Context No. 3831 of 4322 · Psalms

Psalms 31:1-16: in context

1In you, LORD, I take refuge. Let me never be disappointed. Deliver me in your righteousness. 2Bow down your ear to me. Deliver me speedily. Be to me a strong rock, a house of defense to save me. 3For you are my rock and my fortress, therefore for your name’s sake lead me and guide me. 4Pluck me out of the net that they have laid secretly for me, for you are my stronghold. 5Into your hand I commend my spirit. You redeem me, LORD, God of truth. 6I hate those who regard lying vanities, but I trust in the LORD. 7I will be glad and rejoice in your loving kindness, for you have seen my affliction. You have known my soul in adversities. 8You have not shut me up into the hand of the enemy. You have set my feet in a large place. 9Have mercy on me, LORD, for I am in distress. My eye, my soul, and my body waste away with grief. 10For my life is spent with sorrow, my years with sighing. My strength fails because of my iniquity. My bones are wasted away. 11Because of all my adversaries I have become utterly contemptible to my neighbors, a horror to my acquaintances. Those who saw me on the street fled from me. 12I am forgotten from their hearts like a dead man. I am like broken pottery. 13For I have heard the slander of many, terror on every side, while they conspire together against me, they plot to take away my life. 14But I trust in you, LORD. I said, “You are my God.” 15My times are in your hand. Deliver me from the hand of my enemies, and from those who persecute me. 16Make your face to shine on your servant. Save me in your loving kindness.

This psalm moves through deep distress, the psalmist wasting away with grief, slandered, plotted against, forgotten like the dead, treated like broken pottery. And yet running through it is a thread of steady trust. Twice it rises to words that would echo through history.

Into your hand I commit my spirit, David prays, entrusting his very life to God, the words Jesus himself would speak from the cross. And later, in the face of enemies who plot his death, he says simply, but I trust in you, LORD; my times are in your hand. Here is faith in its essence: not the absence of trouble, but the entrusting of ourselves to God in the middle of it. My times are in your hand, David says, all of them, the good and the hard, the timing of every trial and every deliverance, held in the hand of a faithful God. Whatever presses in on us, we can commit our spirit, our life, our very times, into the hand of the God we trust, as David did and as our Lord did before us.

In the middle of my own distress, can I entrust myself as David did, praying "into your hand I commit my spirit" and "my times are in your hand," resting my life in the keeping of a faithful God?

Sources

Psalm 31:5: "Into your hand I commend my spirit. You redeem me, LORD, God of truth."
Psalm 31:14-15: "But I trust in you, LORD. I said, You are my God. My times are in your hand."
Psalm 31:1: "In you, LORD, I take refuge. Let me never be disappointed."