The closing division is prayer, based both upon the contemplation of God's attributes in vv. 5, 6, and of the wicked in the first part. This distinct reference to both the preceding sections is in favour of the original unity of the psalm. The belief in the immensity of Divine loving-kindness and righteousness inspires the prayer for their long-drawn-out (so "continue" means literally) continuance to the psalmist and his fellows. He will not separate himself from these in his petition, but thinks of them before himself. "Those who know Thee" are those who take refuge under the shadow of the great wing. Their knowledge is intimate, vital; it is acquaintanceship, not mere intellectual apprehension. It is such as to purge the heart and make its possessors upright. Thus we have set forth in that sequence of trust, knowledge, and uprightness stages of growing Godlikeness closely corresponding to the Gospel sequence of faith, love, and holiness. Such souls are capaces Dei, fit to receive the manifestations of God's loving-kindness and righteousness; and from such these will never remove. They will stand stable as His firm attributes, and the spurning foot of proud oppressors shall not trample on them, nor violent hands be able to stir them from their steadfast, secure place. The prayer of the psalm goes deeper than any mere deprecation of earthly removal, and is but prosaically understood, if thought to refer to exile or the like. The dwelling-place from which it beseeches that the suppliant may never be removed is his safe refuge beneath the wing, or in the house, of God. Christ answered it when He said, "No man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand." The one desire of the heart which has tasted the abundance, satisfaction, delights, fulness of life, and clearness of light that attend the presence of God is that nothing may draw it thence.
Prayer wins prophetic certitude. From his serene shelter under the wing, the suppliant looks out on the rout of battled foes, and sees the end which gives the lie to the oracle of transgression and its flatteries. "They are struck down," the same word as in the picture of the pursuing angel of the Lord in Psalm xxxv. Here the agent of their fall is unnamed, but one power only can inflict such irrevocable ruin. God, who is the shelter of the upright in heart, has at last found out the sinners' iniquity, and His hatred of sin stands ready to "smite once, and smite no more."
[PSALM XXXVII.]
1 (א) Heat not thyself because of the evil-doers;
Be not envious because of the workers of perversity
2 For like grass shall they swiftly fade,
And like green herbage shall they wither.
3 (ב) Trust in Jehovah, and do good;
Inhabit the land, and feed on faithfulness.
4 And delight thyself in Jehovah,
And He shall give thee the desires of thy heart.
5 (ג) Roll thy way upon Jehovah,
And trust in Him, and He shall do [all that thou dost need].
6 And He shall bring forth as the light thy righteousness,
And thy judgment as the noonday.
7 (ד) Be silent to Jehovah, and wait patiently for Him;
Heat not thyself because of him who makes his way prosperous,
Because of the man who carries out intrigues.
8 (ה) Cease from anger, and forsake wrath;
Heat not thyself: [it leads] only to doing evil.
9 For evil-doers shall be cut off;
And they who wait on Jehovah—they shall inherit the land.
10 (ו) And yet a little while, and the wicked is no more,
And thou shalt take heed to his place, and he is not [there].
11 And the meek shall inherit the land,
And delight themselves in the abundance of peace.
12 (ז) The wicked intrigues against the righteous,
And grinds his teeth at him.
13 The Lord laughs at him,
For He sees that his day is coming.
14 (ח) The wicked draw sword and bend their bow,
To slay the afflicted and poor,
To butcher the upright in way;
15 Their sword shall enter into their own heart,
And their bows shall be broken.
16 (ט) Better is the little of the righteous
Than the abundance of many wicked.
17 For the arms of the wicked shall be broken,
And Jehovah holds up the righteous.
18 (י) Jehovah has knowledge of the days of the perfect,
And their inheritance shall be for ever;
19 They shall not be put to shame in the time of evil,
And in the days of famine they shall be satisfied.
20 (כ) For the wicked shall perish,
And the enemies of Jehovah shall be like the beauty of the pastures;
They melt away in smoke: they melt away.
