One Thing, and the Face

v. 1Whom shall I fear?

Three nouns, each with the possessive, each a claim about God and not a wish. אוֹר is the first created thing (Gen. 1:3), and the pillar that stood between Israel and Egypt gave light by night to one camp and darkness to the other (Ex. 14:20). Nowhere else in the Old Testament is the LORD called my light outright; the nearest is Micah’s “when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me” (Mic. 7:8), and the benediction’s “the LORD make his face shine upon thee” (Num. 6:25), which already ties light to the face this psalm will end up seeking. Isaiah widens it to the nations — “the Gentiles shall come to thy light” (Isa. 60:3) — and our Lord takes the noun for himself: “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness” (John 8:12). Paul joins the two ends of the psalm in one sentence: God “hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). The light of verse 1 and the face of verse 8 are one thing seen from two sides.

יֵשַׁע, salvation, is the Red Sea word — “stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD” (Ex. 14:13); “he is become my salvation” (Ex. 15:2) — and it is the root of the name Joshua, and therefore of the name Jesus, which the angel explains by it (Matt. 1:21). Old Simeon, who had been waiting (the verb of verse 14), held the child and said “mine eyes have seen thy salvation … a light to lighten the Gentiles” (Luke 2:30–32): verse 1 in a man’s arms. מָעוֹז is a stronghold, the fortified place you run to, and Nahum says the same sentence to a city about to be overrun: “The LORD is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble” (Nah. 1:7). Nehemiah gives it its strangest and best use: “the joy of the LORD is your strength” — your מָעוֹז (Neh. 8:10). The fortress is a joy.

The two questions are not open. Whom shall I fear? expects the answer no one, and it has the same grammar as Paul’s “If God be for us, who can be against us?” (Rom. 8:31), which comes at the end of a chapter that has just conceded tribulation, famine and sword. David has not stopped noticing the enemies; verse 2 will name them. He has done what Psalm 11 does with the bent bow: put the LORD on the inventory first, and then asked what is left to be afraid of. That is not temperament. The catechism calls it faith — “not only a certain knowledge … but also an assured confidence” (Heidelberg Q. 21).

vv. 2–3They stumbled and fell; a host may encamp

To eat up my flesh is the language of predators, and it is also court language. In the Aramaic of Daniel, to eat the pieces of a man is to inform against him (Dan. 3:8; 6:24), and Micah describes rulers who “eat the flesh of my people” (Mic. 3:3). David’s enemies are men with mouths: Doeg’s report, the Ziphites’ message. The pronoun in the second line is emphatic — they, the ones who came to devour, are the ones who כָשְׁלוּ וְנָפָלוּ, stumbled and fell. It is the fate Isaiah promises to those who trip over the LORD when they meant to trip his people (Isa. 8:14–15), and it happened literally in a garden. When the arresting party came for our Lord and he said I am he, “they went backward, and fell to the ground” (John 18:6). The men who came to eat his flesh stumbled and fell; he then walked with them to the trial, because the falling had made the point and the cross would make the other one.

Verse 3 raises the stakes from a few informers to an army, and the Hebrew doubles the root: תַּחֲנֶה מַחֲנֶה, a camp should camp. The word is Jacob’s at the Jabbok, where he saw the angels and named the place Mahanaim, two camps (Gen. 32:2): his own and God’s, at the moment Esau was coming with four hundred men. Elisha’s servant learned the same arithmetic at Dothan — a Syrian host round the city, and the prophet praying “open his eyes, that he may see”, and the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire; “they that be with us are more than they that be with them” (2 Kings 6:15–17). David’s own psalm gives the rule: “the angel of the LORD encampeth round about them that fear him” (Ps. 34:7). A host can encamp against the believer; a host already has.

