Author: Scott Walter

According to dictionary.com, overwhelmed means to be “overpowered…to be buried or drown beneath.” Most people feel overwhelmed at some point in their life. Many of us woke up today feeling overwhelmed, buried beneath responsibilities and unpredictabilities that seem insurmountable. What can we do when we feel like life’s realities are overpowering our abilities? 

David’s example in Psalm 61 provides some guidance. As we read, we can almost picture David in a hole with sand spilling over the edge, quickly rising, while he pleads for God to notice him. When we are overwhelmed, it can feel like we are alone, unnoticed, or suffocating as life piles more and more and more onto us. When David feels this way, he asks God to guide him to “the safety of a rock that is high above me.” When we are down in the trenches, feeling buried beneath life, we may not see how to escape.

But God sees all⏤before and beyond⏤so He can lead us in the steps to climb up and out. While He may not stop the spilling sand, He can guide us around it or through it. We can visualize David stepping on a crack in the edge of the hole, shaking sand from his hair as he grips the edges of the slope. He carefully places his hands and feet on each place God lights. So often, this is how God guides us from the hole of overwhelm⏤slowly, steadily, sturdily. Oh, how we wish He would just pull us from the pit and place us in protection instantly! Sometimes He does. But something special happens as we carefully clamber up⏤our strength and faith grow as we climb, step by step. 

When we listen to God’s voice and follow His lead, God reminds us of who He is and what He has done. David remembers how God has saved him before and how secure he felt in God’s presence and provision. This marks a shift in the song and in our perspective. We realize, as David realized, that we are not alone. We are noticed. We are loved. We are cared for. We, like David, can praise God for His faithfulness, love, and care. 

In Psalm 60 King David helps us understand the true source of victory in the battle against the enemy. Every one of us knows what it’s like to fight a battle in our own strength. We make promises, claim victory, and vow to never smoke/drink/gossip/binge/look at porn ever again. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and white knuckle it. We might find success or sobriety for a few days, but ultimately we end up returning to our old ways. Without the Lord leading our lives we will fail. If we fight in our power and not His, we will be defeated. 

It’s exhausting to fail in our battles. We know what it’s like to desire change but to find ourselves stuck in the same old struggles. We feel alone, we feel like failures, and we feel defeated. Sometimes it’s a grind to get out of bed, put our feet on the ground, and face the day ahead of us. The weight is too heavy to carry on our own.

In John 15:5, Jesus says, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” Apart from Christ we can do nothing! We need aid against the enemy, because human help is worthless (Psalm 60:11). Without Him we will not succeed and with Him we cannot fail.

What would it look like for you and I to put our hope and trust in the only One who can trample down our enemies and gain victory (Psalm 60:12)? Whether fighting against enemy nations like King David or attacking an addiction or sin struggle, how can we acknowledge the true source of victory? God does give us the gift of community to help bear our burdens and to fight alongside us, but unless the Lord leads us, we will labor in vain (Psalm 127:1). 

Pause, right now. Take a moment and repent of the ways you try to fight without the Lord. In a position of humility, ask God to give you aid against the enemy. Ask Him to save you and help you. Those He loves will be delivered (Psalm 60:5).

In Psalm 59, we have an opportunity to behold David’s sincere, trial-tested faith. This psalm was written at a time when Saul sent men to watch David’s house in order to kill him (1 Samuel 19:11). Imagine the unrest! Because of a jealous man, David was no longer safe in his own home. David’s immediate reaction is to cry out to his most trusted confidant: God Almighty. David’s words are characterized by a deep, personal relationship with God. He refers to God as his personal source of defense, strength, and mercy. Yes, there were evil men plotting his demise, but David recognized that he was protected by God. After asking God for deliverance from the rising dangers (v. 1), he set his mind and heart to watch for Him (v. 9). Somewhere between the written pages of the Bible, David spent time talking to God, walking with God, worshiping God, studying and meditating on His truth. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of, and David can’t help but sing to his God.

Through the person of Jesus Christ, we have complete access to this mighty, comforting, and awesome God that David loved so dearly. The author of Hebrews describes Him as “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.” God has a name for any and every need that arises in our lives. We can and should read about the names and attributes of God in the pages of Scripture. But there is nothing like when God, in His sovereignty, allows us into circumstances where His name is our only source of hope.

Just like David, the words we have read and mediated on truly come alive as we experience them as our reality. How honored our Lord must be when our hearts exclaim praise in the middle of trails and opposition. Ignoring dangers is not asked of us. Notice how David refers to his pursuers in this psalm. He compares them to dogs. Not biting dogs, but howling, prowling, and growling dogs. They can make as much noise as they want to; David has chosen to trust in his Lord. Oswald Chambers wrote, “We are not fundamentally free; external circumstances are not in our hands, they are in God’s hands, the one thing in which we are free is in our personal relationship to God.” What a gift we have been given!