21 (ל) The wicked borrows, and does not pay;
And the righteous deals generously, and gives.
22 For His blessed ones shall inherit the earth,
And His cursed ones shall be cut off.
23 (מ) From Jehovah are a man's steps established,
And He delighteth in his way;
24 If he falls, he shall not lie prostrate,
For Jehovah holds up his hand.
25 (נ) A youth have I been, now I am old,
And I have not seen a righteous man forsaken,
Or his seed begging bread.
26 All day long he is dealing generously and lending,
And his seed is blessed.
27 (ס) Depart from evil, and do good;
And dwell for evermore.
28 For Jehovah loves judgment,
And forsakes not them whom He favours.
(ע) They are preserved for ever
(The unrighteous are destroyed for ever?),
And the seed of the wicked is cut off.
29 The righteous shall inherit the land,
And dwell thereon for ever.
30 (פ) The mouth of the righteous meditates wisdom,
And his tongue speaks judgment.
31 The law of his God is in his heart;
His steps shall not waver.
32 (צ) The wicked watches the righteous,
And seeks to slay him;
33 Jehovah will not leave him in his hand,
And will not condemn him when he is judged.
34 (ק) Wait for Jehovah, and keep His way,
And He will exalt thee to inherit the land;
When the wicked is cut off, thou shalt see [it].
35 (ר) I have seen the wicked terror-striking
And spreading himself abroad like 36 And he passed (I passed by?), and lo, he was not [there];
And I sought for him, and he was not to be found.
37 (ש) Mark the perfect, and behold the upright;
For there is a posterity to the man of peace.
38 And apostates are destroyed together;
The posterity of the wicked is cut off.
39 (ת) And the salvation of the righteous is from Jehovah,
Their stronghold in time of trouble.
40 And Jehovah helps them and rescues them;
He rescues them from the wicked, and saves them,
Because they take refuge in Him.
There is a natural connection between acrostic structure and didactic tone, as is shown in several instances, and especially in this psalm. The structure is on the whole regular, each second verse beginning with the required letter, but here and there the period is curtailed or elongated by one member. Such irregularities do not seem to mark stages in the thought or breaks in the sequence, but are simply reliefs to the monotony of the rhythm, like the shiftings of the place of the pause in blank verse, the management of which makes the difference between a master and a bungler. The psalm grapples with the problem which tried the faith of the Old Testament saints—namely, the apparent absence of correlation of conduct with condition—and solves it by the strong assertion of the brevity of godless prosperity and the certainty that well-doing will lean to well-being. The principle is true absolutely in the long run, but there is no reference in the psalm to the future life. Visible material prosperity is its promise for the righteous, and the opposite its threatening for the godless. No doubt retribution is not wholly postponed till another life, but it does not fall so surely and visibly as this psalm would lead us to expect. The relative imperfection of the Old Testament revelation is reflected in the Psalms, faith's answer to Heaven's word. The clear light of New Testament revelation of the future is wanting, nor could the truest view of the meaning and blessedness of sorrow be adequately and proportionately held before Christ had taught it by His own history and by His words. The Cross was needed before the mystery of righteous suffering could be fully elucidated, and the psalmist's solution is but provisional. His faith that infinite love ruled and that righteousness was always gain, and sin loss, is grandly and eternally true. Nor is it to be forgotten that he lived and sang in an order of things in which the Divine government had promised material blessings as the result of spiritual faithfulness, and that, with whatever anomalies, modest prosperity did, on the whole, attend the true Israelite. The Scripture books which wrestle most profoundly with the standing puzzle of prosperous evil and afflicted goodness are late books, not merely because religious reflectiveness was slowly evolved, but because decaying faith had laid Israel open to many wounds, and the condition of things which accompanied the decline of the ancient order abounded with instances of triumphant wickedness.
