The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Do you ever feel afraid, desperate or alone? If so, then listen up. This Psalm is for you. Today on the Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, we'll study Psalm 56, where David is on his own, alone, and scared.

But by the end of the Psalm, David expresses a quiet, steady confidence in God. How does he get there? And how can we move from a place of fear to a place of faith?

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Psalm 56 deals practically with the dangers of our lives, which are quite real, but at the same time also expresses the faith of one man who found God to be adequate even in these dangerous situations.

Yes, David is afraid and alone, yet he knows that God has helped him in the past. So how does David move from a place of despair to a place of hope?

Dr. James Boice: The title of our study comes from a question that David asks twice in Psalm 56. You find it in verse 4 and again in verse 11, and it's this: "What can man do to me?" Well, you don't have to think very long about that to have an answer. The answer is man can do a lot.

When I was working on the sermon, I thought I would go through a little exercise to see what man can do to man, and I got out that day's newspaper and I just started at page one and I read through it to find out the kinds of things that man can do to man. And here they are.

First story I read was an attack on Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Vietnamese refugees in Germany by neo-Nazis while the German police looked on. To their credit, the refugees fought back in this particular account, but the attack took place anyway. Number two: a United Nations vote to look into reports by war crimes by the Serbian government against Muslims in Bosnia. Serbs are engaged in what they call ethnic cleansing, and many thousands of people have been killed.

Number three: the trial of a man who sold an unsuspecting family a home with a defective gas heater, knowing it was dangerous, it emitted carbon monoxide, and the night it was first turned on, three people in the family including an infant died.

Number four: the murder of the manager of a fast food restaurant and the wounding of his co-worker by two young hoodlums who wanted to rob them. Number five: the sentencing of two men for insurance fraud. Number six: an abduction. Number seven: several cases of sexual abuse and so on. It could go on and on.

Sometimes on a weekend in Philadelphia, I count the number of murder stories that there are on the evening news. It's often four, five, sometimes it's half a dozen. And that's just one statistic in one city in this country of America that illustrates what Wordsworth very aptly called man's inhumanity to man. So you ask the question, "What can man do to me?" The answer is, man can oppress, slander, hurt, hate, maim and murder me, and that's just for starters.

But of course, that's not the answer that David is giving in the Psalm. What David says in Psalm 56 is this: man can do nothing as long as the Almighty God is on his side and is protecting him against the oppressors. Now, I suppose at that point what we want to say is, well, that's easy for David to say. After all, he was a king, he had an army, he lived in a very well-fortified city. A person in a situation like that could say very justly, "What can man do to me?"

But of course, that's not the situation in which David wrote the Psalm. If you look at the title at the beginning of the Psalm, it says "when the Philistines had seized him in Gath." And that's something that, according to the history, took place many, many years before David became king and was ensconced in Jerusalem.

Now, let me review the story. We saw a bit of it when we started to study Psalm 52. We saw that early in his life, when he was still working for Saul, David had been forced to escape because Saul was going to kill him. Jonathan warned David what was going to happen and David escaped in a hurry. He didn't have his army with him, he didn't have any weapons, and he made his way to Nob. The priest at Nob, it was one of the priestly cities, gave him food and gave him a sword, and David went on his way.

The unfortunate thing we saw when we studied that is that a man named Doeg the Edomite was there, saw David and sometime later revealed that to Saul for his own personal advantage. He wanted to appear as one who was on the side of the king, whom the king could trust, and as a result of that, Saul turned on the priests and Doeg executed the wrath of the king and all of those priests and their families there in Nob were killed. Eighty-five priests were killed, and there were also the women and the children, the citizens, and according to the account in Samuel, it even involved the cattle that were there in the city. So it was a great tragedy.

Now we also saw when we studied that, that between the visit that David made to Nob and Doeg's report of that to King Saul, some time elapsed. We saw that back there in 1 Samuel 21, there are two stories of things that happened during this interval. The first was David's flight to the fortified Philistine city of Gath. He thought, well, it's another country, another people, it's a fortified city, maybe I'll be safe there. The second thing that happened was his escape into the wilderness from Gath when he found out he wouldn't be safe in Gath, and he went to the cave at Adullam, and there he began to gather his 400 men.

Sort of a romantic episode in David's life, there in the wilderness in the cave, the 400 men coming to him. It's almost like a Robin Hood story. But of course, it wasn't a very pleasant time for David. But those two things happened in the interval. Now Psalm 56, according to the title, was written during this period, that is, between the period of his visit to Nob, where he was helped by Ahimelech the priest, and his eventual escape into the wilderness where he lived for a time gathering his army.

