Psalm 70:1-5 — Sermon Prep & Expository Preaching Guide

The Superscription: Prayer as Memorial Sacrifice

The Hebrew heading—directed to the choirmaster, associated with David, and marked lehazkîr—establishes the psalm's identity before a single petition is voiced. The "memorial" designation is the key. Matthew Henry observed that this label suits a psalm designed to be prayed again and again: the same words voiced in a new crisis do not become stale but deepen. This is the logic of liturgy. Repeated prayer is not vain repetition; it is trust rehearsed through return. When Israel gathered in the temple and sang Psalm 70, they were not merely reciting ancient poetry—they were enacting a memorial before God, much as a priest presenting the 'azkarâh portion of the grain offering caused the worshipping community to be brought before divine attention.

v. 1: The Interruption

The Hebrew of the opening verse is grammatically arresting in its abruptness. There is no preamble, no formal approach, no theological credential offered before God. The psalm erupts: "O God—to deliver me! O LORD—to help me, make haste!" The imperative ḥûšâh ("make haste," "hurry") appears here at the beginning and returns at the close of verse 5, creating a bracket of urgency around the entire poem. The psalmist is not preparing God for a request; he is interrupting him.

The pairing of the divine names Elohim and YHWH within a single verse is unusual even in the Elohistic Psalter, where YHWH typically yields to the more generic Elohim. Here the psalmist reaches for both—the universal name of divine sovereignty alongside the personal covenant name. It is the linguistic equivalent of calling out with every word available.

vv. 2–3: The Imprecatory Petition

Verses 2 and 3 contain language that can trouble modern readers: the psalmist asks that enemies be put to shame, turned back, brought to confusion. But the theological function of this imprecation is important to hold clearly. The psalmist is not taking vengeance into his own hands; he is surrendering the matter entirely to God. To pray "let them be put to shame" is to relinquish the outcome—to place one's enemies in the hands of the judge rather than acting as judge oneself.

The enemies described here are specific in their malice. They "seek my life" (v. 2), they "delight in my hurt" (v. 2), and they taunt with the untranslatable onomatopoeic shout heʾāḥ heʾāḥ ("Aha! Aha!", v. 3)—a cry of contemptuous triumph that appears also in Ezekiel's oracles against nations that rejoiced over Jerusalem's fall. Their mockery has theological stakes: if God does not act, his silence itself becomes a form of testimony in their favor. The psalmist's prayer for their shame is simultaneously a prayer for God's vindication.

v. 4: The Widening Circle

With verse 4, the field of vision suddenly expands. The psalmist's personal crisis opens outward to encompass a whole community—all who "seek God," all who "love his salvation." These are to rejoice and be glad, and to say perpetually, "God is great!" The contrast with the enemies of verses 2–3 is the moral center of the psalm: one group delights in the psalmist's ruin; the other delights in God's salvation. One taunts with "Aha!"; the other magnifies. The individual's crisis, when brought before God, becomes the occasion for the community's praise.

v. 5: Poor, Needy, and Confident

The closing verse holds together what seems contradictory: profound vulnerability and unshaken confidence. "I am poor and needy" (ʿānî wĕʾebyôn) is not a spiritual metaphor in the first instance—these are terms for social marginalization and material deprivation, the condition of those with no advocate, no resources, no status. The psalmist claims this condition before God not as a source of shame but as a basis for appeal, since Israel's God is repeatedly identified throughout the Psalter as one who hears precisely the poor and needy.

"You are my help and my deliverer"—the statement is declarative rather than petitionary, present-tense confidence in a God who has not yet acted. The final imperative, "do not delay," echoes the opening ḥûšâh and closes the psalm in the same posture it opened: urgent, exposed, and trusting.

The Patristic Era: Praise as the Soul's Natural Posture

Clement of Alexandria, writing in the late second century, found in verse 4's call for continual praise—"God is great!"—an image of the transformed soul rather than a liturgical formula. For Clement, the person who genuinely seeks God cannot help but voice praise as the natural expression of an inner orientation. The urgent petition of the earlier verses and the vision of the praise-saturated community in verse 4 were, for him, two aspects of the same reality: to call on God in need is already to acknowledge his greatness, and the life of righteousness that follows divine rescue becomes itself a continuous hymn. Clement's reading, shaped by Alexandrian Logos theology, sees the psalm not merely as a cry for external intervention but as a description of the soul awakening to its proper orientation toward God.

Augustine, preaching on the psalms in North Africa in the early fifth century, read Psalm 70 through the longer arc of the church's history. The alternation between persecution and relative peace that the church had endured—from emperors who hunted Christians to emperors who themselves professed faith—became for Augustine the experiential context in which "make haste!" found its truest resonance. The church in every generation, he argued, inhabits the psalmist's position: threatened, apparently overlooked, and yet calling urgently on a God whose faithfulness is not contingent on circumstances.

Medieval Monasticism: The Versicle of Every Hour

The brevity and intensity of Psalm 70 gave it a singular role in the Western monastic tradition. Benedict of Nursia, composing his Rule in the sixth century, prescribed the opening verse of Psalm 70—"O God, make speed to save me; O Lord, make haste to help me"—as the fixed opening versicle of every canonical Hour. Morning, midday, evening, night: every formal act of prayer began with this cry. Benedict's intention was not mechanical repetition but disciplined formation. To begin every hour of every day by acknowledging one's own need and God's sufficiency was to train the soul in the fundamental posture of the creature before the Creator—dependent, attentive, and expectant.

Reformation and Reformed Piety

The Reformers, with their insistence on unadorned, Scripture-rooted prayer, found Psalm 70 congenial to their theology of direct access to God. Its refusal to ornament or delay—its grammatically compressed eruption before God without preamble or qualification—suited Protestant convictions about authentic prayer as honest, unmediated speech. For generations of Reformed congregations, Psalm 70 served simultaneously as permission and pattern: permission to bring God one's urgency without elaborate theological setup, and a model of prayer that holds imprecation, intercession for the wider community of faith, and personal trust together in a single, short compass.