The verb of confidence is בָּטַח: to lean one’s weight on something and find it holds. It is the other trust-word from Psalm 11’s חָסָה; there faith runs to shelter, here it leans. In this is left open on purpose — in the situation just described, and in the confession of verse 1 that covers it. The Belgic Confession names what the leaning rests on: nothing happens by chance, and God “so restrains the devil and all our enemies that without his will and permission they cannot hurt us” (Art. 13). An encamped army is inside that permission.

v. 4Dwell, behold, enquire

A man surrounded by an army has asked for one thing, and it is not victory. אַחַת stands first in the sentence for emphasis. It is our Lord’s word to Martha — “one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part” (Luke 10:42) — and to the rich young ruler, “one thing thou lackest” (Mark 10:21), and it is Paul’s — “this one thing I do” (Phil. 3:13). The two verbs are the pair Jesus uses in the Sermon on the Mount: asked (שָׁאַל) and seek (בִּקֵּשׁ), “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find” (Matt. 7:7). Hannah asked a son of the LORD and named him for it (1 Sam. 1:20); Solomon was told “Ask what I shall give thee” and asked for wisdom rather than the lives of his enemies (1 Kings 3:5–11). David, asked the same question by his circumstances, asks for the house.

And the house is Psalm 23’s house, in Psalm 23’s words: שִׁבְתִּי בְּבֵית־יְהוָה כָּל־יְמֵי חַיַּי is verse 6 of that psalm nearly letter for letter, with the same verb that can be read dwell or return. What the shepherd psalm promised as the end of the tracks of righteousness, this psalm asks for as the one thing while the tracks are still running through the valley. The house in David’s day was a tent (2 Sam. 7:2), and verses 5 and 6 will call it exactly that; it was still the place where the ark was, the priests enquired, and the congregation gathered. This is not a private mystical dwelling. The one thing is public worship. The catechism says so without embarrassment when it makes the fourth commandment mean “that I diligently attend the church of God” (Heidelberg Q. 103), and the Confession, that the ordinances of public worship “are not carelessly or wilfully to be neglected or forsaken” (WCF 21.6). David under Saul’s spears would have found those sentences too cool. He did not attend the house; he wanted it more than his life.

Two infinitives say what the house is for. לַחֲזוֹת, to gaze, is the seer’s verb from Psalm 11 — the eyes that behold from the throne, the upright who behold the face — and the verb of the elders on Sinai who “saw God, and did eat and drink” (Ex. 24:11). Its object is נֹעַם, which the Authorised Version gives as beauty but which means pleasantness, delightfulness: it is Naomi’s name, and wisdom’s ways are “ways of pleasantness” (Prov. 3:17), and Moses prays “let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us” (Ps. 90:17). David wants to look at God and find him delightful. That is the catechism’s first answer — to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever (WSC 1) — and the beatitude, “they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8). The second infinitive, לְבַקֵּר, is a shepherd’s and an inspector’s word: to look over carefully, as a man looks over his flock (Ezek. 34:11–12, the same root) or a priest examines an offering (Lev. 27:33). To enquire in his temple is to come with questions and expect the sanctuary to answer them — which is what David had done at Nob, and would do at Keilah with the ephod (1 Sam. 23:2–12). Beholding and enquiring together: adoration and instruction, in one house, on one day. The הֵיכָל at the end is Psalm 11’s palace-temple. The house where you gaze is the throne room where he rules.

vv. 5–6The booth, the rock, the lifted head

For: verse 5 gives the reason the house is the one thing. It is the safest place in the country. The word for pavilion is סֻכָּה, a booth — the leafy shelter of the Feast of Tabernacles, in which Israel lived for a week each year to remember that God had housed them in the wilderness (Lev. 23:42–43). It is a flimsy word for a fortress, and that is the point: the safety is not in the walls. Amos uses it of David’s own dynasty, “the tabernacle of David that is fallen”, which God will raise “that the residue of men might seek after the LORD, and all the Gentiles” (Amos 9:11–12) — and James quotes it at the Jerusalem council to explain why Gentiles are being gathered into the church (Acts 15:16–17). The booth David hides in is the one the nations are being brought into.