So there are several things that are worth reflecting on about that. Number one: David was alone when he was at Gath. You see, we think of him being in the wilderness there with his 400 soldiers and as I said, that seems like a kind of romantic time and we think, well, you know, he hadn't come into power yet, but at least they had all the pleasant times of living together and camaraderie and all of that, and they had a kind of rough type of fellowship there in the wilderness. But this was before that happened.

You see, according to the history, David left Nob with nothing. He went to Gath alone and he fled from Gath to Adullam where he began to gather the 400 soldiers. So he was alone when he was in Gath, absolutely alone. He had nobody with him. That's the first thing we need to see.

The second thing we have to see is that David was desperate. Now I have a very good reason for saying that and it's simply this: Gath was the home of Goliath, the giant whom he had killed, at least it had been his home. Whatever would cause a man to go there under those conditions? Goliath was certainly the great hero of the Philistines and he was highly admired in Gath. So for David to go to Gath must have been an absolute act of desperation.

Now there's also this: I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere in any of the commentaries, but I'm sure it's true. When David was in Nob and he asked Ahimelech if he had any weapons, Ahimelech said, "No, we don't keep weapons here. The only thing I happen to have is the sword of Goliath, whom you killed." And so David said, "That's fine, I'll take that." You see, it was sort of laid up as a trophy. It wasn't there to defend Nob.

And so David said, "I'll take that." Now, presumably he went to Gath with Goliath's sword. You say, well, maybe he slipped by. Now, when you read about Goliath's armor back there in 1 Samuel 17, you find that Goliath was nine feet tall and his armor was appropriately large and heavy. Doesn't mention his sword specifically, though the sword is mentioned later. Doesn't tell us any of the dimensions. It must have been something unusual, a very big sword.

And so here comes David into Goliath's home city carrying his sword. He must have been out of his mind. A little later on, he began to act like he was out of his mind. That's how he got out of there. But you say what in the world would ever cause somebody to do that? Well, either he had to be utterly arrogant, "no thing's ever going to hurt me because I'm David," or he had to be terribly desperate. Now we know he wasn't arrogant because he tells us in the Psalm he was afraid. That eliminates that possibility and you have to say he was desperate, very desperate indeed.

Derek Kidner, one of the commentators on the Psalm, says to have fled from Saul to Gath of all places, the hometown of Goliath, took the courage of despair. It measured also David's estimate of his standing with the people. So he thought none of his own people would defend him and he found out that was true. He discovered it later. His time in Gath was not successful, of course, and he had to flee. But when he did, then he felt himself doubly encircled. His own people were against him and he couldn't even escape into the land of the Philistines. So that's the second thing.

Now the third thing is something I've already mentioned: David was afraid. He says it explicitly. We're told it in 1 Samuel, but he also reflects it in the Psalm. Notice verse 3, "When I am afraid, I will trust in you." Now he had good reason to be afraid. Not only was he there in Gath under those conditions, the people of Gath didn't receive him well. When he came, what we're told in 1 Samuel is that the people reported to the king of Gath, whose name was Achish, "Isn't this David, the king of the land? Isn't he the one they sing about in their dances?"

And then they quote the little lyric that they used to sing when they were dancing in praise of David: "Saul has slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands." Now who were those tens of thousands that David killed? They were the Philistines! And you can certainly bet that some of them had come from Gath. They had gone to war with Goliath. But you see when that was reported to Achish the king, that David, the one who has killed tens of thousands of our people is here in Gath, when David heard about that, he was afraid and he had every reason to be. Now what he did, of course, was begin to act crazy, and the king said, "Look, I've got enough crazy people in my government. Every government is filled with crazy people," he said. "I don't need this madman here." And so he didn't arrest him and kill him and David got away.

Now with all of that in mind, you see David alone and despairing and afraid, read what he actually says in the Psalm: "When I am afraid, I will trust in you. In God whose word I praise, in God I trust, I will not be afraid. What can mortal man do to me?" Now this is a Psalm for you if you ever feel afraid. Do you ever feel afraid? Desperate? Do you ever feel desperate? Alone? Do you ever feel alone? A lot of us feel that, most of us feel it at some time or another. Some people feel that way most of the time.

It's a Psalm that reflects those feelings, very real on the part of David. But not only did he feel that way, he had something else and that's where the Psalm really speaks to us: he had confidence in God. So without minimizing the fear at all or the circumstances at all, they were desperate circumstances, none of us would want to be in those circumstances, we see nevertheless that as he prayed to God, he emerged from them and he reassured himself by his confidence in the God whom he served. And that's really what we want to explore.

