Ps. 86.6-7 (you can answer)

Listen O Yhwh / to my prayer
and give attention / to my pleas for mercy
in my time of distress / I call to you
for you can answer my prayers. 

In a way the psalmist here begins again his petition. The language employed here is full of repetition of the opening verses. The psalm opened with his call to God to ‘bend your ear’ (vs. 1). Now, he ask Yhwh to “listen to my prayer”. In verse 3 he asks for mercy because he calls to him all day; here, he asks God to ‘give attention to my pleas for mercy’. The psalmist then begins a shift in perspective very similar to verse 5. Meaning, from the petition he moves into an assertion about God and what God can do. We recall that verses 1-4 were an attempt to get God to respond. Verse 5 revealed, however, that in a deeper sense, the petition of the psalmist was a participation within God’s prior goodness and mercy. Here, something similar emerges—the psalmist ‘calls to God’ “for you can answer”. In other words, the petition does not emerge from an optimistic hope that God will come to his aid. There is no question in the psalmist’s heart that God can respond. As such, it is grounded in a certain hope because it is grounded in a certainty that God’s redemptive desire and power is always already prior to his petition. In the same way that God is “good and forgiving” can “he answer”. God’s responsiveness to his people is as clear and certain as his nature of being goodness and forgiving. The following verses will offer us an insight into where this psalmist’s certainty in God’s responsiveness resides, and it is not in a place we would (I think) tend to root it. Said too broadly perhaps—it is not rooted in God’s relationship to creation as Creator, but in his relationship to the nations as King. And it is in a conviction that Yhwh’s glory is one that is and will be a fully public and recognizable display of his mastery over the gods and the nations.