Psalms 54:5
He will reward my enemies with evil. In Your faithfulness, destroy them.
BSB
ASV
He will requite the evil unto mine enemies: Destroy thou them in thy truth.
KJV
He shall reward evil unto mine enemies: cut them off in thy truth.
After this there is a return to the Person of God, to Whom the petition was at the first addressed: Destroy them by Your truth. Truth confounds falsehood, and lying is destroyed by truth. We have shown that the whole of the foregoing prayer is the utterance of that human nature in which the Son of God was born; so here it is the voice of human nature calling upon God the Father to destroy His enemies in His truth.
He shall reward evil unto mine enemies,.... That eyed him as Saul did; that observed his haunts, where he resorted, and who were with him, as the Ziphites did under Saul's direction; as the Word (m) here used for "enemies" signifies: the mischief they had devised for him, he believed, would be returned upon their own heads; the pit they digged they would fall into themselves; and the net they had spread for others their own feet would be taken in.
But he prays, Cut them off in thy truth. This is not a prayer of malice, but a prayer of faith; for it has an eye to the word of God, and only desires the performance of that. There is truth in God's threatenings as well as in his promises, and sinners that repent not will find it so to their cost.
How treacherous, how officious, were these Ziphim! It is well that God is faithful, for men are not to be trusted, Mic. vii. His prayer to God for succour and deliverance,
He shall reward evil unto mine enemies. They worked for evil, and they shall have their wages. It cannot be that malice should go unavenged. It were cruelty to the good to be lenient to their persecutors. It is appointed, and so it must ever be, that those who shoot upward the arrows of malice shall find them fall upon themselves. The recoil of their own gun has often killed oppressors. Cut them off in thy truth. Not in ferocious revenge is this spoken, but as an Amen to the sure sentence of the just Judge.
Rare words are the text's own signal of a deliberate thread: the fewer the occurrences, the more the places it appears belong together.
The walk8
Follow this verse’s cross-references two steps out. Each card is a verse this one points to, and beneath it the verses that one points to in turn. Where several different paths arrive at the same place, that place is listed first: the text keeps returning to it. Every stop shows its own words, and every stop is a page.
Through
Psalms 31:23Love the LORD, all His saints. The LORD preserves the faithful, but fully repays the arrogant.
leads to
Hate evil, O you who love the LORD! He preserves the souls of His saints; He delivers them from the hand of the wicked.
Rise up, O Judge of the earth; render a reward to the proud.
The LORD preserves all who love Him, but all the wicked He will destroy.
My sheep listen to My voice; I know them, and they follow Me.
Through
2 Timothy 4:14Alexander the coppersmith did great harm to me. The Lord will repay him according to his deeds.
leads to
Among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme.
After all, it is only right for God to repay with affliction those who afflict you,
Repay them according to their deeds and for their works of evil. Repay them for what their hands have done; bring back on them what they deserve.
Through
Psalms 94:23He will bring upon them their own iniquity and destroy them for their wickedness. The LORD our God will destroy them.
leads to
His trouble recoils on himself, and his violence falls on his own head.