The invocation, that is the first one. This is the first line. We would call it verse 1A, if you will. "Hear my voice, O God, in my meditation." He is invoking God's help. Hear my cry. Hear my voice. Hear my prayer.
Then we get to 1B through verse 2, and this is the lament. "Preserve my life from fear of the enemy. Hide me from the secret counsel of the wicked, from the insurrection or rebellion of the workers of iniquity." That is the problem. That is the trial he is going through. He wants help from God. He is lamenting their secret plots of the wicked and their rebellion. Evidently, this is a psalm of David. He was going through some internal rebellion and a whisper campaign or something like that against him. And so he is asking God to look on this matter. "I'm having trouble here at court. There are people who are shooting arrows, verbal arrows at me. They're getting together and they are talking about how they could depose me or whatever, undermine me." And that is his complaint. "God, how'd You let this happen? Why'd You let these people get around me and start making my life miserable?"
This also includes his supplication. Like I said, sometimes they smash these things together and do not make them all one after another. The supplication is here: Preserve my life. And also hide me. Preserve my life is the first thing he says after the invocation and then verse 2 starts with "Hide me from the secret counsel of the wicked." So it states the problem, the thing that he is lamenting, and it also states what he wants God to do.
Let us go on to verses 3 through 6. This is probably the easiest one to spot of all. This is an extended description of the wickedness of his oppressors, of the rebels. You know, "they sharpen their tongue like a sword." How vivid is that? "And they bend their bows to shoot their arrows," but the arrows are bitter words against him.
And so he is describing his enemies here and letting God know how vile and terrible what they are doing is. He is making a case by describing what it is that these people are doing. They are sinning against me. They are rebelling. They are saying lies against me, and they are shooting them at me and trying to undermine me. Of course we know that David was chosen to be king by God and so this was actually, if you look at it, this was a rebellion against God and His anointed. And so he is letting God know in vivid language just what is going on here.
Verses 7 through verse 9. Now this is where he turns positive. These are confident statements that God will foil his enemy's stratagems. "God shall shoot at them with an arrow." He turns it around. They are shooting arrows, these words at David, but he says, God is going to go ahead and pull out His bow, and He is going to shoot arrows at them. He is going to give them exactly what they are giving me. And "they shall be wounded," he says. "So He will make them stumble over their own tongue." He was being slandered. It was a campaign against him by words in this particular case and he is saying, "I'm confident that God is going to turn those words right around on them and make them stumble, make them fall because of what they said that is untrue and rebellious."
And he also says here that when this becomes known, when this comes out, "all men shall fear." I think this has double entendre, if you want to use that term. The one meaning is that they will fear the king, fear rebelling and having this whisper campaign against the king, but they will also fear God behind David, and it says they "shall declare the work of God," that these people who fear will talk about it and make it known. He says, "for they shall wisely consider His doing." They will look at, see what God did to back David up, and they will say, "Okay, we shouldn't do this." You do not get away with things when you go up against God's anointed.
Finally, we get to verse 10 and that is where we see the final element, the praise of God. And verse 10 is … . . .
