WHAT DO YOU do when you feel threatened, when you don’t feel safe?

Hopefully, when we were kids, we had parents or other adults we could run to, grown-ups whom we trusted to keep us safe. Of course, as we got older, we learned we couldn’t run to Mom and Dad forever. We had to find our own ways to deal with our fears, whether those fears were real or only imagined. We hugged our teddy bear more tightly, burying our face in its soft fur. We hid under the bed. We hid in the closet.

And when we couldn’t find a safe space, we hid deep inside ourselves. Some of us still spend a good deal of our life hiding, until it feels safe to peek out.

Growing up, did you have a safe place to go? Who in your life did you trust to chase away the bogeyman, to hold and comfort you when you were scared, to dry your tears when you were hurt?

Was God ever one of them? And is he one of them now?

. . .

PSALM 118, AS we’ve seen, begins and ends with a call to worship, an invitation for the community to join in the grateful celebration of God’s goodness and loving mercy. These are, in fact, the same two divine qualities that form the climax of the Shepherd Psalm. You may be most familiar with the traditional language of the King James: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever” (Ps 23:6). The writer of Psalm 118 has experienced that goodness and mercy personally, having cried out in distress to God and then rescued:

When hard pressed, I cried to the LORD;
    he brought me into a spacious place.
The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid.
    What can mere mortals do to me?
The LORD is with me; he is my helper.
    I look in triumph on my enemies. (Ps 118:5-7)

The language pictures the psalmist being squeezed into a tight space, feeling the pressure. The situation isn’t described in detail, but apparently the psalmist is surrounded by enemies. But God answered the psalmist’s prayer:

All the nations surrounded me,
    but in the name of the LORD I cut them down.
They surrounded me on every side,
    but in the name of the LORD I cut them down.
They swarmed around me like bees,
    but they were consumed as quickly as burning thorns;
    in the name of the LORD I cut them down.
I was pushed back and about to fall,
    but the LORD helped me.
The LORD is my strength and my defense;
    he has become my salvation. (vss. 10-14)

God vindicates the psalmist, granting the psalmist victory over what may have seemed to be superior forces. And not surprisingly, there’s rejoicing among the people for God’s miraculous intervention:

Shouts of joy and victory
    resound in the tents of the righteous:
“The LORD’s right hand has done mighty things!
    The LORD’s right hand is lifted high;
    the LORD’s right hand has done mighty things!” (vss. 15-16)

But again, the psalmist also experiences the answered prayer as a personal act of divine mercy, a rescue from death:

I will not die but live,
    and will proclaim what the LORD has done.
The LORD has chastened me severely,
    but he has not given me over to death. (vss. 17-18)

Because of all this, the psalmist has a word of wisdom for all, one that sounds like it was taken straight from the pages of Proverbs:

It is better to take refuge in the LORD
    than to trust in humans.
It is better to take refuge in the LORD
    than to trust in princes. (vss. 8-9)

Here, the psalmist uses two words that could both be translated as taking or seeking refuge, or more broadly, to put your trust in someone or something. Both are used throughout the Psalms to refer to the psalmists’ trust in God. The first word has more of a sense of urgency to it; we might picture it as fleeing to your safe place when you’re threatened. That’s the word the New International Version translates as “take refuge.” The second is less urgent, so the NIV translates that as “trust.”

The lesson, though, is clear: God is more trustworthy than human beings. Note that the psalmist doesn’t say that people can never be trusted. But the point seems to be that not even those who should be expected to act nobly and generously — here translated as “princes” — are as dependable as the God of mercy.

. . .

SO, WHO IS this nameless psalmist? The psalm itself doesn’t say. But to me, the background imagery of the psalm suggests that it is God’s anointed king who is crying out to God both personally and on behalf of the people to be rescued from the unbelieving nations that threaten them. Indeed, some of the language echoes other psalms that are clearly about the king.

For example, as we read in verse 5, the psalmist experiences God’s salvation as being brought out of a tight place into an open and spacious one. The word translated as “spacious place” is a relatively rare one, used only three times in the Psalms. One of those is 100 psalms back, and attributed to King David. In Psalm 18, David calls God his “rock, in whom I take refuge” (vs. 2), using the same language as we have here in Psalm 118. When he felt his life being threatened by his enemies, David prayed desperately to God and was rescued:

He brought me out into a spacious place;
    he rescued me because he delighted in me. (Ps 18:9)

Even the imagery in Psalm 118:12 of the psalmist’s enemies being quickly consumed by fire has its parallel in a royal psalm in which, again, David trusts God for victory against his enemies:

When you appear for battle,
    you will burn them up as in a blazing furnace.
The LORD will swallow them up in his wrath,
    and his fire will consume them. (Ps 21:9)

There’s no way for us to know who wrote the psalm. Perhaps it was written by one of God’s anointed kings. Perhaps it was written by a poet about the king. Or perhaps a poet simply used the imagery of a victorious king and his joyous troops to make a point: the God of covenant mercy is the one true and trustworthy refuge of his people.

But as we’ll see shortly, part of the significance of the psalm is that over time, God’s people likely read it as not only about a king from their past, but a prophecy of an anointed king to come.