I want to say one more word about the title. The title of some of these Psalms is interesting and this particular one mentions the tune to which it apparently was to be sung: "To the tune of a dove on distant oaks." Now we don't know anything about those tunes. It would be nice if we did, but we don't. But the very fact that it mentions a dove makes us think back to Psalm 55 in which David referred to a dove. It might be why they're in the order they are, that sort of thing would be in the minds of the compilers.

And if you think back to Psalm 55, you know what David was doing there. He said, "Oh that I had the wings of a dove, then I would fly away and be at rest." But we found when we studied that, that David did not have the wings of a dove and he couldn't fly away and be at rest. But here we learn that he had something better: he had God who made the dove. And when he placed his confidence in that God, he found that that God was adequate and he could find peace by trusting Him.

This Psalm has been particularly popular with the biblical writers. It's interesting because I suppose if you'd asked people today what their favorite Psalm is, very few would mention this one, and yet it is referred to again and again. Verses 4 and 11 are picked up in Psalm 118 verse 6, they're also quoted by the author of Hebrews in chapter 13 verse 6. Verse 9 is referred to by Paul in Romans 8:31 and the first part of verse 13 is quoted in Psalm 116 verse 6 with only a slight alteration. And the very last phrase of the Psalm, "the light of life," reappears in the third of Jesus' "I am" sayings in John's Gospel. He said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life." So here you have a very popular Psalm.

Now what do we do about an outline? Well, this is the first of a number of Psalms that we're going to find here in this section of the Psalter that have a repeating chorus. Most of the Psalms we came to earlier did not have that, but some do at this point, and let me show you some examples. The very next Psalm has one: Psalm 57. If you look at that, you'll find that verses 5 and 11 are the same: "Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; let your glory be over all the earth." You find that in the middle of the Psalm in verse 5 and again at the end. It divides it into two parts, each with a chorus.

And then you find the same thing in Psalm 59. There the repetition is in verses 9 and 17: "O my strength, I watch for you; you, O God, are my fortress, my loving God." Those exact words appear at the end. Now we have the same sort of thing here and what I want to suggest is it gives us a way of outlining the Psalm. The chorus, if we may call it that, is found in verse 4. It's part of the words I read to you a moment ago, "In God whose word I praise, in God I trust, I will not be afraid; what can mortal man do to me?"

And then you find it again in verses 10 and 11 with a slight expansion. The slight variation is not unusual in Hebrew verse and here it's that second line of verse 10: "In God whose word I praise, in the Lord whose word I praise, in God I trust, I will not be afraid; what can man do to me?" Now that gives us the outline, you see. You've got an opening statement there of the trouble in which David finds himself, verses 1 and 2. Then you have his statement of faith, verses 3 and 4. Third, there is a further elaboration of the problem, verses 5 through 9. Then you have the chorus again, it's a statement of faith, and then at the end almost as a coda, that is something added on, not so much germane to the actual structure, you have David promising to present a thanksgiving offering to God when he is saved by Him. So that's the way we need to look at it.

Now I would say that the way to treat it then is to look at the first part and the third first because the first part and the third part are elaborating the problem. And I would say it's the voice of fear. David speaking out of a full heart, telling you exactly what he was experiencing. Now it was a very real fear and the opening part of this describes the fury of the attack that had made him so afraid. Sometimes it's very helpful just to analyze how the words are used, and if you do that of the first two verses, you'll find that there is a striking repetition of phrases.

Notice in verse 1 the word "pursue." Men hotly pursue me. That occurs again in verse 2. My slanderers pursue me. Notice the first part of the second line of verse 1: "all day long." You find that again in verse 2: "they pursue me all day long." Then you find the word "attack" at the end of the first verse. They press their attack at the very end of the second verse, there it is again: "many are attacking me in their pride." So you've got "pursue," "all day long," and "attack" repeated two times over and over again. Now that's not mere redundancy. That is written for effect.

And I suppose the way to capture that effect would be to say something like this: "I am overwhelmed, just overwhelmed. They're pursuing me, pursuing me all the time. They're attacking me, everywhere I turn they're attacking me, they're attacking me." You see you begin to get the idea. When you say it that way, you understand that David is expressing how relentless and how furious the attack is. So that's what he does at the beginning.