In today’s psalm, David is frustrated and upset at the judges and rulers in his day who were acting unjustly on God’s behalf. He’s experiencing a righteous anger that we’ve read about numerous times throughout the book of Psalms and perhaps one we’ve experienced in our own lives. Just like he does in Psalm 10, David takes this righteous anger to God and does not lean on his own power to judge. We can learn from this when we are faced with similar circumstances.

In the latter half of this Psalm, we read that God’s judgement rightly falls on these religious pretenders. David finds comfort in the truth that God would ultimately judge the wicked and make things right. As extreme and graphic as this psalm is, it is not a psalm of vengeance or vindictiveness but of justice and the fulfillment of God’s words, so that all will see there is a righteous God. When undeserved judgement falls on us, may we cling to the fact that God has the final word. He is the ultimate judge and we can trust Him.

However, we should not forget that everyone is subject to God’s righteous judgment. David says that “even from birth the wicked go astray.” Because of Romans 3:23, we know that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. It’s not just the wicked that David was writing about in this psalm that deserve judgment, but all of us. We all have gone astray from birth. But, thank God for Jesus’ death and resurrection which gives us all the chance to be forgiven, redeemed, and born again.

Can our hearts be steadfast when the world around us is not? Can we stand secure in the midst of anything but security? Can we praise God for His deliverance even when we haven’t been fully delivered yet? 

If we’re honest, we may not be so sure. But David sure is. David pens today’s psalm from inside a cave where he was seeking a moment of safety among a very real and present danger. King Saul was out to kill him. Enemies were lurking around, looking to destroy David and his family (1 Samuel 22). It’s easy for us to read these words because we know that God preserves David’s life; he eventually becomes King and the threat of Saul is removed. But, for a moment, put yourself in David’s shoes a few thousand years ago. What would you be saying to God in the middle of such a pressing crisis? What would your honest prayer say to the God who had promised to make you King, yet hadn’t fulfilled it yet? When you could hear those seeking to kill you just beyond the cave walls- what would you be doing? How would you be feeling?

Maybe we wouldn’t have responded this way, but David here gives us a roadmap to follow for praising God in the middle of the storm. David doesn’t turn a blind eye to his enemies (he describes them throughout the Psalm), but he doesn’t feed into fear of them, either. David describes the very real danger he’s in, but finds perspective by sandwiching it in the middle of praise to God. He knows that God is in control–even when it doesn’t feel like it. Even though he is finding momentary shelter from a cave, he knows his permanent refuge is found in God alone (v 1). He centers his earthly reality within God’s eternal reality. This world, and what happens to us here, matters. But it doesn’t matter forever. The only thing that matters for all of eternity is God’s salvation, which is why David could praise God for His saving love, even when he hadn’t experienced physical salvation yet.

Too often we wait to praise God until we’ve been rescued. We let our feelings dictate our reality and we feed our fear by dwelling on our earthly problems, instead of God’s eternal promises. Instead, let’s take a play from David’s playbook and feed our faith by remembering the truth of who is in control, regardless of how it feels in the moment. For our hearts to remain steadfast when our circumstances aren’t, we must praise God no matter what.

If you compare Psalm 53 with Psalm 14, you will notice that it is almost an exact copy of the earlier psalm. A few minor revisions have been made, but for the most part, this is an identical repetition of words that David has already shared. Scholars have noted that the titles attributed to each psalm are different—“For the director of music. Of David.” (Psalm 14) and “For the director of music. According to mahalath. A maskil of David.” (Psalm 53)—so more than likely, these two psalms had different tunes associated with them. In essence, Psalm 53 is a musical “remake” of Psalm 14—slightly different in sound, but largely the same lyrics.

Charles Spurgeon notes that Psalm 53 “is not a copy of the fourteenth Psalm, emended and revised by a foreign hand; it is another edition by the same author, emphasised in certain parts, and rewritten for another purpose.” It is likely that, at the time that David wrote Psalm 53, Israel was in the midst of a national challenge, such as the threat of invasion or a siege. As a result, he was using familiar words to give faith and courage to God’s people in the midst of their current crisis.

One similarity between these psalms is that David is reminding us that those who deny God are fools and that denying God will lead to corruption and abominable iniquity (v. 1). In verse 2, we are reminded that man may forget about God, but God never forgets about man, and then in verse 3, that man is deeply fallen. Where this psalm shifts from the earlier one is in verse 5. While verse 5 of Psalm 14 focused more on the deliverance of the righteous, David makes a modification in Psalm 53 to include, “For God scatters the bones of him who encamps against you; you put them to shame, for God has rejected them.” David is specifically highlighting the refuge of God’s protection.

Whatever crisis Israel was facing at that moment, David was reminding God’s people that God can be trusted. David knew from experience that God had sent fear into the hearts of Israel’s enemies on other occasions because he remembered it. He used this opportunity to encourage Israel to not fear where there was no reason to fear!

Psalm 53 closes identically to Psalm 14, as David anticipates the coming deliverance for God’s people and invites us all to be joyful as we look forward to that. Praying that no matter where we find ourselves as we read this Psalm, whether on the brink of a challenge or feeling under siege, that we will be reminded of God’s protection and promise.