But though this psalm does not go to the bottom of its theme, its teaching of the blessedness of absolute trust in God's providence is ever fresh, and fits close to all stages of revelation; and its prophecies of triumph for the afflicted who trust and of confusion to the evil-doer need only to be referred to the end to be completely established. As a theodicy, or vindication of the ways of God with men, it was true for its age, but the New Testament goes beneath it. As an exhortation to patient trust and an exhibition of the sure blessings thereof, it remains what it has been to many generations: the gentle encourager of meek faith and the stay of afflicted hearts.
Marked progress of thought is not to be looked for in an acrostic psalm. In the present instance the same ideas are reiterated with emphatic persistence, but little addition or variation. To the didactic poet "to write the same things is not grievous," for they are his habitual thoughts; and for his scholars "it is safe," for there is no better aid to memory than the cadenced monotony of the same ideas cast into song and slightly varied. But a possible grouping may be suggested by observing that the thought of the "cutting off" of the wicked and the inheritance of the land by the righteous occurs three times. If it is taken as a kind of refrain, we may cast the psalm into four portions, the first three of which close with that double thought. Vv. 1-9 will then form a group, characterised by exhortations to trust and assurances of triumph. The second section will then be vv. 10-22, which, while reiterating the ground tone of the whole, does so with a difference, inasmuch as its main thought is the destruction of the wicked, in contrast with the triumph of the righteous in the preceding verses. A third division will be vv. 23-29, of which the chief feature is the adduction of the psalmist's own experience as authenticating his teaching in regard to the Divine care of the righteous, and that extended to his descendants. The last section (vv. 30-40) gathers up all, reasserts the main thesis, and confirms it by again adducing the psalmist's experience in confirmation of the other half of his assurances, namely the destruction of the wicked. But the poet does not wish to close his words with that gloomy picture, and therefore this last section bends round again to reiterate and strengthen the promises for the righteous, and its last note is one of untroubled trust and joy in experienced deliverance.
The first portion (vv. 1-9) consists of a series of exhortations to trust and patience, accompanied by assurance of consequent blessing. These are preceded and followed by a dehortation from yielding to the temptation of fretting against the prosperity of evil-doers, based upon the assurance of its transitoriness. Thus the positive precepts inculcating the ideal temper to be cultivated are framed in a setting of negatives, inseparable from them. The tendency to murmur at flaunting wrong must be repressed if the disposition of trust is to be cultivated; and, on the other hand, full obedience to the negative precepts is only possible when the positive ones have been obeyed with some degree of completeness. The soul's husbandry must be busied in grubbing up weeds as well as in sowing; but the true way to take away nourishment from the baser is to throw the strength of the soil into growing the nobler crop. "Fret not thyself" (A.V.) is literally, "Heat not thyself," and "Be not envious" is "Do not glow," the root idea being that of becoming fiery red. The one word expresses the kindling emotion, the other its visible sign in the flushed face. Envy, anger, and any other violent and God-forgetting emotion are included. There is nothing in the matter in hand worth getting into a heat about, for the prosperity in question is short-lived. This leading conviction moulds the whole psalm, and, as we have pointed out, is half of the refrain. We look for the other half to accompany it, as usual, and we find it in one rendering of ver. 3, which has fallen into discredit with modern commentators, and to which we shall come presently; but for the moment we may pause to suggest that the picture of the herbage withering as soon as cut, under the fierce heat of the Eastern sun, may stand in connection with the metaphors in ver. 1. Why should we blaze with indignation when so much hotter a glow will dry up the cut grass? Let it wave in brief glory, unmeddled with by us. The scythe and the sunshine will soon make an end. The precept and its reason are not on the highest levels of Christian ethics, but they are unfairly dealt with if taken to mean, Do not envy the wicked man's prosperity, nor wish it were yours, but solace yourself with the assurance of his speedy ruin. What is said is far nobler than that. It is, Do not let the prosperity of unworthy men shake your faith in God's government, nor fling you into an unwholesome heat, for God will sweep away the anomaly in due time.