Christians have long recognized this as the Crucifixion Psalm. It’s not as if David necessarily foresaw precisely that form of torture and execution. Each item is recognized as a form of suffering, and David runs together all the different images he can imagine. Yet this song is loaded with symbolic references that happened to come rather literally true for Christ on the Cross. Our Savior had the presence of mind to quote this famous psalm. The only fight here is overcoming one’s own human doubt.
God abandons no one, but there are times when it surely feels like it. It is the human flaw, the curse of the Fall that blinds us to God and His divine nature. During moments of suffering, the flesh can easily overwhelm the consciousness. The cry of anguish represents how the sufferer feels, not the truth of the heart. David notes that God had never failed Israel as a nation, nor anyone else God called to serve Him.
Still, in moments of sorrow we can surely feel less than human. All the more so when men so easily hate another enough to deny their humanity. The mocking was typical of such hatred, an experience many had faced since the Fall. However, it also mocks God as unwilling or incapable of acting in this world. David cannot appreciate that sort of feeling, because his moral discernment was upon him from an early age. His heart was actively engaged from his earliest memories. He knew all along that men are unreliable at best, but God never fails. So David remarks that he trusts in no one else.
Indeed, the only humans visible are those gathered to watch the entertainment of his fall. The sense of isolation heightens all the senses to physical symptoms of agitation and despair: weakness, dehydration, and a sense of doom. Again, it is easily an apt description of crucifixion. God alone can rescue him.
Then David declares that God has, indeed, come to his rescue. For David it was quite literal in many cases, all the way back to his days as a shepherd. However, for Our Savior, it was symbolic, for His death was His victory. David would have seen his own end that way, too, because Hebrew intellectual culture declared truth manifested differently on different levels of consideration. Both David and Christ returned to their people with triumph and gave thanks directly to God. In both cases, the justice of God rained down on the oppressed and oppressor, with different results.
David bluntly notes that both the living and dead will glorify God and thank Him for His deliverance. Loss of life is not a tragedy if that life was first dedicated to God’s revelation. What matters is that those who yet live do so only for the reason of glorifying Jehovah.
