What Shall I Render?

vv. 1–4Heard; the cords of death

The psalm begins with a bare verb: אָהַבְתִּי, I love. In the Hebrew it has no object. The sentence runs I love, because the LORD hears my voice; the Authorised Version moves the divine name across to make it the object, I love the LORD, which is certainly what is meant. And the reason is given at once. The verb hears is in the imperfect, יִשְׁמַע — not a single past event but a God who hears. This love is not a mood that came on in a quiet hour. It is the answer to being heard when it mattered. John says the same thing about every Christian’s love: “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). The command of Deuteronomy, “thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart” (Deut. 6:5), is kept here not by effort but in reply.

There is one other servant in the law who says אָהַבְתִּי, and he will matter at verse 16. When a Hebrew slave’s six years were up and he could go free, he might instead say, “I love my master … I will not go out free” (Exod. 21:5) — and serve for life. Psalm 116 opens with that word and closes, nearly, with I am thy servant.

What he loves God for hearing is קוֹלִי תַּחֲנוּנָי, my voice, my supplications — nearly the phrase of Psalm 28, “he hath heard the voice of my supplications” (Ps. 28:6; cf. 31:22), and of Psalm 130 (Ps. 130:2), whose lesson studies the word: a supplication is a plea for grace, built on the root for being gracious. Then verse 2, the ear bent down — “Bow down thine ear, O LORD, hear me” (Ps. 86:1) — and the resolve that follows: therefore will I call upon him as long as I live, literally in my days. A man heard once will call for the rest of his life. The rest of the psalm is those days.

Verse 3 says what he was heard from. The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me. The first words, אֲפָפוּנִי חֶבְלֵי־מָוֶת, are the words with which David’s song for the day the LORD delivered him from Saul begins to describe the danger: “The sorrows of death compassed me” (Ps. 18:4; cf. 2 Sam. 22:5–6). חֶבֶל can be a cord — Rahab let the spies down “by a cord” (Josh. 2:15) — and a word that looks the same means the pangs of a woman in labour (Isa. 13:8). The line can be heard either way: death’s ropes thrown round him, or death’s contractions closing on him. The second line has מְצָרֵי שְׁאוֹל, the straits of Sheol — the narrow places, the word the same Hallel uses two psalms later: “I called upon the LORD in distress: the LORD answered me, and set me in a large place” (Ps. 118:5). The AV’s hell is the old English word for the hidden place of the dead; Sheol is where Jacob expected to go down mourning (Gen. 37:35). And there is a grim little play in the Hebrew: the straits of Sheol found him, and what he found was trouble and sorrow.

The New Testament takes this line and puts it on Christ. Peter, at Pentecost, says that God raised Jesus “having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it” (Acts 2:24). The pains of death is the phrase the Greek Psalter uses for this verse and for Psalm 18:4, and Peter goes straight on to Psalm 16: “thou wilt not leave my soul in hell” (Acts 2:27; Ps. 16:10). The man of Psalm 116 was near death and brought back. The Son was in death — the Larger Catechism says he continued “under the power of death till the third day” (WLC 50) — and was brought out of it, so that the cords that nearly took the psalmist cannot hold anyone who is in Christ.

Verse 4 is the turn, and it is very plain. Then called I upon the name of the LORD; O LORD, I beseech thee, deliver my soul. This is the oldest form of prayer in the Bible — “then began men to call upon the name of the LORD” (Gen. 4:26) — and Joel makes it the way of rescue on the great day: “whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered” (Joel 2:32). Peter quotes Joel in the same Pentecost sermon, a few sentences before the pains of death (Acts 2:21), and Paul applies it to confessing Jesus as Lord (Rom. 10:9, 13). אָנָּה, I beseech thee, is the particle of urgent pleading, and the psalm will use it once more, at verse 16. מַלְּטָה נַפְשִׁי, deliver my soul, asks to slip free, the verb of Psalm 124: “Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers” (Ps. 124:7).

vv. 5–9Gracious, righteous, merciful; return to thy rest

Having told what happened, the psalm says who did it. Gracious is the LORD, and righteous; yea, our God is merciful. Two of the three words come from the name the LORD proclaimed to Moses, “merciful and gracious” (Exod. 34:6), which Psalm 103 also quotes (Ps. 103:8). The psalm adds a third, צַדִּיק, righteous — and Psalm 112 has the same three together (Ps. 112:4). Why righteous, in a verse about rescue? Because God’s mercy never works against his justice; when he delivers, he keeps his word, and does it rightly. That is the gospel in Paul’s summary: God set forth Christ “that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26). The third word, מְרַחֵם, is a participle — one who shows compassion — and Isaiah uses the same verb for a mother: “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?” (Isa. 49:15). Notice too the pronoun. Our God: the only our in the psalm. One man’s thanksgiving is already being said in company.