Then the third section that I said really should be taken with it begins to describe the nature of the attack. Now when you read that first part, you would think that what David was chiefly concerned about was his physical danger. And especially if you know that he was in Gath, what you'd expect them to be doing there would be arresting him and killing him, taking out their anger on him because he'd killed Goliath. When you get to this third section, verses 5 and following, you find that he's not primarily concerned about the physical danger, though of course he is concerned about that, but that it also involves the fact that people are slandering him.

I think what he must be thinking of there is the situation that caused him to have to run away. We know of the jealousy that Saul had for David and we blame it all on Saul. We say, well, Saul was jealous of him, but in a court situation, you don't have to use your imagination very much to realize that there must have been all kinds of people that were playing on the jealousy of the king. They would use every possible thing they could that David had said or done or the way he looked to say, "Oh, David's conspiring against you. Why yesterday I saw him do this and as he was walking down the hall the other day I heard him say this," and so forth, and David's reflecting all of that here. He says, "All day long they twist my words, they're plotting to harm me, they conspire, they lurk, they watch my steps, they're eager to take my life."

Sometimes we find ourselves in situations like that. People hate us for one reason or another. Sometimes at work it's a matter of jealousy, somebody wants to get ahead, sometimes it's just selfishness. Sometimes they just don't like you. Maybe they don't like you because you're a Christian. And so things you say are terribly twisted. Many of us have experienced things like that. Well, that's what David was undergoing.

He says in verse 7 he prays that God will bring judgment upon them because in his situation it was creating great danger. Many people were going to get hurt. We know that did happen. There were wars and people died. And then in the midst of that, he expresses his confidence that God really does know the situation he's going through. Now he's going to say that he's sure God's going to deliver him. He doesn't have any question about that. He's going to put his trust in God. But here he says, "You see even when I'm living in a situation like this where people are slandering me and everything I say is twisted, I'm in physical danger as well, I'm really in distress, I'm really afraid, I do know even in that situation that you know what I'm going through."

He has a beautiful way of saying it. We know it probably best in the words of the King James Bible. The translation there is, "put thou my tears into thy bottle." Well, the New International Version has the same idea: "list my tears on your scroll." Scrolls probably were made out of leather, bottles were made out of leather, and so it might mean that and down at the bottom you'll see a footnote "or put my tears in your wineskin." You kind of lose the poetry of it when you do that, but it's the same idea. What David is saying is, "All these things I'm going through, I want you to remember them, take note of them," and then of course he knows that God does.

Isn't it good to know that? The sorrows that you go through, that you think perhaps only you know because you don't have a friend that you can share them with or at least nobody that would really understand, God knows. God understands. They're all written down in heaven. He's taking note of it, noting how you go through them. One day He will more than compensate you for the grief and the tears and the pain and the hurt and the suffering and the loss. That's a teaching of the Bible. At this point, of course, the voice of faith emerges. We've heard the voice of fear. Now we have the voice of faith and David begins to express his confidence in God in those words that are repeated: "In God whose word I praise, in God I trust, I will not be afraid; what can mortal man do to me?"

And the second time he repeats it, he uses the word for God, Elohim, four times in those verses and the word for Jehovah once. That's the variation that you find in verse 10. So what he's saying here, the very first thing is that the reason he can be confident is that his confidence is in God. You see if you try to put your confidence in man, you're always going to be disappointed. It's good to have friends and sometimes friends will stand by you and that's a wonderful thing. We're glad to see that. Sometimes friends will even die for one another. We know examples of that, our hearts are moved when we hear stories like that. But more often than not, man will let you down. People will let you down.

And David says, "My confidence is not in man. I would be happy if somebody would stand by me." And in time the 400 came and gathered around him and that was a good thing. But he says you can't put your confidence in man because they will gather, but they'll also go away and even his own son betrayed him, as you know. So David said, "My confidence is in God."

So let me ask that question. You go through hard times. The question is this: do you trust God? Not circumstances, you know the things are going to work out all right and then you're not going to have problems, but do you trust God Himself, even in the circumstances? Now if you're a Christian, you've trusted Him in the matter of your salvation. You were dead in sins, the Gospel was presented to you, the work of Jesus Christ, you responded to it. It may be that you didn't even see anything very remarkable taking place in your life at the time, but you believed that God sent Jesus Christ to be your Savior and so you trust Him for your salvation. You put your whole confidence in Him for that.

