Ps. 71.17-18 (full circle, overflow)

O God / you have taught me / from my youth
and unto now / I have told about / your wondrous deeds.
So / even to grey-haired old age
O God / forsake me not
till I can tell / about your strong arm
and tell about / your mighty deeds
to all the generation / to come. 

These lines form a type of unit—it begins with God ‘teaching me from my youth’ and concludes with the psalmist telling “about your mighty deeds to all the generation to come.” It comes full circle as the psalmist envisions his end as a new tradition-ing, a new ‘handing-down’ of God’s ‘mighty deeds’. In this way, God will now teach the next generation who will, like the psalmist, ‘grow old with Yhwh’. Further, these lines also display a type of mutual interaction: God teaches – Psalmist tells about wondrous deeds – God does not forsake – Psalmist tells about mighty deeds to next generation. This perpetuity of the story of God within the generations is a type of participating with the ‘forever’ of God’s presence and his righteousness. We must note that the psalmist’s desire, here, for God not to forsake him is so that this praise can be passed down. To the psalmist, what is being ‘tradition-ed’ (“handed over”) is a tremendous treasure, a pearl of great price. And the psalmist feels the weight of this responsibility. There is a note of anxiety here that the psalmist may, in fact, die prior to this transfer. That the ‘great chain’ may be severed, in some manner. What is important here is that the desire to note be ‘forsaken’ is the desire for his enemies to not claim victory over him (as is clear from verses 9-11). The victory that God would establish in not forsaking the psalmist would be the redemption of this ‘faithful servant’ who then lives to pass down the ‘great works’ of God. The enemies threaten this; they would seek to interrupt (and intercept) this; to stop the message from flowing into another generation. Their danger is not solely limited to that posed to the psalmist’s individual life, but to that life-passed-down. They do not want his teaching to live. The psalmist and the enemies understand this: the psalmist abandoned by God is merely an individual; the psalmist protected by God is a link in the chain of God’s covenantal power.