My Strength and My Shield

The Psalm opens with a man afraid the line has gone dead. "To you, O LORD, I call; my rock, be not deaf to me, lest, if you be silent to me, I become like those who go down to the pit." Notice the equation he makes. If God will not speak, the silence is itself a kind of death. The pit yawns under any soul whose God has gone quiet. So the prayer becomes a cry to be heard — not yet to be saved from the trouble, but first to be heard in the trouble. He lifts his hands toward the inner sanctuary, the most holy place. He puts his whole body into the asking. We know this position. We have stood in it ourselves at our worst hours, listening for any small word out of the silence. The Psalm has put words in our mouths for those hours and it has also put hands on our hands and lifted them toward the holiest place.

And then, halfway through, the Psalm turns. "Blessed be the LORD! For he has heard the voice of my pleas for mercy. The LORD is my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts, and I am helped." The line did not go dead. He has been heard. And here the gospel rushes in. There was one Man whose cry to the Father was, for one terrible afternoon, met with the silence Psalm 28 dreads — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He went into the pit so that no one praying this Psalm in His Name would ever truly be left there. He is the Rock that was struck for us; He is the strength and shield of every soul whose hands are lifted toward the sanctuary. So when we pray Psalm 28 now, we do it under His finished cry. The Father heard the Son out of the silence of the cross, and through Him, He hears us.