סֵתֶר is a hiding place: “thou art my hiding place” (Ps. 32:7); “he that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High” (Ps. 91:1). And צוּר is the rock — the rock Moses struck at Horeb, of which Paul says “that Rock was Christ” (Ex. 17:6; 1 Cor. 10:4); the rock Moses stood on to see the glory pass (Ex. 33:21); Hannah’s “neither is there any rock like our God” (1 Sam. 2:2); the wise man’s foundation in the storm (Matt. 7:24–25). Notice the movement: hidden low in the booth, then set high on the rock. God’s protection is not only concealment. It is elevation, and verse 6 says what gets lifted.

And now — not after the enemies are gone. They are still round about, as they were still watching at Psalm 23’s table. The head is lifted above them, in their presence. To lift a man’s head is to restore him to honour: Pharaoh “lifted up the head” of the butler and put him back in office (Gen. 40:13, 20); the LORD is “the lifter up of mine head” (Ps. 3:3, another psalm from a time of flight); and the priest-king of Psalm 110, having drunk of the brook, “shall lift up the head” (Ps. 110:7). Our Lord gives the phrase to his church for the days when everything seems to be shaking: “then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh” (Luke 21:28).

What the lifted head does is sacrifice, and the sacrifices are זִבְחֵי תְרוּעָה: not joy in the quiet sense but shouting, the trumpet-blast. It is the noise made over the offerings when the silver trumpets sounded (Num. 10:10), the shout at which Jericho’s wall fell (Josh. 6:5, 20), the roar when the ark came into the camp so that the Philistines were afraid (1 Sam. 4:5–7), and the shout with which David himself brought the ark up to Zion (2 Sam. 6:15). “Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound” (Ps. 89:15) — the same word. So the response to being surrounded is to go into the tent and make the sound an army makes when the wall comes down. Hebrews calls the Christian form of it “the sacrifice of praise” (Heb. 13:15), and Paul says how it is done: “speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody” (Eph. 5:19), where the Greek for making melody is the Septuagint’s for this verse’s I will sing praises. Congregational psalm-singing is verse 6 in practice: the lifted head, in the tent, in front of the enemies, making the Jericho noise.

v. 7Hear, be gracious, answer

Here the psalm turns to thou, and the mood turns with it. The man who feared no one in verse 1 is now asking to be heard at all. Readers who want two psalms cut here. But the turn is the same one Psalm 23 made in the valley: confession about God becomes address to God at the point where the pressure is felt. The three imperatives are the vocabulary of the covenant. חָנַן, be gracious, is the benediction’s second line, “the LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee” (Num. 6:25), and it is the word God reserved to himself at the cleft of the rock: “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious” (Ex. 33:19). David is not demanding; he is asking for the thing that is given freely or not at all.

That assurance and petition sit in one psalm is not a flaw in the psalm; it is the ordinary shape of a believer’s week. The father in Mark cried “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24) in a single breath, and was answered. The Confession is candid that assurance “may be divers ways shaken, diminished, and intermitted” and is revived “by the operation of the Spirit” (WCF 18.4); the apostle’s instruction for the interval is “in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God” (Phil. 4:6). Verse 7 is verses 1–6 doing that.

v. 9Hide not thy face

The verb hide is verse 5’s verb, and the reversal is deliberate: there God hides David in the covert of his tent; here David begs God not to hide himself. A hidden face is the covenant’s own curse — “I will forsake them, and I will hide my face from them, and they shall be devoured” (Deut. 31:17) — and its lifting is the covenant’s mercy: “in a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee” (Isa. 54:8). David asks that the moment be short.

