while still in Babylon: “plant gardens … that ye may be increased there, and not diminished” (Jer. 29:5–6).

Read with the prophets, verse 35 is more than a remark about irrigation. The November set is gathered under a postmillennial heading, and readers who share that hope hear in it the shape of history under Christ’s reign: not only the return from Babylon and not only the new creation, but what the gospel does to the barren places in between, because “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” (Isa. 11:9), and the kingdom grows like a mustard seed and works like leaven (Matt. 13:31–33). As the Psalm 23 lesson put it, the optimism of the psalms is historical before it is eternal. But Psalm 107 is careful, and its very next verse says why.

vv. 39–43Princes brought low; the wise observe

Again, they are minished and brought low through oppression, affliction, and sorrow. The blessing of verse 38 is followed at once by its opposite. וַיִּמְעֲטוּ, they are minished, is the verb of the line before — he suffereth not their cattle to decrease — and now they decrease. It is Jeremiah’s pair, increased … and not diminished, run backwards. The psalm does not say why, and does not need to. Prosperity in this world is not a possession but a season, and the God who multiplies a people may let them be ground down by oppression. The Heidelberg Catechism draws exactly this lesson from the doctrine of providence: knowing that all things are in our Father’s hand, we are to be “patient in adversity; thankful in prosperity” (Heidelberg Q. 28).

Then the most striking pair of lines in the psalm, because they are borrowed. He poureth contempt upon princes, and causeth them to wander in the wilderness, where there is no way. Both halves are in Job, word for word, in Job’s speech about the God who unmakes the great (Job 12:21a, 24b). And the verb the psalm borrows is its own first-scene verb. וַיַּתְעֵם, he makes them wander, is the causative of תָּעוּ in verse 4. The princes are put where the wanderers were. Their wilderness is תֹהוּ, the without form of Genesis 1:2 and the waste of Deuteronomy 32:10; and it has no way in it, where the wanderers were given the right way. Mary sang it: “He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree” (Luke 1:52).

Yet setteth he the poor on high from affliction, and maketh him families like a flock. וַיְשַׂגֵּב, he sets on high, is the root of מִשְׂגָּב, the high place out of reach that Psalm 46 and Psalm 62 call God himself: “the God of Jacob is our refuge” (Ps. 46:7); “he is my defence” (Ps. 62:2). The poor are lifted into the place where God keeps his own. Hannah sang it first — “He raiseth up the poor out of the dust … to set them among princes” (1 Sam. 2:8) — and Ezekiel’s promise to the restored land has the flock: “I will increase them with men like a flock” (Ezek. 36:37).

The righteous shall see it, and rejoice: and all iniquity shall stop her mouth. Job again, twice (Job 22:19; 5:16). The righteous here are יְשָׁרִים, the upright, the straight — the people of verse 7’s straight road. They are glad not because princes fall but because God’s justice is seen; and iniquity, pictured as a woman with a loud mouth, has nothing left to say — the silence Paul describes, “that every mouth may be stopped” (Rom. 3:19).

Whoso is wise

Then the last verse, which tells the reader what the whole psalm was for. Whoso is wise, and will observe these things, even they shall understand the lovingkindness of the LORD. Hosea closes his book with almost the same question: “Who is wise, and he shall understand these things? prudent, and he shall know them? for the ways of the LORD are right” (Hos. 14:9). The sailors’ wisdom was swallowed up (v. 27). Here is the wisdom that cannot be.

Three words carry it. וְיִשְׁמָר, and will observe, is שׁמר: to keep, to guard, to keep watch over — the verb the Psalm 130 lesson followed from the God who does not keep iniquities on file to the watchman keeping watch for the morning. Here the wise man keeps these things. He does not let the four rescues and the reversals go by; he stores them and keeps a watch on them, as Mary “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). וְיִתְבּוֹנְנוּ, and they shall understand, is from בִּין, in a form that means to consider attentively, to look until you see. And what they come to see is the plural, חַסְדֵי יְהוָה, the lovingkindnesses of the LORD — the word of verse 1 and of every refrain, now counted out one act at a time.

So wisdom, in Psalm 107, is not cleverness about providence — predicting what God will do next, or explaining why this land turned to salt and that one to pools. It is noticing, keeping, and understanding the hesed in all of it: “let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the LORD which exercise lovingkindness” (Jer. 9:24). Calvin, explaining in the Institutes how God makes himself known by his works, walks through this psalm’s scenes one by one — the lost brought back to the road, the starving fed, the captives freed from iron, the shipwrecked brought into harbour, the sick fetched back from the gates of death, scorched fields watered, the lowly raised and the mighty thrown down — and draws the psalmist’s conclusion: that the events men put down to chance are so many proofs of God’s providence, and above all of his fatherly kindness, giving the righteous cause for joy and stopping the mouths of the ungodly (Institutes 1.5.8).