Psalm Chapter 35

Psalm 35: The Wound of Betrayal

There is a particular anguish that belongs to the one who loved first and was repaid with cruelty. David does not merely report that his enemies attacked him; he tells us what he did when they were suffering. "When they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth: I humbled my soul with fasting." He mourned for them as a man mourns for his own brother, bowed down as one grieving his mother. And these same people — the ones he had wept for, prayed for, fasted for — gathered against him in his hour of weakness and tore at him with the glee of hypocrites at a feast. It is this betrayal, not the violence, that gives the psalm its searing heat. David does not pretend to stoic calm. He asks God to fight, to take up shield and buckler, to say to his soul, "I am thy salvation." The psalm ends not in vengeance but in a longing for vindication — that those who favour his righteous cause might yet say, "Let the Lord be magnified." Even wounded, he wants God glorified more than enemies punished.

00:00 Plead My Cause, O Lord
01:00 The Net They Set for Themselves
02:00 Mourning for Those Who Betrayed
03:00 Lord, How Long?
04:00 Let the Lord Be Magnified