Verse of the day · October 14

Why does Psalm 66:20 mention God's mercy as well as the prayer?

He came through fire and water, and calls a meeting to say that he was listened to.

Blessed be God, which hath not turned away my prayer, nor his mercy from me.
Psalm 66:20

This psalm carries nobody's name, and who wrote it is not known; one reading takes it for David, another dates it to the end of a long captivity. The shape of it is plain enough. It calls every country on earth to praise God, it says what was done to a people and how they came out of it, and then one man steps out of the crowd and starts talking about himself. Today's verse is the last line he says.

He is going up to God's house with animals for the altar, because of something he said out loud while he was in trouble. The psalm has the promise in his own words: "I will pay thee my vows, which my lips have uttered, and my mouth hath spoken, when I was in trouble." The Hebrew behind uttered means opened, and the root of it is about breaking something open by force. The promise was not composed, it was forced out of him, distress bursting the door of his lips so that the vow rushed out like water that had been dammed a long time. It came from a full heart with no care for the wording, and he does not want it back.

What the trouble actually was, the psalm never says. What it says is what the trouble was like, and it says it in the plural, because the affliction belongs to a whole people and the vow belongs to one man inside it. "Thou broughtest us into the net; thou laidst affliction upon our loins." They were caught the way a fish is caught, with no way out, then pressed down under a weight laid across the loins, where a man's strength is. "Thou hast caused men to ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water." Ridden over as cavalry rides over infantry whose ranks have broken, everything under the horses' feet. Fire and water are two different kinds of danger, and they came through both of them. And God is the subject of every one of those lines: they are not in the net unless he brings them into it, nor under the affliction unless he lays it on. The psalm says what the whole business was for: "thou hast tried us, as silver is tried." Then the line that ends the ordeal: "but thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place" — in the Hebrew, a well-watered one.

So he is paying, in the most expensive currency the law had. "I will offer unto thee burnt sacrifices of fatlings, with the incense of rams; I will offer bullocks with goats," he says. The incense of rams is understood to mean the fat of them burning: its smoke goes up off the altar the way the smoke of incense does. The fatlings are the best fed of the flock, not the lame and not the lean, and a burnt offering was burnt whole, so the man who brought it got nothing back off the altar. And the incense in that service pointed past itself: it stood for Christ's intercession, and without that intercession the fattest sacrifice a man can bring is not accepted. This is also where most vows quietly die: trouble is when good resolutions get made, and once the calamity lifts, how often are they remembered?

Then he calls people together, and he is particular about who. "Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul." Earlier the invitation was "Come and see the works of God"; now it is "Come and hear," and hearing is how faith sees. The audience is chosen: pearls are not for throwing down in front of people who would make a joke of them. And what he has gathered them for is not an account of what he gave, but his own experience — what he needed, what he asked for, and what God did. It is the way soldiers talk when a long war is finally over, going back over the fighting and the fear and the danger where the ones who have not been through it can hear them.

The first thing he declares is the praying itself. "I cried unto him with my mouth, and he was extolled with my tongue." The man was praising God while he was still asking him, giving God the glory for a mercy he could only hope for. And the praying goes on the list of what God did for his soul, not on a list of his own doing. He had been given leave to pray, a command to pray, encouragement to pray, and, to crown it, a heart to pray.

Then the psalm says out loud the thing a report like this usually leaves out. "If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me." There is iniquity in his heart, as there is in every good man's heart, and a great deal of it. The line is not about noticing it, or hating it, or asking to be kept from it. The Hebrew is nearer to seeing iniquity with pleasure — having seen the thing sitting there, going on looking at it without any aversion, keeping it, giving it a sidelong glance of affection, excusing it. An imperfect prayer God will hear for Christ's sake. What he will not take is one offered by a man who means to keep the sin. And there is a way back for a man who has been keeping it: if he delights in the wickedness God will not hear him, but if he confesses it, God will receive him.

Then he says it outright: "But verily God hath heard me; he hath attended to the voice of my prayer." He seals it with a verily; there is no guess in it. He had not begun in that confidence. Conscious of a great deal amiss in himself, he had begun to fear his prayers would be turned down, and found to his comfort that God was pleased to take notice of them. And the answer came back to him as a fresh assurance that his heart had been sincere before God.

"If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me." And then: "But verily God hath heard me." Those two lines are the two halves of an argument. Anyone can finish it: therefore I do not regard iniquity in my heart. That is a comfort he could have taken to himself, and it follows from what he has just said. He does not say it. What goes in that place is "Blessed be God." The argument looked as though it would put the crown on the man's own head, and he puts it on God's.

So the closing line sets down two things that were not turned away, and keeps them together in one sentence. Not turned away covers three things God did not do: he was not angry against the prayer, he did not shut it out, and he did not cover himself with a cloud so that it could not pass through. And one thing he did: he heard it graciously, and received it. The prayer was not cast out and neither was the man; God's love stands, and so does the man's liberty to pray. The mercy also runs a long way past this one answered prayer: it does not run out, and it rests on those who fear him. And the clause he adds — "nor his mercy from me" — is a correction he makes to himself. He does not want the deliverance thought to have been granted for the sake of something in the prayer, so he puts it down to mercy: it was not his prayer that fetched the deliverance, it was God's mercy that sent it.

The wonder, then, is not on the man who got an answer. It is on the fact that answers happen at all. There is no better ground of praise than the fact that God listens to prayer: the prayer of poor, ignorant, sinful, dying men, creatures of a day who know nothing. Looked at honestly, our own praying is cold and faint, and most of it gets done while the trouble lasts. Then the wonder is not that some of it goes unanswered. It is that any of it is answered. We stop showing up at the place of prayer. God never has.

So what he called those people together to report is not that his praying was good enough to be heard. The sentence he ends on has two owners in it: the prayer is his, the mercy is God's, and even the prayer had been handed to him — the leave to pray, and the heart to do it. Neither of the two was turned away, and what let the prayer through was not any worth in the prayer. It was the mercy behind it.

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

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