Well, if you can trust Him in the greater, you can trust Him in the lesser. God is able to save your soul from hell, He's certainly able to preserve you in this life. And that's what He promises to do. Now the Bible teaches that God will take care of you if you follow after Him and seek righteousness and try to serve Jesus Christ. David wrote in an earlier Psalm, "I was young and now I'm old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their seed begging bread." The Psalm immediately before this one said, "cast your cares on the Lord and He will sustain you." The Apostle Paul wrote in Philippians, "My God will meet all your need according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus." People that trust God to do that have found that to be true.

But I want you to see one other thing about this. He's expressing his confidence in God, that's where his faith lies, but notice that he also expresses it in the form of confidence in God's word. Isn't that interesting? "In God whose word I praise." And when the chorus is repeated the second time in verses 10 and 11, that's the thing that is amplified: "In God whose word I praise, that is in the Lord whose word I praise." Now his confidence is found in the expressed word of God. What is that? What did that refer to in David's circumstance? Well, it certainly referred to the portions of the Bible that had been given by that time. That would include the Pentateuch and Joshua, maybe Job or some books we don't know the dating of all of the Old Testament books. That was the Bible David had. And God had given it and so he said, "My confidence is in God and I praise His word."

It may also be, we don't know that this is true, but it may also be that he was thinking of that special word that had been given to him by Samuel. Samuel the prophet had come to him and anointed him and had told him that God had chosen him to be the king of Israel. He wasn't the king of Israel yet. God had chosen him to be the king of Israel and so it may very well be that that is the word of God that he is trusting. He's in terrible situation here, humanly speaking his life is on the line. Very likely that he's going to be killed. But God had told him that he's going to be king and if God told him he was going to be king, he's going to trust that word of God because it's certainly going to happen one day.

Now you and I don't have prophets to come to us with words like that. That does not happen in our day. But we have the Bible and the Bible we have is more extensive than anything David had. The Bible deals with all these circumstances of life that we go through and it is filled with promises. The question is, do we really trust it? Do we really believe God? We're going to sing, "How Firm a Foundation, Ye Saints of the Lord, Is Laid for Your Faith in His Excellent Word." And yet we act so often as if we don't really believe that word and we show we don't really believe it because we tremble and don't trust God.

Well, at the very end we have what I called the coda, verses 12 and 13, and these are verses in which, like the ending of Psalm 54 which is exactly the same, David vows to present a thanksgiving offering to God when he's delivered because he's certain God is going to deliver him. "I am under vows to you, O God; I will present my thank offerings to you. For you have delivered my soul from death and my feet from stumbling, that I may walk before God in the light of life." It's a great vow of confidence and if you ask yourself, well, how did David ever get to this point, the answer is he got there by praying. You see that's what these Psalms are. They're all prayers in which David lays up before God the heart and the feelings of his heart and he gains confidence as he does it because God ministers to his soul.

But let me say one more thing before I close. You see the very fact that Jesus probably referred to that last phrase, "the light of life," in His "I am" saying in which He referred to Himself as the light, the text is John 8:12, makes us think of verse 13 in light of the deliverance that Jesus Himself brings. And this gift of life is the gift of salvation by the Holy Spirit. You see that is the ultimate fulfillment of the Psalm. One of the commentators, Alexander McLaren, says, "The really living are they who live in Jesus and the real light of the living is the sunshine that streams on those who thus live because they live in Him."

So I want to end this way. I say if you really want to move out from your fear or your despair or your loneliness, your doubt, your hurts and bask in the sunshine of God, the way to do it is to look upward to the face of Jesus Christ, which shines upon you. If you do, then you'll find yourself saying as He Himself ministers to your heart, "I will not fear, I trust in God. What can mortal man do to me?"

Let's pray. Our Father, we thank you for this Psalm. We thank you for the way it deals so practically with the hurts we have, the dangers of our lives, which are quite real, but at the same time also expresses the faith of one man who found you to be adequate even to those dangerous situations. We thank you for David and the way he expressed confidence in you. We pray that because we are called by you and the faith in which we stand is the same faith, that you would make us men and women just like that, so that we're able to stand and express by our words and also by our actions that we really do trust you and so find you to be real and powerful in our lives. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen.

Thank you for listening to this message from The Bible Study Hour, a listener-supported ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance is a coalition of pastors, scholars and churchmen who hold to the historic creeds and confessions of the Reformed faith and who proclaim biblical doctrine in order to foster a Reformed awakening in today's church. To learn more about the Alliance, visit AllianceNet.org. And while you're there, visit our online store, Reformed Resources, where you can find messages and books from Dr. Boice and other outstanding teachers and theologians, or ask for a free Reformed Resources catalog by calling 1-800-488-1888.

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