Consider mine affliction, and deliver me:
For I do not forget thy law (Psa 119.153).
English is a dynamic language. Useful words sometimes become corrupted by popular usage. When biblical terms are at stake, we should be jealous for their proper sense and clarify their meaning to our hearers.
So it is with the word “saint,” usually understood as a “canonized” dead person, or at least one “eminent for piety or virtue.”1 Scripture never uses it in either of these senses. Instead, “saints” (literally, “holy ones”) refers simply to those people separated by God unto himself from the rest of the world’s sinners. Many saints have died, and many remain in this world. Basically, a saint is a Christian (cf. 1 Cor 1.2).
Of course many falsely claim to be Christians, while some true Christians may not yet be baptized and officially recognized as such, but the Lord knows those that are truly his. Real saints are his favorites among men, those in whom he delights because they are in Christ, his Beloved.
One would naturally think that such people in the world would visibly fare the best, far better than those abiding in God’s wrath (John 3.36), as a good man lavishes upon his own children favors denied to others. But God in his wisdom governs his creation in a surprising way. This verse in Psalm 119 bears witness to that, because it shows that saints pine, pray, and persevere.
SAINTS PINE
To pine means “to suffer a mental and physical decline, especially because of sorrow.”2 It comes from an Old English word for “suffer,” and from the Latin for “punishment.” It is very important to recognize that saints pine, that real Christians, even the most spiritual ones, must sometimes in this life suffer so badly in body and soul that it looks for all the world like they are under divine punishment for being the greatest sinners of all.
This was sometimes David’s experience, and so he cries out to the Lord, “Consider mine affliction.” The Hebrew is very expressive, a compound of three words—see, me, misery. This is a cry for special divine attention because of acute distress. “Oh Lord, look at me, and you will see a pitiful case of human suffering!” As with most similar instances in the Psalms, we are not told the specifics of what troubled David so greatly, but this makes it all the more easily applied to our own individual experience and situation. It may have been nothing more at this point in his life than the anguish of a truly pious soul in its conflict with remaining sin, but only people who have never been stretched upon that rack of torment would lack great sympathy.
On the other hand, there were times of distress in David’s life also occasioned by external trials. Who can forget Ziklag when his troops nearly mutinied after all their wives and children were kidnapped by the enemy?
And David was greatly distressed; for the people spake of stoning him, because the soul of all the people was grieved, every man for his sons and for his daughters: but David encouraged himself in the LORD his God (1 Sam 30.6).
Was David then a true saint? Yes, in fact, a great one. Was he then a man after God’s own heart? Yes, that was true from our first introduction to him in Scripture (1 Sam 13.14; 1 Kgs 11.4). He was truly the servant of the Lord in that generation, but this catastrophe was serious enough to constitute a severe punishment of an ungodly man.
I have a friend who appears to be dying this very hour after an illness of five months that has bounced him back and forth between a hospital and a nursing home, and has included indescribable physical pain beyond the relief of medication. For five decades he has been a faithful husband, and for almost as long, a faithful pastor. Few people in this world come to the end of their lives with so good a testimony for Christ, and yet very many live longer, and die with much less physical pain.
My friend’s experience illustrates the truth that saints pine.
Interpreting Ecclesiastes 9.1, Calvin wrote,
anyone who would ascertain, from the present state of things, who are in the favor or under the displeasure of God, labors in vain, and torments himself to no useful purpose, since “All things come alike to all;” “to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not:” and hence God does not always declare his love to those on whom he bestows uninterrupted prosperity, nor his hatred against those whom he afflicts.3
You cannot expect an easier time of it in this life just because you are a Christian, nor even if you become eminently godly. How contrary to the lying vanities of those who preach that accursed “prosperity gospel!” And what a comfort to those saints suffering greatly, to strengthen them against despairing of God’s special love toward them. Remember how Jesus Christ suffered, and yet how infinitely beloved of the Father.
SAINTS PRAY
In great distress, the psalmist looks up and cries, “deliver me,” or “rescue me,” as it might be translated. He uses the same word in a song of praise to the Lord after a former deliverance. “He delivered me, because he delighted in me” (2 Sam 22.20; also Psa 18.19). This had been his experience in the past, and it remained his hope for the future.
The one in whom the Lord delights comes by Providence into a place where he needs deliverance, but this is no sign at all of divine disfavor, or of ultimate ruin. We walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor 5.7). Those with true and saving faith enjoy a deep-down kind of confidence of God’s favor, present feelings and circumstances notwithstanding, based upon his promises. This faith in the Lord as one who would never fail to keep his Word prompts us to pray for help even when things are at their worst in our lives. All this tends to promote the glory of God, because it shows off his power and grace as our mighty Savior. “Call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me” (Psa 50.15).
The nature of true saving faith is not merely to believe that what God has said is true, but to rely upon his promise of salvation alone, in and through Christ alone, for our own deliverance from all miseries, and that by grace alone. And hearts where this hope-filled faith dwells are wont to call upon the Lord in prayer. While walking through the valley of the shadow of death, they fear no evil, because they never lose the seed of assurance that God is with them in the darkness.
SAINTS PERSEVERE
These considerations help us to grasp why David testifies in the second line about himself when he says, “I do not forget thy law.” Far from being any appeal to personal merit, this is his testimony of sustaining grace from the Lord as the evidence of abiding divine favor. Plainly, anyone with a living faith—a faith that keeps in mind the content of God’s Word and joins with this a persistent carefulness to walk in habitual obedience to God’s commandments—is the kind of person who can know for sure that he will have a final and ultimate deliverance from all his woes. He has grounds to relish a full assurance of salvation. Those grounds are not his obedience, but God’s grace, manifestly resting upon the saint by a sanctified walk of godly devotion.
So David calls to mind his former and present experiences of turning from sin to live as God’s servant by grace, not for boasting in man, but in the Lord, and to increase comfort in distress until the present miseries pass. “I have been, and I am, a sincere believer and follower of the Lord! I have known God’s special favor in his enabling me to believe and repent! He who began a good work in me will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ!” (Phil 1.6).
Even on a deathbed of considerable pain, these assurances quiet the troubled soul, and escort it peacefully it into the heavenly rest prepared by the Lord for those who love him.
Whatever trials are before you now, the biblical counsel is the same. Pour out your heart to the Lord, plead for him to rescue you, and take solace in his promises to the faithful until deliverance comes. Amen.
Notes:
1 MWCD. Canonization follows the beatification in a process of the Roman Catholic Church.
2 COED.
3 Institutes III, ii, 38.