Psalm 25

Psalms 25:1-3

The Hebrew title, which this page's text does not show, reads A Psalm of David. In the Hebrew each verse of this psalm opens with a successive letter of the alphabet, an ordering device the King James cannot carry and the commentators note as the philological fact it is. The opening posture is trust offered before any request is made, my God, I trust in thee coming before let me not be ashamed, and the plea widens at once to include all that wait on thee rather than the psalmist alone.

Psalms 25:4-7

The request for guidance, thy ways, thy paths, thy truth, is a request to be taught rather than merely told, lead me and teach me standing together. Remember not the sins of my youth asks God to forget by an act of will rather than by an absence of memory, and the plea is grounded twice over in verses 6 and 7, once on God's tender mercies of old and once on his goodness rather than on anything owed the psalmist. The pairing of an old sin with a present request is the shape the rest of the psalm keeps, honesty about failure held together with confidence in God's character.

Psalms 25:8-10

Good and upright is the Lord: The prayer turns from request to statement, God's own goodness given as the reason he teaches sinners the way at all. The meek, not the strong or the clever, are named twice as the ones he guides and teaches, a preference the psalm states plainly rather than argues for. All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth closes the unit, but only unto such as keep his covenant and his testimonies, the promise held together with the condition rather than offered apart from it.

Psalms 25:11

The psalm's single central verse names its ground plainly, for thy name's sake rather than for any merit of the one praying, the same appeal made at 23:3. For it is great does not soften the request but sharpens it, the psalmist naming the size of the guilt rather than minimizing it before asking pardon for exactly that much. The bench reads this verse as the psalm's hinge, the honest center between the guidance sought before it and the affliction described after it.

Psalms 25:12-14

The question is answered in the man's own experience rather than in a list of qualifications, him shall he teach in the way that he shall choose, a chosen path rather than a fixed set of rules. His soul shall dwell at ease sets the fruit of that teaching in the present, not only in an inheritance to come, though the seed shall inherit the earth is named alongside it. The secret of the Lord, a Hebrew word elsewhere used of a council or an intimate circle, is with them that fear him, friendship offered rather than information alone.

Psalms 25:15-18

The psalm turns from teaching to trouble without transition, the settled confidence of the middle verses now pressed by real affliction, I am desolate and afflicted, my heart enlarged with trouble. Look upon mine affliction and my pain, and forgive all my sins sets suffering and sin side by side in one breath, asking relief for the first and pardon for the second rather than treating the affliction as proof of the sin. The steady watching of verse 15, mine eyes are ever toward the Lord, is the posture that holds through the complaint that follows it.

Psalms 25:19-22

The enemies are named as many and as hating with cruel hatred, and the plea for rescue is grounded in integrity and uprightness rather than in their defeat, let integrity and uprightness preserve me standing where a demand for vengeance might otherwise fall. The last verse breaks the alphabetic pattern the psalm has kept, an extra line the commentators note as appended after the sequence runs its course, and with it the prayer widens from one man's soul to the whole nation, redeem Israel, O God, out of all his troubles. The individual plea that opened the psalm closes as a plea for the whole people, the personal trouble folded into the national one.