God’s Word for You
Psalm 119:81-82 My soul faints
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Wednesday, September 4, 2024
The Kaph stanza (verses 81-88) returns to the problem of life among God’s wicked enemies, especially showing that they dig pitfalls for God’s people (vs. 85). “Men persecute me without cause” (vs. 86). These troubles explain the complaints in the earlier verses: “My soul faints… my eyes fail… I am like a wineskin in the smoke.” The writer even asks, “When will you punish my persecutors?” (vs. 84). Life in the world is a life in the world of sin, and there will be pitfalls. The Christian must live ‘in’ the world while being careful not to be ‘of’ the world.
81 My soul faints, longing for your salvation,
but I have put my hope in your word.
82 My eyes fail, looking for your sayings;
I say, “When will you comfort me?”
“Faint” in the Bible means something closer to “become weak” than to momentarily lose consciousness the way we use the word. There are a couple of Hebrew words translated “faint,” amellal (Psalm 6:3), racac (Job 23:16), ‘ataph (Psalm 61:3), shachach “be weakened” (nifal stem, Ecclesiastes 12:4), and more. Here it is calah, “be exhausted,” perhaps the closest that any of these words comes to our definition of fainting.
Consider these two verses together. They are close to saying the same thing in two different ways. Each one has these elements, and in nearly the same order:
1, I (my soul, my eyes) am weak (faint/fail)
2, longing/looking for ( = faith)
3, the way to heaven (salvation / your word)
This is the first line of each verse. Then comes the second line:
4, But I hope / I say
5, in your word / your comfort for me
The main difference is that verse 81 uses antithetic parallelism, which means that the two lines say the same thing, one in positive words and the other in negative words. Positively, “I long for your salvation.” Negatively, “However (but) I hope in your word.”
Verse 82 uses synthetic poetry, in which the second line is a natural continuation of the first: “I look for your sayings, and my saying is, when will you comfort me?”
Why is it that David’s (permit me to use a name here) soul faints, and that his eyes fail? He is longing, looking for the way to heaven. He calls it salvation; he calls it the Word (“sayings”) of God. Salvation is the content of the message of how we are saved. The Word and sayings of God are the communication God uses to bring that message to us. David wants it, and so do I. David looks for it, as do we all. He looks in the word of God, for there and only there do we learn about salvation. That’s where we must look, too.
He says, “I put my hope in your word.” Hope, as we saw in verses 49 and 74, is to wait with a purpose; to wait with the expected culmination of salvation, as we confess in the creed: “the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” So even though (in verse 81) his soul is weak, frail, and fainting, his hope is right where it should be. It is the confidence of the believer in God’s promises.
But in verse 82, “When will you comfort me?” His eyes are failing, poring over the texts of the Word, reading the scrolls and the parchments, pondering what, in his time, was still safely closed away under the heavy solid gold lid of the ark of the covenant: the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, set there by the hands of Moses as a testimony to the testimony, the physical reminder of God’s glorious promises to his people (Exodus 40:20). As he ponders, reads, meditates and considers, he cannot help but ask: “How long? When will comfort come?”
In David’s time, the time of the writing of this Great Psalm, the coming of Christ and the comfort and redemption of all mankind was still forty generations away, a thousand years. Solomon would have his reign after David, and the temple would be built. Then Solomon’s son would lose ten of the twelve tribes, and the kingdom divided would go on for nearly five hundred years—three hundred with the northern tribes intact and in rebellion, but they would go into exile, and Judah would muddle on alone another two hundred years until they, too, were carried off to captivity. But the Persian Cyrus would send them home again, and after a flurry of final prophecy and messages from the Lord (eight last books of the Old Testament: Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi), the Lord would go silent for four hundred years. That is, until the coming of John the Baptist, just six months or so before the appearance of the Savior on the banks of the Jordan. “Look! The Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).
“When will you comfort me?” Then. Then and there, the Savior came in time, at just the right moment. “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless (My soul faints! My eyes fail!), Christ died for the ungodly” (Hebrews 5:6). This is your answer, O poet. This is your Savior, O Christian friend. He is our salvation; the Word of God incarnate.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.