Verse of the day · August 21
What if I do not have the courage Psalm 31:24 asks for?
He was as safe in the caves as inside a strong city, and certain Saul would kill him.
Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the LORD.
Psalm 31:24
Psalm 31 ends in an exhortation, and the man giving it had spent that part of his life in caves and woods with Saul's sword looking for him. He was kept alive out there, as safe in the caves as if he had been inside a strong city. Two verses before the exhortation he sets down something he had said while he was still running.
What he had said was that he was cut off before God's eyes — quite forsaken, and certain he would perish one day by the hand of Saul. Two readings of that line have come down, and Matthew Henry gives a meaning for each: in his flight, which marks the distress of his affairs, and in my haste, which marks the disturbance of his mind. Saul was just at his back, and the speed of it found him off his guard. It was not ignorance talking. He had express promises to build on and great experience of God's care in many straits behind him, and he entertained the hard and jealous thought anyway, and could not forbear telling it to God's face.
The answer came regardless. His faith failed and the promise did not, and the line he writes next has God hearing the voice of his supplication for all that. He puts the unbelief on the record deliberately, as a foil — the fidelity stands out larger against it, and the loving-kindness is the more marvellous for having gone to a man who had stopped expecting it. Distrust like that could justly be taken at its word, as it was with Israel in the wilderness. Pity and pardon came instead, because he knows our frame.
The order comes in the last line of the psalm. John Gill puts one thing under it: by this piece of God's wonderful kindness to the psalmist he would have the saints take heart and be of good cheer, even in the greatest distresses, since their case cannot be worse than his was, and yet he had deliverance out of it. The Geneva Notes keep both halves in that order — be constant in your calling, and God will confirm you with heavenly strength.
Spurgeon, in the Treasury of David, hears it as an order to the nerve: keep up your spirit, let no craven thoughts blanch your cheek. Fear weakens, courage strengthens, and victory waits upon the banners of the brave. What is promised after it he takes as something done to the source rather than to the situation — power from on high, administering force to the fountain of vitality. So far from leaving us, the Lord draws very near in our adversity and puts his own power into us. Henry has that strength arriving by way of the trust: whatever difficulties or dangers you may meet with, the God you trust in shall by that trust strengthen your heart.
Simeon Ash, gathered into the same volume, reads the promise as a soldier's care. Put thou thyself forth in a way of bold adventure for him, he says, and his providence shall be sweetly exercised for thy good — the way a worthy commander looks after a brave blade, a man who will fight at a cannon's mouth. A bone broken, send for the bone-setter; bleeding to death, call the surgeon; growing weaker and weaker, withhold nothing, for would he eat gold he should have it. Every item on that list is for a man already hit. And the commendation Ash reaches for went to a church where one of them had been killed for it — thou hast held forth my name and not denied it, in the days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth.
The line before this one is where JFB put the ground of the whole thing. The Lord preserveth the faithful reads, literally, the Lord is keeping faith — with his people — and the clause after it has him repaying the proud doer. Let none despair, then, but take courage: their hopes shall not be in vain. There is a delay in it, on Spurgeon's reading: they have to bide their time, but the recompense comes at last, and meanwhile all the cruel malice of their enemies cannot destroy them.
The people the order is given to are not identified by their courage. They are the ones still hoping, which is the least a person under that kind of pressure can be doing, and it is made to them at exactly that level: God is faithful, and does not fail even his little children who do but hope. The eye of the Lord is on such, and he takes delight in them. So the command asks for no steadiness that the man who gave it had ever managed himself. What it stands on is what was done for one who lost his.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, Charles Spurgeon, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary and the Geneva Bible notes.
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