Ps. 56.9 (deliverance has a date)

If that is true / my enemies / will turn back
on the day / when I call;
by this / will know / God is for me.

Here we find the fully historical perspective of the psalmist as well as a confirmation of our previous reflection. It resolves the tension inherent within both his certainly that God has “kept a tear-bottle record” of his misery as well as his questioning of whether or how God’s reckoning is actually measured. In this verse, the psalmist declares that if it is true that God has this bottle of tears, his enemies will, almost inevitably, be turned back by God—the ‘mercy’ pleaded for in vs. 1 will have been ignited and God’s wrath would have fallen upon them. And, importantly, it will be “on that day”—it is not an eternal understanding but an event that is prayed for. “By this” (this, to many, embarrassingly particular event of deliverance), “I will know God is for me” (i.e, that his certainly that God’s concern is one that would, in fact, keep tears (not a written ledger) in a bottle as a source for his future wrath in judgment). If we are to hear in this the voice of king, the “day” would come when his words that had been so ‘slandered’ and twisted, were straightened out within the community, his glory and authority restored, and the attempted coup forever put down. It is this ‘day’ that the psalmist looks for, and to be precise the ‘day’ should not be in scare-quotes. It is precisely in the fact that it needs no distancing that we see how literal-historical the viewpoint of the psalm is (and, hence, how much it partakes of the resurrection). Again, as with nearly every psalm we have looked at: the psalmist is not searching for an answer; he does not want to make peace with the world. He wants deliverance and it will have a date associated with it.