נָטַשׁ and עָזַב, cast off and forsake, are the words of the commissioning formula: “he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee” (Deut. 31:6, 8; Josh. 1:5), which David would one day say to Solomon over the plans for the real house (1 Chr. 28:20), and which Hebrews hands to every Christian: “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Heb. 13:5). But עָזַב is also the verb of the cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1; Matt. 27:46). The Son had the face hidden from him in full, in the dark, at noon, so that the request of verse 9 is answered for everyone in him: “neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard” (Ps. 22:24). The title David closes with, God of my salvation, is verse 1’s יֵשַׁע returned. The man pleading is the man who said whom shall I fear; the two halves are tied by his own word.

v. 10When father and mother forsake

The verb forsake carries straight over from verse 9, and now it is the nearest human bond that fails. The line need not accuse Jesse and his wife; Hebrew when can mean even if, and David had in fact been the son his father forgot to call in from the sheep (1 Sam. 16:11) and the brother Eliab despised (1 Sam. 17:28), and he had lately had to send his parents away because he could not keep them (1 Sam. 22:3). The point is the extreme case. Isaiah presses it further — “Can a woman forget her sucking child? … yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee” (Isa. 49:15) — and our Lord makes it a condition of discipleship that the bond to him outrank the bond to father and mother (Matt. 10:37), and promises that whoever has forsaken houses or parents for his name’s sake “shall receive an hundredfold” (Matt. 19:29). At twelve he had already said where his Father’s house was (Luke 2:49), and from the cross he gave his own mother into another son’s keeping (John 19:26–27).

The verb on the other side is אָסַף, gather in: what a farmer does with a harvest, what a city does with a stranger at nightfall — the Levite’s complaint at Gibeah was that “there was no man that took them into his house” (Judg. 19:15, 18) — and what the LORD does with the outcasts of Israel (Ps. 147:2; Mic. 4:6). Isaiah gives it a rear-guard sense: “the glory of the LORD shall be thy rereward”, literally shall gather thee up, as the pillar gathered up the stragglers behind the camp (Isa. 58:8). The child no one collected is collected. This is the doctrine of adoption in a picture: believers “are taken into the number, and enjoy the liberties and privileges of the children of God” (WCF 12), having “received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father” (Rom. 8:15). And it is corporate before it is private: the gathering is into a house, which is why the psalm’s one thing was the house.

vv. 11–12Teach me; the watchers and the false witnesses

הוֹרֵנִי is from the root of תּוֹרָה: torah me. Guidance is instruction; the way is taught before it is walked. It is Moses’ promise at the bush, “I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee” (Ex. 4:12), David’s elsewhere, “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go” (Ps. 32:8), and the nations’ in the last days, when they go up to the house of the God of Jacob “and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths” (Isa. 2:3). The verb lead is Psalm 23’s נָחָה, the pillar of cloud’s verb, and the path is מִישׁוֹר, level ground: what the crooked places are made in Isaiah’s highway (Isa. 40:4), what the sceptre of the king is made of (Ps. 45:6, the same word). A level path is one you cannot be seen to stumble on.

And being seen is the point. Because of mine enemies is לְמַעַן שׁוֹרְרָי, for the sake of my watchers, the men who lie in wait for a fall, and David has prayed the identical clause before: “lead me, O LORD, in thy righteousness because of mine enemies; make thy way straight before my face” (Ps. 5:8). The believer is watched, and a stumble is a scandal for the name. The apostles make the same request into an ethic: “having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God” (1 Pet. 2:12); “that he that is of the contrary part may be ashamed, having no evil thing to say of you” (Titus 2:8). Sanctification is public.

The will of mine enemies is their נֶפֶשׁ — soul, throat, appetite — which picks up verse 2’s eat my flesh. The threat is judicial. עֵדֵי־שֶׁקֶר is the ninth commandment’s phrase, false witness (Ex. 20:16), and the law’s remedy was to do to the false witness what he had meant to do to his brother (Deut. 19:16–19). David had watched the remedy fail: Doeg’s testimony was true in fact and murderous in intent. Naboth died on the word of two sons of Belial (1 Kings 21:13). And the chief priests “sought false witness against Jesus, to put him to death … At the last came two false witnesses” (Matt. 26:59–60); Stephen died the same way (Acts 6:13). The last phrase, יָפֵחַ חָמָס, is one who breathes out violence — Proverbs’ stock description of the lying witness (Prov. 6:19; 14:5), with Psalm 11’s חָמָס as the thing breathed. Luke uses the phrase of one particular man: “Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord” (Acts 9:1). The one breathing out violence in this verse was, in the next age, knocked to the ground on a road and made the man who wrote if God be for us, who can be against us. Verse 12’s enemy is not beyond verse 8’s grace.

v. 13Unless I had believed to see

The sentence is not finished. לוּלֵא, unless, opens a condition whose consequence is never said, and the translators supply I had fainted in italics to close the gap. The scribes marked the word with dots above and below, one of a handful of places in the Hebrew Bible where the Masoretes flagged a word as doubtful. Whether the break is textual or deliberate, it is true to the experience: David does not say what would have happened to him without faith, because he cannot bear to.