The LORD preserveth the simple. Preserveth is שֹׁמֵר, from שׁמר, to keep or guard — the keeper of Psalm 121, who “will not slumber” (Ps. 121:3), and the verb the Psalm 130 lesson followed, where God is asked not to keep iniquities. He keeps people instead. פְּתָאיִם, the simple, are the open-doored, unguarded people of Proverbs, who “believeth every word” (Prov. 14:15) and whom wisdom exists to help (Prov. 1:4). They are the ones God’s word makes wise (Ps. 19:7; 119:130), and the ones to whom the Father reveals what he hides from “the wise and prudent” (Matt. 11:25). The psalmist puts himself among them: I was brought low — דַּלּוֹתִי, the cry of Psalm 142:6 — and he helped me. God keeps those who cannot keep themselves.

Then the turn inward. Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the LORD hath dealt bountifully with thee. The soul is spoken to, as in Psalm 103 — “Bless the LORD, O my soul” — and the Hebrew even shares that psalm’s unusual, long form of the suffix thy (compare Ps. 103:3–5). מְנוּחָיְכִי reads as a plural, thy rests (grammarians differ on the form), the word of Psalm 23’s “still waters,” the waters of rest (Ps. 23:2), and of the land as Israel’s inheritance (Deut. 12:9). Hebrews builds the Christian life on it — “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God” (Heb. 4:9) — and our Lord offers it in person: “Come unto me … and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). The soul that had been held by the cords of death is told to come home.

And the ground of the rest is a verb that will return in verse 12. גָּמַל עָלָיְכִי, he has dealt bountifully with thee, is how the psalms describe God doing good to someone: “I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me” (Ps. 13:6); “Deal bountifully with thy servant, that I may live, and keep thy word” (Ps. 119:17). Psalm 103 uses the same verb and preposition for what God has not done: “nor rewarded us according to our iniquities” (Ps. 103:10).

Verse 8 says how, in three parts: For thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling. It is nearly a line of Psalm 56: “For thou hast delivered my soul from death: wilt not thou deliver my feet from falling?” (Ps. 56:13). And each part is promised again, in full, at the end: “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death” (Rev. 21:4; cf. Isa. 25:8); “unto him that is able to keep you from falling” (Jude 24). The psalmist’s rescue was real but partial — verse 15 knows he will still die. The full version is the resurrection.

So verse 9: I will walk before the LORD in the land of the living — the Hebrew says lands, plural. To walk before God is Abraham’s calling: “walk before me, and be thou perfect” (Gen. 17:1). The land of the living is Psalm 27’s hope — “I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living” (Ps. 27:13) — and Hezekiah’s fear, “I shall not see the LORD, even the LORD, in the land of the living” (Isa. 38:11). Rest, in this psalm, is not idleness. It is a life lived in God’s sight on this side of the grave. The Greek Psalter, as it often does with this Hebrew idiom, renders verse 9 I will be well-pleasing before the Lord, which is what Hebrews says of Enoch, who “pleased God” (Heb. 11:5) — and Hebrews adds at once that “without faith it is impossible to please him” (Heb. 11:6). In the Greek Psalter, the next psalm begins: I believed.

vv. 10–11I believed; all men are liars

Here the Greek and Latin Bibles begin a new psalm — Ἐπίστευσα, διὸ ἐλάλησα; Credidi, propter quod locutus sum — and here the New Testament begins quoting. The two verses are short and hard, and they are worth slowing down for.

I believed is הֶאֱמַנְתִּי, from אמן, the verb of Abraham: “he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness” (Gen. 15:6). Isaiah plays on it — “If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established” (Isa. 7:9), two forms of the one root. Then comes כִּי, a small word that can mean for, that, when or even though, and the rest of the line depends on it. The Greek translators read therefore — I believed, therefore I spoke — and the Authorised Version reads the same. Many modern versions take it differently: I believed, even when I said, “I am greatly afflicted.” Both are honest readings of the Hebrew. On either, faith and speech belong together, and the speech includes the complaint. The man who believed did not stop saying how bad it was. He said it to God.

Paul quotes the line, from the Greek, in a chapter about being “troubled on every side”: “We having the same spirit of faith, according as it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also believe, and therefore speak; knowing that he which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus” (2 Cor. 4:8, 13–14). The apostle is the greatly afflicted man, and he reads the psalm’s rescue from death as resurrection-shaped. Faith speaks because it knows how the story ends.

