Psalm 64

Psalms 64:1-2

Hear my voice, O God, in my prayer opens a plea that assumes no other help is near, and preserve my life from fear of the enemy names the harm as much psychological as physical, the fear itself pressing as hard as any weapon. Hide me from the secret counsel of the wicked asks not for a shield against an open attack but for cover from a plot he cannot yet see, the insurrection of the workers of iniquity already organized before he knows to fear it. Barnes and Henry both note the shift the psalm makes at once from voice to hiding, a man who can pray aloud but cannot see the danger he prays against.

Psalms 64:3-6

The conspirators are drawn as archers and swordsmen turned inward, who whet their tongue like a sword, and bend their bows to shoot their arrows, even bitter words, speech made into a weapon with an edge and a range. They shoot in secret at the perfect, suddenly, and fear not, the ambush and the confidence both named, while verse 5 adds the moral detail that they encourage themselves in an evil matter and ask who shall see them, sin that requires talking itself into. Verse 6 closes the description at its deepest point, both the inward thought of every one of them, and the heart, is deep, a plot so worked out that even its makers could not easily be searched to the bottom.

Psalms 64:7-8

But God shall shoot at them with an arrow turns the psalm's own weapon imagery back on the plotters, the sword and bow of verse 3 answered by fire from the one side they never watched. Suddenly shall they be wounded repeats the ambush word of verse 4 against the ambushers themselves, the same speed that hid their plot now hiding nothing about its collapse. So they shall make their own tongue to fall upon themselves reads the disaster as self-inflicted rather than merely deserved, the sword-like speech of verse 3 turning on the mouth that shaped it, and all that see them shall flee away closes the reversal in public view.

Psalms 64:9-10

The reversal becomes a public lesson: and all men shall fear, and shall declare the work of God; for they shall wisely consider of his doing, the plot's undoing read aloud as evidence rather than kept as a private relief. The righteous shall be glad in the Lord, and shall trust in him closes the psalm where it opened, in trust, but now answered rather than merely offered. All the upright in heart shall glory ends on the same word the plotters used of themselves in secret at verse 5, glory now given openly instead of hidden away.