הֶאֱמַנְתִּי is the verb of Genesis 15:6: Abraham “believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness” — the same form, the verse Paul builds justification on (Rom. 4:3). And the order of the infinitive matters: believed to see, not saw and therefore believed. It is Isaiah’s “if ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established” (Isa. 7:9), Hebrews’ “the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1), and our Lord’s word at the tomb of Lazarus, which is this verse turned into a sentence: “Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?” (John 11:40).

What is believed-in-order-to-be-seen is טוּב־יְהוָה, the goodness of the LORD: the very thing Moses was shown when he asked for the face — “I will make all my goodness pass before thee” (Ex. 33:19) — and Psalm 23’s goodness that pursues. Verse 8 asked for the face; verse 13 expects the goodness; that is exactly the exchange Moses got. And it is to be seen בְּאֶרֶץ חַיִּים, in the land of the living: this world, this history, before the grave. It is Hezekiah’s phrase for the life he thought he was losing (Isa. 38:11) and the psalmist’s for where he will walk before the LORD (Ps. 116:9). The Servant was “cut off out of the land of the living” (Isa. 53:8) precisely so that his people would not be, and so that the meek could inherit the earth (Ps. 37:11; Matt. 5:5). Our hope is not only for what follows this life. David expected to see God’s goodness here, and the Confession grounds that expectation in providence itself, which extends “to all creatures” and orders them “to his own glory” (WCF 5.1). A faith that only expects goodness after death has stopped believing verse 13.

v. 14Wait, be strong, wait

The psalm ends by turning outward — or inward: the singular thou is the congregation, or David talking to himself, and the Psalter does not distinguish. קָוָה, wait, is a taut word. Its noun is hope, and its other noun is a cord: the scarlet line Rahab tied in her window is a תִּקְוָה (Josh. 2:18). To wait on the LORD is to hold a line fastened to something. It is Jacob’s last breath in the blessing of his sons, “I have waited for thy salvation, O LORD” (Gen. 49:18), and Isaiah’s “they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength” (Isa. 40:31), and the song of the delivered: “this is our God; we have waited for him, and he will save us” (Isa. 25:9). Simeon was waiting for the consolation of Israel when the salvation of verse 1 was put in his arms (Luke 2:25).

And the middle of the verse is Joshua’s commission. חֲזַק וֶאֱמָץ, be strong and of good courage, is what Moses said to Joshua and what the LORD said to him three times on the bank of the Jordan (Deut. 31:6–7, 23; Josh. 1:6–9), and what David, at the end of his life, said to Solomon with the plans of the house in his hand: “Be strong and of good courage, and do it: fear not, nor be dismayed: for the LORD God, even my God, will be with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee” (1 Chr. 28:20) — verse 9’s words, answered. So waiting on the LORD is not standing still. It is what the men who crossed the Jordan were told to do on the way in. The verse frames the conquest formula with wait on either side because the two belong together: the strength is his, the courage is commanded, the timing is his, and the land is to be entered. Paul says it in one line to a church: “Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong” (1 Cor. 16:13); and he explains the waiting: “if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it” (Rom. 8:25). The catechism’s last word on providence is the same posture — patient in adversity, thankful in prosperity, and for the future, good confidence (Heidelberg Q. 28).

So the psalm that began with a man who feared no one, and passed through a man begging not to be forsaken, ends with that same man telling the congregation to be Joshua. The one thing has not changed. He is still asking for the house and the face. He has only learned that the asking is done standing up.