Psalm 102

Psalms 102:1-2

The Hebrew title, which this page's text does not show, reads A Prayer of the afflicted, when he is overwhelmed, and poureth out his complaint before the Lord, one of the few psalm titles that names a condition rather than a person or an occasion. The prayer opens with the two requests that stand behind every complaint psalm, hide not thy face from me and incline thine ear unto me, distance and deafness being the two fears a sufferer brings to God first. Answer me speedily asks for haste, and matches the urgency of the whole poem's opening cry.

Psalms 102:3-7

The affliction is described first in the body: days consumed like smoke, bones burned as an hearth, a heart smitten and withered like grass until he forgets to eat, and groaning so constant that his bones cleave to his skin. He then reaches for two solitary birds, a pelican of the wilderness and an owl of the desert, creatures of ruined and empty places rather than sociable birds of house and field, and closes with a sparrow alone upon the housetop, cut off from its own kind. Barnes notes the exact identity of the Hebrew birds is uncertain, but the picture each supplies, a creature crying alone in a wasted place, is plain enough without it.

Psalms 102:8-11

Mine enemies reproach me all the day turns from private grief to public mockery, men mad against him swearing by his fall. Eating ashes like bread points to the mourner's custom of sitting in ashes, grief itself become food, his drink mingled with weeping, and he traces the affliction to God's own hand, thine indignation and thy wrath, for thou hast lifted me up, and cast me down. My days are like a shadow that declineth returns to the fading images of the opening verses, a life running out even as the prayer is being prayed.

Psalms 102:12

But thou, O Lord, shalt endure for ever sets the sufferer's fading shadow of a life against the one fact strong enough to answer it, and thy remembrance unto all generations widens the contrast from God's own duration to his enduring name among men. The verse is the hinge of the psalm, the complaint's language of smoke and grass and shadow suddenly measured against an eternity that does not share its terms. Delitzsch marks it as the point where the prayer stops describing the sufferer's ruin and starts building its case on God's unchanging nature.

Psalms 102:13-17

The prayer turns outward to Zion: thou shalt arise and have mercy upon Zion, for the time to favour her, yea, the set time, is come, an appointed hour the sufferer trusts rather than invents. Thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and favour the dust thereof reads as an almost extravagant love, affection reaching even to rubble, and the result is public, the heathen shall fear the name of the Lord, and all the kings of the earth thy glory. He will regard the prayer of the destitute closes the unit by folding the sufferer's own low estate back into the nation's hope, one destitute man's prayer answered as a sign that Zion's is heard too.

Psalms 102:18-22

written for the generation to come: This shall be written for the generation to come looks past the sufferer's own lifetime to readers not yet born, a people which shall be created who will praise the Lord on the strength of a mercy they never watched happen. He hath looked down from the height of his sanctuary answers the whole poem's fear of a hidden face, and the purpose is stated plainly, to hear the groaning of the prisoner, to loose those that are appointed to death, language many read against Israel's own captivity while others take it more broadly of any bound and dying people. The unit ends at worship on the largest scale the psalm reaches, the people gathered together, and the kingdoms, to serve the Lord.

Psalms 102:23-24

The prayer returns to the sufferer's own case with the same urgency it began in: he weakened my strength in the way, he shortened my days, and the plea O my God, take me not away in the midst of my days answers the earlier image of a life like smoke or a fading shadow with a direct request to be spared it. Thy years are throughout all generations sets up the argument the next verses make in full, that the God who does not age is the very one being asked to lengthen a life that does.

Psalms 102:25-27

Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of thy hands addresses God as the maker of everything that has a beginning, and they shall perish, but thou shalt endure sets creation's whole future, wearing out like a garment and being changed like a vesture, against the one being who does not wear out. Hebrews 1:10-12 quotes this passage as the Father's own words to the Son, part of the chain of Old Testament texts that opens that chapter's argument for the Son's deity, so that thou, Lord in the epistle's use addresses the second person of the Trinity as the earth's uncreated Creator. It stands among the strongest uses any psalm receives in that chapter's argument, since the sufferer's own complaint about a shortened life becomes, in the apostolic reading, a hymn sung to the eternal Son.

Psalms 102:28

The children of thy servants shall continue closes the psalm on a promise reaching past the sufferer's own threatened days into future generations, and their seed shall be established before thee answers the fear of being cut off in the midst of life with the assurance of a continuing line kept in God's own sight. The psalm that opened in smoke and ashes ends in permanence, first Zion's and now the sufferer's own household, both anchored in the God just declared eternal in the verses before.