Verse of the day · October 9
What does it mean to direct my prayer and look up in Psalm 5:3?
A man can pray for a thing, get it, and never know that he did.
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My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O LORD; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.
Psalm 5:3
The psalm before this one — the fourth — ends with David lying down and sleeping in the peace of his God. This one is the morning after. He wakes still pursued by men who mean him harm, and God is his only hope of protection, even to get through one day. They are liars: there is no faithfulness in their mouth; their throat is an open sepulchre; they flatter with their tongue. He was a king himself, on his own throne; at God's throne he is a beggar.
The first thing out of him is not his request but a plea to be listened to, and he makes it three times over, in three different ways. Give ear to my words. Then, consider my meditation — and meditation there is probably more than thinking. It is the inward half of prayer, a stirring that partly gets out as a sigh or a groan and never gets fully into words at all. Then, hearken unto the voice of my cry — more than words now, more than a groan: an outcry, the noise a man makes when he is in great distress.
Then comes this verse, and it changes key. It is not so much a request as a resolution, and what he is resolving amounts to this: I will not go quiet, I will not hold my tongue, because there is a fire in me that compels me to pray.
Why that hour? A man is at his best for it then, clear of the night's sleep and not yet filled up with the business of the day. And he needs it most then, with the day's dangers and temptations all still in front of him. Whatever fills the mind first on waking tends to keep hold of the heart the rest of the day. Prayer should be the key of the day and the lock of the night.
What a man has to say at that hour is ordinary enough. Thanks for sleep, and for being kept through the night from thieves and murderers; then a set of asks for the day ahead — to be kept out of evil, to be given food, to be helped to get on with his work. Those asks are what gets put in order. Direct my prayer turns on one Hebrew word, arach, and it means to set in order — to place things in a row. Call it the ordering word. It is the word for laying the wood and the pieces of a sacrificed animal out on the altar. It is also the word for setting the bread out in order on a table in God's house. So the picture under the English is a priest at dawn, laying out the morning sacrifice piece by piece. A prayer like that should not be rash, and should not be got through lightly; it should have the man's profound thought in it, and the same care the temple service was ordered with. He calls up all his powers and bids them stand in their proper places, to pray with all his might.
What is set in order is the prayer itself, laid out the way the bread and the sacrifice were. Yet the method of a prayer is sometimes very broken and confused, and the prayer is regarded by God anyway. And the prayers go up by way of the one mediator, Christ, so that on his account they are sure not to go astray. The bread on that table stood for that very thing: his intercession for his people, which never breaks off.
The phrase at the end — and will look up — is where the English flattens something. That is one Hebrew word as well, zaphah, and looking upward is not necessarily in it. It means to look about, to view a thing from a distance. Call it the watchman's word: it is used of a tower with a wide view, and of men on watch through the night for the first light of morning. So the nearer sense is look out. A man has gone up somewhere high and is watching, narrowly and carefully, the way somebody stationed on a tower does, for any token that what he asked has been heard. He stays at the post, patiently expecting. Having laid the thing out on the altar, he watches for the fire — for an answer to come down from heaven and take what he laid there.
He is not the only one watching in this psalm. Later in it he asks to be led in God's righteousness because of mine enemies — and the Hebrew behind mine enemies is nearer to those who are watching me. They are watching him, standing by for him to put a foot wrong so that they will have something to accuse him of. He made use of that. The more closely they watched for a fault, the more closely he kept clear of one, and of anything that could be made to look like one. And he did not leave the keeping to his own care alone: he asked God to put him in the right way and hold him in it. Men are posted on him, waiting for him to fail. He is posted on God, waiting for an answer.
Those two words, arach and zaphah, are soldiers' words as well. Side by side they give the verse a posture and a practice. First the petitions are drawn up and put into battle array. Then he goes up onto his own watch-tower like a scout, to see whether he had prevailed — whether the thing he asked for had been granted or not.
And the plain English yields a picture of its own. Direct sounds like taking aim and look up like following the shot, which makes him an archer: put the prayer on the bow, and when the arrow has gone, look where it went. But the Hebrew has a still fuller meaning than this one — the altar, and the bread on the table.
The priest, the soldier and the archer all put a second act after the asking. It makes no sense to do the first and not the second: a man shooting arrow after arrow towards heaven and never minding where any of them land is either a fool or a madman.
Dropping that second act costs a man much of the comfort of praying, for want of noticing what came back. For want of looking up, many a prayer is lost to the man who prayed it. An answer can arrive and be walked straight past — the thing granted, and never recognised as an answer to anything he asked. A man who prays and never goes back to look is like the ostrich, which lays her eggs and never looks for her young.
The psalm does not leave him standing on the tower. It ends with him sure of two things: that God blesses the righteous — the ones who put their trust in him and love his name — and that his favour goes round that man like a shield, a defence on every side.
What the resolution commits him to, twice over, is attention — once while the prayer is being laid out, and once afterwards, when he goes up to see whether anything came of it. The laying out has an hour on it, every morning. The watching has none. It runs on, patiently expecting. What there is to see may be a grant to be thankful for, a refusal to be patient under, or a delay to keep praying and waiting through without giving up. And a delay is not the same thing as not being heard. The prayer found its way to God's throne, sent up by Christ the Mediator, and it is on the register there, whatever the man on the tower can see from where he stands.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, Albert Barnes, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Adam Clarke, the Geneva Bible notes and Charles Spurgeon. How these teachings are made