Then verse 11. I said in my haste, All men are liars. בְחָפְזִי, in my haste, is the word for alarm, panicked flight: David “made haste to get away for fear of Saul” (1 Sam. 23:26); the child Mephibosheth fell and was lamed as his nurse “made haste to flee” (2 Sam. 4:4). The same phrase opens a confession in Psalm 31: “For I said in my haste, I am cut off from before thine eyes: nevertheless thou heardest the voice of my supplications” (Ps. 31:22). What a man says in that state is said in terror.

And what he said was כָּל־הָאָדָם כֹּזֵב, every man is a liar. כֹּזֵב is not only someone who tells lies. It is whatever fails you when you lean on it. Jeremiah asks God, in one of the darkest moments of his ministry, “wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar, and as waters that fail?” (Jer. 15:18) — the dry streambed that looked like water — and Isaiah promises the opposite, “a spring of water, whose waters fail not” (Isa. 58:11), with the same verb. Psalm 62 uses the noun: “men of high degree are a lie” (Ps. 62:9). Two psalms after this one, the Hallel says it as doctrine: “It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man” (Ps. 118:8).

So was the sentence true or rash? Interpreters divide. Some take it as a hasty judgment the psalmist is confessing, as in Psalm 31 — in panic he wrote everyone off. Others take the haste as the occasion and not the error: in the crisis he saw what is true, that every human help fails. Paul settles the substance. Arguing that God is faithful even when men are not, he borrows these very words from the Greek: “let God be true, but every man a liar” (Rom. 3:4). The content is true. What the psalmist owns as haste is the panic in which he said it, and the despair that may have come with it. Faith under pressure is not always tidy speech, and the psalm keeps the untidy sentence in the permanent record. It is still faith, if it goes on calling on the Name. And having learned that every man fails, he is ready for verse 12’s question about the One who does not.

v. 15Precious in the sight of the LORD

A verse often read at Christian funerals stands between the two vow-lines, and it is worth reading slowly, because it does not quite say what it is usually taken to say. Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.

יָקָר is the word for what is weighty, rare and costly. “The word of the LORD was precious in those days” — rare, that is (1 Sam. 3:1). Solomon’s builders cut “costly stones” for the temple (1 Kgs. 5:17). And “the redemption of their soul is precious, and it ceaseth for ever” — it costs more than any man can pay (Ps. 49:8). With the phrase in the eyes of it becomes an idiom, and the idiom is clear. When David spared Saul’s life in the camp at Hachilah, Saul said, “my soul was precious in thine eyes this day” (1 Sam. 26:21). When the captain of fifty came to Elijah after two companies had been consumed, he fell on his knees and begged, “let my life … be precious in thy sight” — that is, spare me (2 Kgs. 1:13–14). For a life to be precious in someone’s eyes is for it to be too valuable to that person to be thrown away.

So the first sense of verse 15, in its place in the psalm, is this: the LORD does not let his saints die cheaply. Their death is a costly thing to him, not lightly permitted — and that is why this man, held by the cords of death, was heard and brought back. Psalm 72 says the same of the King’s care for the poor: “He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence: and precious shall their blood be in his sight” (Ps. 72:14). Our Lord says it of sparrows and of his disciples: “one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father … Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows” (Matt. 10:29–31).

The second sense follows from the first, and it is why the church reads the verse at gravesides. When the death of a saint does come, it is not a loss God shrugs at. It is weighed and seen and kept. And on this side of the resurrection the death of the saints is something more than costly: “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them” (Rev. 14:13). Paul could say “to die is gain” and “to depart, and to be with Christ … is far better” (Phil. 1:21, 23). The Shorter Catechism puts the whole hope in one sentence: “The souls of believers are at their death made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory; and their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the resurrection” (WSC 37).

Two words in the Hebrew are worth a note. הַמָּוְתָה, the death, is an unusual form of the noun; it changes nothing in the sense. And לַחֲסִידָיו, his saints, is the plural of חָסִיד, a person of חֶסֶד — one bound to God in covenant love. The Psalm 107 lesson traces hesed through that psalm, and Psalm 136 sings it twenty-six times; the saints are the people that hesed has made. Psalm 50 defines them: “Gather my saints together unto me; those that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice” (Ps. 50:5) — which is exactly what this man is doing in verses 13 to 18. The Confession uses the word the same way, of “all saints, that are united to Jesus Christ their Head, by his Spirit, and by faith” (WCF 26.1). Not a select few; every believer.

