Psalms 70:2

The Text

Someone is being hunted, and he knows it. Verse 1 has already come out of him in short breaths: "Hurry, God, to deliver me." Then, in verse 2, the prayer swings around to face the pursuers: let the people who are after my life run headlong into failure, let those who want to watch me go under be turned around and sent home with their faces burning. Notice what he does not ask. He does not ask for their blood, does not ask that they fall down dead on the road. He asks that they be disappointed, confounded, turned back in disgrace. He wants the hunt called off and the hunters exposed.

The Core

Two things are packed into this small sentence, and both matter. First, the prayer assumes that God runs a court where public verdicts get reversed. In the world of this psalm, shame is not an emotion you process privately; it is your standing in the village square collapsing where everyone can see. To pray that enemies "be turned back in disgrace" is to ask God to overturn the story being told about you at the gate, where reputations were made and destroyed. Second, and this is the part that grates less than it should: the man wants them stopped, not erased. He hands the desire for retaliation over instead of acting on it. That transfer is the whole spiritual muscle of this verse. He says out loud what he would like to see happen, and then leaves it in someone else's hands.

The Common Thread

Read verse 2 alongside verse 3 and you hear the sound that gives this psalm its shape: "Aha! Aha!" That jeer follows the righteous sufferer through the whole Old Testament and finally lands at a Roman execution, where passers-by wag their heads at a dying man and invite him to save himself. Jesus stands inside this psalm rather than above it. But he prays the last movement differently. Where this man asks that his pursuers be turned back in disgrace, Jesus asks that they be forgiven, and weeks later some of that same crowd is cut to the heart in Jerusalem and turns around. The psalm's request is not cancelled; it is answered more deeply than it was asked. Shame that stops a man in the road can also be the thing that turns him toward God.

The Mirror

You probably know the feeling of being talked about in a room you are not in. The colleague who repeats your mistake in the meeting with a small smile. The relative who has decided what kind of person you are and tells the family so at Christmas. The person who would not mind at all if your business folded, your marriage strained, your name slipped. Verse 2 gives you permission to say that out loud in prayer, in words that are not nice, and it gives you the boundary at the same time: you say it to God, you do not say it to them, and you do not act on it. That is the difference between prayer and revenge, and the difference is thinner than we like to pretend. Today: write the name of the person on a scrap of paper, pray verse 2 out loud with that name in it, then say "and I leave it with you" and throw the paper away.

The Intertext

This verse is not new even inside the Psalter. Almost the whole of Psalm 70 appears at the end of Psalm 40, where it comes after a long, calm account of God lifting the singer out of a pit and putting a new song in his mouth. Someone took that ending, cut away the calm, and let the psalm begin at the panic. Psalm 70 is the emergency version, the prayer for when there is no time to rehearse the past. And the boundary the psalm draws around vengeance is the same boundary Paul draws for the Roman church: leave room for the wrath of God, because repayment belongs to him. Paul is not inventing restraint. He is quoting the instinct of this praying man.

The Profile

Imagine hearing this sung in the temple courts, incense and roasting meat in the air, a crowd of pilgrims who know exactly what a ruined reputation costs. In a village of a few hundred people, your name was your bank account, your marriage prospects, your legal standing. If the men at the gate decided you were guilty, you did not move to another town and start over. So when the singer asks that his accusers be turned back in disgrace, the first hearers do not think of hurt feelings. They picture men walking home in silence, their case collapsed, the whole street watching. Many in that crowd had been on the wrong end of a whispering campaign or a rigged land dispute. They were not praying an abstraction. They were praying their week.

The Detail

The verse hides a hinge. Those who "seek my soul" in verse 2 and those who "seek you" in verse 4 are doing the same verb in Hebrew, baqash, which means to search out with intent, the way you search for a lost animal or a wanted man. Everyone in this psalm is hunting something. The enemies hunt a life; the faithful hunt God. The psalm sets those two pursuits side by side and lets you see that a human being is always tracking something, and that what you hunt makes you. One search ends in disgrace on the road home. The other ends in a mouth full of praise. The singer is not asking God to stop his enemies from being active; he is asking God to bend their search until it runs into a wall.

Reflection

Whose name came to mind when you read "those who desire my ruin", and have you ever actually said that name to God rather than about them to someone else?

If everyone in this psalm is hunting something, what have you been tracking this month, and what would someone watching your calendar and your spending say you are searching for?

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