Psalm 94

Psalms 94:1-3

The psalm opens by naming God with a title, O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth, a phrase close in thought to the Song of Moses, to me belongeth vengeance and recompence (Deut 32:35), the words Paul later quotes at Romans 12:19 to forbid private revenge. The psalmist does not take vengeance himself; he calls on the one to whom it belongs, lift up thyself, thou judge of the earth. Barnes and Delitzsch note the same distinction the whole book of Psalms keeps in its imprecatory prayers, vengeance handed to God and asked of him rather than seized.

Psalms 94:4-7

The wicked's crime is named specifically: they break in pieces thy people, they slay the widow and the stranger, and murder the fatherless, the three classes the law repeatedly sets under God's own protection. Their confidence is not that God does not exist but that he does not watch, the Lord shall not see, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it, practical unbelief rather than formal atheism. Henry reads the crimes as an index of the wickedness, since a society that preys on those who cannot defend themselves has stopped fearing any higher court.

Psalms 94:8-11

The psalmist turns and answers the wicked's own claim with an argument from creation: he that planted the ear, shall he not hear? he that formed the eye, shall he not see? The maker of a faculty cannot lack it himself, a piece of reasoning the older commentators treat as settled logic rather than poetry alone. The Lord knoweth the thoughts of man, that they are vanity closes the argument by turning the same scrutiny the wicked denied back onto their own reasoning.

Psalms 94:12-15

The psalm turns from the wicked's judgment to the sufferer's own discipline, blessed is the man whom thou chastenest, and teachest him out of thy law, present hardship reframed as instruction rather than abandonment. The purpose clause follows, that thou mayest give him rest from the days of adversity, until the pit be digged for the wicked, the two fates running side by side, rest for the chastened and a pit already being dug for the wicked. Judgment shall return unto righteousness closes the unit with the psalm's confidence that the present imbalance is not permanent.

Psalms 94:16-19

Who will rise up for me: The psalm shifts into first-person testimony, who will rise up for me against the evildoers, and answers its own question, unless the Lord had been my help, my soul had almost dwelt in silence, the grave named without flinching as the near alternative. When I said, My foot slippeth, thy mercy, O Lord, held me up sets the moment of failure against the mercy that caught it. Spurgeon draws out the multitude of my thoughts within me, the anxious inward crowd, met by thy comforts delight my soul, comfort matched to trouble one for one.

Psalms 94:20-23

The psalm closes on a rhetorical question that carries its own answer, shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief by a law, naming judicial corruption, wickedness dressed as legal process, as the specific target of the whole prayer. But the Lord is my defence, and my God is the rock of my refuge answers verse 1's opening cry directly, and the last line turns the wicked's own devices back on them, he shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness.