Psalms 62:11

The Text

After a whole psalm of leaning walls and double-tongued men, the poet stops arguing and reports something he overheard. God said it one time; he heard it two times. And the content of that single, doubled word is brief enough to carry: power belongs to God. Verse twelve lets the second half land, that steadfast love belongs to the Lord as well.

Picture the scene. The room has emptied. All evening they came with blessings in their mouths, hands warm on his shoulder, and he could hear the curse humming underneath like a wasp in a closed jar. Now it is quiet. He sits with the quiet, which is what he told his own soul to do in verse five, and into that quiet a sentence falls, and does not stop falling.

The Core

Everything in this psalm has been weighed and found light. Men of low degree, a breath. Men of high degree, a lie. Put them all on the scale together and the pan does not even dip. The psalmist is not being cynical; he is doing arithmetic. He has counted up every source of security available to a human being, including the ones with armies and treasuries, and the sum is zero.

Verse eleven is what remains when the subtraction is done. Power belongs to God, which means it is not on loan to the men who threaten you, not banked in the riches of verse ten, not even faintly resident in the systems that look immovable. The Hebrew word is oz, the strength that holds, not merely strength that strikes. One owner. No shareholders.

The Common Thread

This is the sentence the whole Bible keeps repeating in different accents. Pharaoh has chariots; the sea has God. Goliath has bronze; the boy has a name. The empire has a cross, which is the most efficient power ever devised for making a man into a leaning wall, and three days later the tomb is a joke.

What makes the psalm more than a slogan is verse twelve, which the one, two formula deliberately sets up. Power is the first word; loving kindness is the second, and the second is not a softening but the completion. A God who only had power would be weather. A God who has both is the God who shows up in Jesus, where the authority to still a storm and the willingness to die belong to the same person.

The Mirror

You already know how to pray for help. What this psalm asks is harder: that you stop secretly hedging. You pray about the restructuring at work, and then you draft the email that positions you well with the person who decides. You pray for your marriage, and then you win the argument. You pray about money and keep checking the balance like a pulse. None of that is wicked. It is just the quiet conviction that power is distributed, that God has some and you had better secure the rest.

Verse eleven says the distribution is a fiction. There is one owner.

Today: name out loud, alone, the one person or number or outcome that currently has the most power over your mood, and then say after it, "power belongs to God." Say the whole thing twice. Once is apparently not how we hear.

The Detail

"God has spoken once; twice I have heard this." It sounds like a stammer, but it is a deliberate form, the kind of counting proverb that says a thing is weightier than a single statement can hold. God does not repeat himself. The repetition happens in the hearer.

Which is exactly right. You have heard this before. You have heard it in a sermon, in a hospital corridor, in the mouth of someone who loved you. One utterance, and it keeps arriving, because the first hearing never finishes. That is what revelation does to a person. It does not need to be said again; it needs to be heard again, until the hearing has worked its way down from the ear into the place where decisions get made.

The Profile

The first singers of this psalm were not philosophers. They were people whose land could be taken by a neighbor with better connections, who had seen officials bless with the mouth and curse inwardly at the city gate, who knew that in the balances a poor man weighs nothing. For them, "power belongs to God" was not a comforting abstraction. It was the only available counterweight to a social order where power manifestly belonged to someone else, someone with a house on a lofty place.

Hearing this in the temple courts would have felt like treason, quietly sung. Every oppressor in verse ten is being told his holdings are rented. And every man leaning like a tottering fence is being told who actually owns the ground.

The Question

Then why am I still shaken? The psalmist says in verse two that he will never be greatly shaken, and by verse six he has dropped the qualifier, but you and I have been shaken flat, and so have better people. If power belongs to God, the obvious inference is that God could have stopped it, and did not.

The psalm does not answer this. It refuses to. It simply sets power and loving kindness side by side and leaves them there, two things heard in one word, neither one allowed to explain away the other. What it will not let you do is solve the problem by making God smaller. A God with less power would be easier to forgive and useless to trust.

Reflection

Which sentence have you heard many times and never yet heard twice, in the way this psalm means?

If you honestly weighed what you rely on this week, what would the scale say?

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