Ps. 54.4-5 (a countering light)

Give attention / O God / my helper!
O Lord / sustainer of my life.
Let the evil recoil / onto my slanderers;
in your faithfulness / silence them.

At this point, the psalmist places God in direct confrontation with the strangers. First, the psalmist knows God’s name (vs. 1) and it is to that name that appeals for help, and yet his enemy is ‘nameless’ (“strangers”; vs. 3). Second, whereas at the conclusion of the previous verse the strangers were described as having “no regard for God”, here the psalmist asks God to “give attention” (or, “have regard for me”). Third, the strangers “seek my life;  God is the “sustainer of my life”. And, finally, as the strangers have ‘risen against me’, now God is asked to allow evil to recoil onto them and “in your faithfulness silence them.” There is a new designation for the ‘strangers’ here: “slanderers”. The fact that they are then asked to ‘be silenced’ coheres with this and may point back to the psalmist’s request for God to “defend him” (as in a court-room from slander). What we are seeing in this formal arrangement (it seems loosely chiastic), is the way in which the form mirrors the substance of the petition—just as the lines, point-for-point, refute the ‘strangers’, so too is the psalmist asking that God refute them. This is important: the ‘strangers’ seek his life, whereas the psalmist, in the Temple, is appealing to the source of life (the creator God). In this we see that the Temple, as opposed to the chaos of the ‘strangers’, is the home and ‘sphere’ of protection because it is the home of the life-protecting God of Israel. With God is life (and justice and power). And in him is the power that can thwart and reverse the force of death that has been unleashed by the strangers in their pursuit of the psalmist. We can therefore see in this psalm, something that originates uniquely within the covenantal realm between God and his people—as they enter into his name, and petition him from within that sphere, for protection from those that pursue them and who, thereby, represent an active force against God (they “have no regard for God”). In a way, we can picture this psalmist entering the Temple, and petitioning that the light contained therein be expanded to encompass him, and to drive away his enemies. Yet, importantly, it is the petitioning that ‘causes’ this expansion and response.