And there is one חָסִיד above them all. “Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption” (Ps. 16:10) — the Holy One there is a חָסִיד, and Peter and Paul both preach that verse as Christ’s resurrection (Acts 2:27; 13:35). His death was precious in the sight of the LORD beyond any other, and it was not prevented. The Father who will not let his saints die cheaply “spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all” (Rom. 8:32). We are “redeemed … with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Pet. 1:18–19). Because his death was paid, theirs is precious in a new way: it is no longer the wages of sin but the door into rest.

vv. 16–19Thy servant; the courts of the LORD’s house

O LORD, truly I am thy servant. The verse begins with אָנָּה, the same urgent particle that began the cry of verse 4, O LORD, I beseech thee. The man who pleaded from inside the cords now pleads again, and this time the plea is a confession of belonging. The same particle stands in the Hallel’s great cry two psalms on, “Save now, I beseech thee, O LORD” (Ps. 118:25) — the Hosanna the crowds shouted as Jesus rode into Jerusalem (Matt. 21:9).

I am thy servant; I am thy servant, and the son of thine handmaid. He says it twice, and the second time he adds his birth. The phrase is Psalm 86’s — “give thy strength unto thy servant, and save the son of thine handmaid” (Ps. 86:16) — and it describes a servant born in the house, not bought from outside; the law treats the children born to a servant in his master’s house as belonging to it (Exod. 21:4). He is not God’s by recent acquisition. He was born into the household. That is the language of covenant children — “the promise is unto you, and to your children” (Acts 2:39) — and it is Mary’s word for herself: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord” (Luke 1:38).

Then the line that explains everything before it. Thou hast loosed my bonds — פִּתַּחְתָּ לְמוֹסֵרָי. These are the cords of verse 3, undone. The noun is the one the rebels used in Psalm 2, “Let us break their bands asunder” (Ps. 2:3), and the one Psalm 107 uses when the LORD “brake their bands in sunder” (Ps. 107:14); Nahum has the LORD promise, “now will I break his yoke from off thee, and will burst thy bonds in sunder” (Nah. 1:13). And notice the order. I am thy servant … thou hast loosed my bonds. The man whose fetters are off does not walk away. He declares himself a servant. Here the slave of Exodus 21 comes back into view: offered his freedom, he says “I love my master … I will not go out free,” and has his ear bored at the doorpost, and serves for ever (Exod. 21:5–6). The psalm opened with אָהַבְתִּי, I love. It closes with a freed man choosing the house.

That is the New Testament’s doctrine of Christian freedom exactly. “Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness” (Rom. 6:18); “ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another” (Gal. 5:13). And it is the shape of our Lord’s own life, who “took upon him the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:7). The bonds are loosed so that the man may belong, not so that he may drift.

I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and will call upon the name of the LORD. The זֶבַח תּוֹדָה was the peace offering brought for a thanksgiving, with its cakes and its leavened bread, and its meat had to be eaten on the day it was offered (Lev. 7:12–15) — which in practice meant sharing it. Psalm 107 calls for it from the rescued (Ps. 107:22), and Psalm 50 promises the one who offers it “the salvation of God” (Ps. 50:23) — the root of verse 13’s cup. The church has no altar now: “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). And the Supper itself is a thanksgiving — our Lord took the bread “when he had given thanks” (1 Cor. 11:24) — though not a sacrifice for sin. The Westminster Confession says that in it Christ is not offered up again, but there is “a spiritual oblation of all possible praise unto God” for the one offering of the cross (WCF 29.2). That is verse 17 at the Lord’s table.

Then the vows again, word for word, and the place: In the courts of the LORD‘s house, in the midst of thee, O Jerusalem. The courts are the חַצְרוֹת of Psalm 100: “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise” (Ps. 100:4) — so Psalm 116 ends with a thanksgiving offering in the place Psalm 100 told the nations to enter with thanksgiving. And there is a small echo in the Hebrew. בְּתוֹכֵכִי, in the midst of thee, uses the same long, unusual suffix with which the man addressed his own soul in verse 7. The soul that was told to return to its rest is now in the midst of the city. Private rest has become public worship.

The last word is הַלְלוּ־יָהּ, praise ye Yah, the short form of the Name. In the New Testament the word occurs only in Revelation 19: “Alleluia; Salvation, and glory, and honour, and power, unto the Lord our God” (Rev. 19:1). Christians already belong to that assembly — “ye are come unto mount Sion … the heavenly Jerusalem” (Heb. 12:22) — and every Lord’s Day the vows of verse 18 are paid in its courts.