Psalm 38

Psalms 38:1-4

The Hebrew title, not shown on this page, reads A Psalm of David, to bring to remembrance, a phrase some commentators connect to the memorial portion of the meal offering in Leviticus 2, though its exact liturgical use is not certain. The plea opens as Psalm 6 opens, rebuke me not in thy wrath, and this psalm stands among the seven psalms the church has long grouped as penitential. The suffering is read as consequence rather than accident: thine arrows and thy hand are God's own hand at work, and mine iniquities are gone over mine head names sin, not misfortune, as the burden's source.

Psalms 38:5-8

My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness turns from physical wound to moral cause, the Hebrew word for foolishness carrying the sense of sin's own folly rather than mere weakness. The description that follows, loins filled with a loathsome disease, feeble and sore broken, roared by reason of the disquietness of my heart, reads to some commentators as literal illness and to others as the body's own language for an anguished conscience, and both readings are held without a verdict. Whatever the outward cause, the psalmist names the inward root the same way throughout: sin, not circumstance, is what he is confessing.

Psalms 38:9-11

The complaint turns from body to God and then to the men left standing at a distance: all my desire is before thee, and my groaning is not hid from thee claims that God already sees what has not yet been spoken aloud. The light of mine eyes, it also is gone from me is read by the commentators as failing sight from grief or sickness, the strength visibly drained. My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore, and my kinsmen stand afar off completes the isolation, sickness, guilt and the absence of those nearest him arriving together.

Psalms 38:12-14

The enemies are now named directly, laying snares and speaking mischievous things, while he answers nothing: as a deaf man, heard not; and I was as a dumb man that openeth not his mouth. The silence is deliberate rather than helpless, a refusal to meet accusation with argument, in whose mouth are no reproofs. Henry reads the restraint as an act of trust, the case left with God rather than defended with his own words.

Psalms 38:15-17

The silence of the previous verses is not despair but a deliberate wait: for in thee, O Lord, do I hope: thou wilt hear, O Lord my God states the ground the dumbness stood on. The reason he asks to be heard is practical as much as devotional, lest otherwise they should rejoice over me, his enemies waiting for any stumble to magnify themselves against him. I am ready to halt names a man near collapse, his sorrow continually before him even as he professes hope.

Psalms 38:18-20

The confession arrives in full: I will declare mine iniquity; I will be sorry for my sin, the psalm's penitential center stated without qualification or excuse. Against that honesty stands an opponent who owes him nothing, they also that render evil for good are mine adversaries; because I follow the thing that good is, and this innocent suffering sits beside the guilt just confessed rather than replacing it. Gill and the older commentators hold both together, a true sinner before God and a wronged man before his enemies, neither canceling the other.

Psalms 38:21-22

The psalm closes on two short petitions rather than a resolved ending: forsake me not, O Lord: O my God, be not far from me, and make haste to help me, O Lord my salvation. No deliverance is narrated, only the plea itself, and the commentators note that the psalm's very last word in the Hebrew is salvation, so the cry ends reaching toward the thing it still lacks. Spurgeon reads the unresolved close as honest to real prayer, which is asked before it is answered and is often written down before the answer comes.