Plead my cause, and deliver me:
Quicken me according to thy word (Psa 119.154).
Evidently the Lord knows that we need to concentrate upon the great fundamentals of true religion, the very basics of revealed truth, because he keeps bringing us back to them again and again in his wise Word.
The basic elements arising from this verse include the Lord to whom it is addressed as a prayer, the psalmist who prays, threatening enemies, his distress before them, his helplessness and need of salvation, and the divine word of promise. These particulars get down to the essential dynamics of who God is, who we are, our situation in a fallen world, the way out of all death and misery, and the One deserving all praises for delivering his people.
These are all great themes addressed in the comprehensive scope of the grand biblical message we may summarize as the law and the gospel. We need to keep both in remembrance while we walk with God in this world. The law will continue exhibiting his glory and holiness. It will keep convicting us of our sin and alarming us with our ill desert on account of it. It will prove relentless to expose sin remaining in the crevasses of our hearts, that we might increase in humility and contrition, desperate for divine grace to overcome it.
On the other hand, the gospel, even more brilliantly than the law, displays God’s glory and holiness, along with his compassionate love to the fallen and guilty. It will continue preaching peace to us through Christ our Lord and his effectual sacrifice in our place, even when we have sinned as Christians. The gospel begets and nurtures our deep internal love for the Savior, and it comforts us that we are accepted in him, rather than for anything present in us or done by us. The gospel announces that the just condemnation of the law for sinners has been suffered by another in our place, and that there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus (Rom 8.1). Further, the gospel imparts spiritual life and revives the fainting to produce good works to the glory of God for the sake of Jesus Christ. The gospel is both the sinner’s salvation and the saint’s sustenance, and therefore never dispensable for either.
In our psalm text today, the prophet looks away from himself to the God of all grace for deliverance from present misery and for spiritual renewal in its wake. While we are far from imagining that in his day he had a complete knowledge of the gospel of Jesus Christ, yet under the Spirit’s infallible direction this writing saint used language rich enough and full enough to suggest this gospel and provided a form of sound words copious enough to encompass the fuller light of New Testament revelation. As Christians, we are both warranted and responsible to interpret such Old Testament texts with the benefit of the truth progressively given through long ages to the Church and now deposited in the whole canon of Scripture. Any interpreter would be spiritually blind and derelict in his duty not to see Christ in this verse, and to proclaim him from it. “The two Testaments are the two lips by which God speaks to us” (Thomas Watson).
SAVE ME
“Plead my cause, and deliver me,” are two ways of speaking about salvation from trouble, the first phrase emphasizing God’s activity on behalf of the psalmist and the second, the result of that activity.
“Plead my cause” is clearly legal language used metaphorically here. The Hebrew vocabulary here involves bringing forth a lawsuit for the plaintiff’s benefit, or defending one against accusations, “to contend forensically.”1 In view is a contest in court between two parties for justice.2 Some renderings use phrases like, “Plead my case for me,” and “argue my case.”
It acknowledges two parties in opposition, with acute danger felt by the one making this appeal. He knows his enemies have the power to do him considerable harm, a power that exceeds his own. He is confessing the circumstance of being in over his head, of trouble far greater than his own ability to handle. For his rescue, he needs an Advocate, a defender against the foe, a great one on his side who will act in his best interests and bring superior power to bear on the situation.
God appointed legal means for the maintenance of order and resolution of disputes in the civil code of Israel (Deut 17.8-10). As the psalmist is praying, it is obvious that he views God as that Advocate and Judge who shall make things right at last.
The New Testament enriches our understanding of salvation in its explicitly Trinitarian theology. God the Father takes the role of Judge and God the Son of our Advocate before the Father. “If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous” (1 John 2.1b). Believers can expect forgiveness for all sin as we make our appeal to God through his Son, and he stands to represent us, pleading the merit of his righteous life and atoning death. For without this unique Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, we sinners could never expect to find favor with God Most Holy, and our guilt would sink us lower than the grave (1 Tim 2.5).
Our understanding of the second phrase, “deliver me,” is also deepened by appreciating the Hebrew original.3 It could also be rendered “redeem me” (lit., to buy back by the payment of a ransom price) with the noun form denoting a “kinsman [near of kin, close relative] redeemer.”4 The Septuagint uses a word here that means to release by payment of a ransom, and hence, to liberate one from an oppressive situation, to set free, to rescue.5
Again, in Israel’s civil code, God made provision for deliverance of debtor-slaves who had come into abject poverty and could in no other way repay their just debts. The law arranged for their liberation in case one of their close relatives, a “kinsman redeemer,”6 was so kind to pay the ransom price in full to the creditor (Lev 25.47-49).
With the light of the New Testament, we can easily see a vivid type of Christ in this. Our blessed Lord came from heaven, assumed our human nature in both body and soul, and thus became our close relative, truly one of us, and just like us, except without sin. Laden as he was with the riches of his own virtue and righteousness, and well-deserving of its reward, namely, eternal life, Jesus Christ willingly laid down his life on the cross, paying the ransom price to release his elect who had become slaves to sin and overwhelmed with an infinite debt to God. The New Testament fully justifies our thinking of Christ’s redeeming work in these terms (e.g., Gal 4.4-5; Heb 2.14-16). A simple old gospel song puts it this way:
He paid a debt he did not owe;
I owed a debt I could not pay;
I needed someone to wash my sins away.
And, now, I sing a brand new song,
“Amazing Grace.”
Christ Jesus paid a debt that I could never pay.7
Thus David pleads and hopes for salvation by the Lord’s powerful grace exercised toward him, and this is the faith of every real Christian.
QUICKEN ME
The original verb in the form used here has a range of possible meanings: to preserve alive, let live, to give life, to quicken, revive, refresh, to restore to life, to cause to grow, and to restore.8 The figurative and spiritual sense is almost certainly in view in this context, and so this amounts to a plea for spiritual preservation and renewal. “Thy word” denotes Scripture, especially the gospel which is God’s great promise of salvation to his people. The phrase “according to” could grammatically and theologically have the sense of “with.”9 Thus we have a further plea that God would “preserve me according to your gospel promise,” or “revive me with your gospel promise,” or some other combination of these verbs and prepositions.
The wise believer knows that he is utterly dependent upon God’s grace not only for initial deliverance from sin and its bad consequences, but also for spiritual preservation and restoration when he has fallen, and that these blessings come through believing prayer, modeled for us by the psalmist. So let us pray, guided by the gospel, that we, too, may be delivered from death by our gracious Savior to his glory. We have warrant so to pray from both Testaments. Amen.
Notes:
1 Gesenius.
2 DBLSD.
3 LH-EIB.
4 BDBHEL.
5 G-ELS, .
6 “The relative who restores or preserves the full community rights of disadvantaged family members. The concept arises from God’s covenant relationship with Israel and points to the redemption of humanity in Jesus Christ” (Zondervan Dictionary of Bible Themes, #7388).
7 http://www.touchjesussongs.net/lyricspage15.html
8 ESL.
9 Plumer, in loc.