Ps. 6:8

Depart / from me / all workers / of wickedness

For the Lord / has heard / the sound / of my weeping

All of the sudden, without explanation, without preparation and without warning, the world of this psalm changes utterly. The night has become day and the sun appears, not at its rising, but at its zenith. This can be rather jarring. How do we account for it?

If we look back at our Psalms thus far we see this: Ps. 2—there is a preparing for the shout of Yhwh in his menacing laughter; Ps. 3—David makes way for an answer by saying his Lord will hear him and, importantly, there is the hiatus of sleep; Ps. 4—arguably there is not development; Ps. 5—the curse-blasts do prepare the reader for the eventual confidence. As we can see, there is no parallel yet for this sudden change.

Might it be answered as something purely internal, as an experience of confidence that Yhwh will deliver this sick man? Perhaps what we see here is a man who stands on nothing except a pure and unalloyed cry for help. There can be no ‘preparation’ for an answer to this cry because it stands on nothing and refers to nothing except the plea and the fact that praise would not be offered to Yhwh any longer if he died. This sudden change is nothing short of a sudden and almost miraculous recovery. I think there could be something important to this insight.

It could also be answered this way: this sick man has journeyed to the temple to make supplication before Yhwh, something we know men and women did in times of real distress. Perhaps he even spent the night at the temple in order to hear a word from Yhwh delivered by one of the Temple’s attendants or priests. At some point the priest/attendant came to him and spoke to him letting him know that Yhwh had heard his prayers and that he would be healed (and therefore delivered). Perhaps he touched him to administer the blessing. Viewed from this perspective the confidence emerges from an externally delivered message of healing; there is a hidden and not reported ‘third voice’ in this psalm (the priest). One could point to Hannah’s prayer and Eli’s telling her that Yhwh had heard her.

Both of these perspectives I think can be combined and work well together. We have seen how this man is dissolving; his sickness is, literally, consuming him and his faculties. As he descends further and further into Sheol he issues forth a cry unlike anything we have heard so far (he makes no reference to being an anointed (Ps. 2); he does not refer to himself as a king (Ps. 3); he does not speaks about himself as “set aside” by Yhwh (Ps. 4); nor does he appeal to justice as the righteous man (Ps. 5)). He appeals to nothing except the Exodus experience that initiated Yhwh’s covenant and lovingkindness with Israel.

Notice, though, that embedded within the Exodus experience is the one thing this man appeals to: praise of Yhwh. This is a central aspect of the Exodus. When Israel was first “called out” of Egypt they were not called out for freedom from Egypt, but to offer “praise” to Yhwh. Their “Passover” from the death of Egypt to the life of the promised land is one rooted, fundamentally, in praise being offered to Yhwh.

And recall their progression: they were dwelling in Egypt, a place wherein proper worship of Yhwh could not take place because it was unclean (it was eerily similar to Sheol in this regard). When they were ‘delivered’ from Egypt they found themselves facing an army they had no inkling of defeating, while their backs were pressed up against the Reed Sea (the abyss; a traditional symbol of death (flood)). Sure of their demise they are, again, delivered, by the splitting of the abyss (death) in two; they are allowed to travel across on dry land while their enemies are destroyed and thwarted. On the other side they immediately offer up the ‘song of Moses’ (perhaps the oldest literature in the OT).

Our sick man is in similar straits: seeking release from his sickness and the place of Yhwh’s abandonment, he asks to be delivered. While facing his enemies in front of him he has his back pressed against the abyss of Sheol. From this desperate place he calls out for help and he is, without warning, delivered from danger while his enemies are put to shame.

My point here is not that this psalm is mirroring the Exodus, but that this sudden and drastic change from ‘near death’ to ‘life’ is something rooted very deeply within the OT. There is a very real sense of the unexpected deliverance, of the shockingly new. It is not only in the Exodus account but runs throughout many of the prophets (from Isaiah to Jeremiah to Ezekiel). And this ‘shockingly new’ almost always occurs as a dramatic healing: Isaiah (binding up the weak: those who would have made the return from exile most difficult); Jeremiah (healing of the ‘wound’ and the ‘heart transplant’); Ezekiel (bringing back and ‘resurrecting’ of the dry ‘disturbed’ bones). This spirit of sudden health permeates every pour of the OT. This same ‘spirit’ flows into the NT as Jesus’ healings continue these sudden acts of deliverance. Understood in this way, this psalm could be very profitably read from the perspective of those many men and women who were healed (first by Jesus and then by the church). Jesus becomes the ‘priest’ and Temple who touches these men and women ‘close to Sheol’, and brings them back to a life of praise.

Lastly, and this I think can be a crucial point: Yhwh (the divine name) is mentioned 7 times in this Psalm. Seven, as we know, is the number of perfection, completion and rest. Here, in this verse, the name appears again after beign absent for the entire middle of the Psalm--for that part during which he sank closest to Sheol. In a way, the divine name needed to become absent at this point because Sheol cannot be a place where the divine name is uttered (it is the place where no 'praise' is offered; as we saw, praise and memory are intimately tied to the presence of Yhwh, and this presence is absolutely tied to the 'name'; the Temple is where the 'name' dwells; Sheol and death are a type of anti-Temple). But now, with this 'sudden change' and act of deliverance Yhwh is again able to be uttered. And this is not merely repeating the name--the name is the presence of Yhwh.

This is rather remarkable. One almost sees Yhwh responding to this man. It is like this: this man calls out to Yhwh, but as he moves closer to Sheol the name disappears because the name cannot descend there (for all the reasons we have said). In one final gasp our sick man calls out for help but his cry is rooted in Yhwh saving him so that he can continue to 'praise' him. All of the sudden, and without preperation, this man is healed and one of the first words on his lips is: Yhwh. His repeating of the divine name is the act of praise that Yhwh was saving him for. It is a very poignant expression of what Yhwh's 'lovingkindness' consists of.

And here is something truly disturbing (in a wonderful way): Paul will later say it was because Jesus died that he was "given the name that is above every name".....