Psalms 102

The title names one afflicted who pours out complaint before the LORD. Wesley: a prayer for true Israelites on behalf of the church, near the end of captivity.

The psalmist moves from distress to petition. The cry is to be uttered; God invites the overwhelmed to speak. Grace stirs prayer; the afflicted must still cry.

Calvin: this earnestness shows the words were not for the careless. The captive Jews testify severe distress and an ardent desire for alleviation. The Holy Spirit stirs prayer for the common welfare of the Church; scarcely one in a hundred is affected as he ought by the Church's calamities.

The cry is Spirit-taught liturgy for a people, not a light mouth-habit. Heart and tongue help each other when grief shuts us up.

Do not hide your face; incline your ear; answer speedily. The day of distress is named twice—face and ear sought with urgency.

Speed is the plea of the faint, not a denial of God's wisdom. Wesleyan Arminians pray as those who may truly be heard; the face may feel hidden while the promise still stands.

Calvin: after nearly seventy years it might seem God had forever turned away his favor; yet they are commanded in extreme affliction to have recourse to prayer. God permits us to lay open our infirmities without reserve and patiently bears with our foolishness—inviting the weak to approach familiarly.

The seeming hidden face does not nullify the covenant command to call. Tenderness is providence, not permission for irreverence.

Wesley: An hearth—an hearth is heated or burnt by the coals which are laid upon it. Days like smoke; bones like a furnace—body and time both wasting.

Complaint is honest physiology under grief. The verse names felt wasting before God and asks for mercy.

Calvin treats these verses as the Church's and the sufferer's shared language of languishing. Smoke and furnace picture a life nearly spent under captivity's weight.

The complaint is recorded so the faint may pray it. Frailty is not hidden from the eternal King who will answer.

Heart struck down like grass; bread forgotten. Grief reaches appetite and cheer. Wesley's later note on ashes as bread (v. 9) already begins in this withering.

Depression's symptoms are not unbelief by default. Pour them out; then hold the turn of v. 12 when it comes.

The heart withers like grass; even necessary bread is forgotten. Calvin's frame: such language belongs to those distressed for the desolate Church, not to the light-hearted.

God receives this honesty. The grass image will return when steadfast love is set against human frailty.

Wesley: Skin—my flesh being quite consumed. Loud groaning has wasted him to bone and clinging flesh.

The body keeps the score of unanswered days. The psalm does not scold the groan; it carries it to God.

Groaning reduces him to skin and bone. Calvin: when shut up by grief, the gate is not shut against prayer—then is a proper season to pour out the heart before God.

Extremity is invitation, not exile from the throne of grace.

Wesley: A pelican—is a solitary and mournful bird. Wilderness and waste places picture isolation.

Loneliness is named without romance. The afflicted may feel cast to the wastes while still belonging to Zion's hope.

Solitary birds of desert and ruin: the sufferer is cut off from ordinary company. Calvin's title stress: this form is for those shut up and pouring out meditation before Jehovah.

Isolation does not erase election's people; it drives them to the God who builds Zion.

Sleepless; a sparrow that is alone on the housetop. Wakefulness and exposure join the owl's solitude.

Night watches become prayer watches. The housetop sparrow is seen and unsheltered—still heard by the LORD of v. 1.

Lying awake in lonely exposure. Wesley reads it the same way: the image is mournful solitude under the LORD's ear.

The Church in exile may feel housetop-naked; the memorial of God's name (v. 12) will answer.

All-day taunts; the name used for a curse. Social shame compounds bodily wasting.

Enemies are agents. Their mockery does not prove God absent; it proves the need of the cry.

Enemies taunt and make the name a curse. Calvin's setting: Babylon's weight on a people who must still pray for Zion.

Derision is inside providence that will yet favor Zion at the appointed time—not chance cruelty alone.

Wesley: Bread—dust and ashes are as familiar to me as the eating of my bread; I cover my head with them; I sit, yea, lie down in them, as mourners often did. Tears mix with drink.

Mourning rites become daily fare. The verse legitimizes grief's diet before God.

The Church's sorrow is liturgical as well as personal.

Such mourning looks toward pity on Zion's stones and dust (v. 14), not toward despair as a final word.

Wesley: Lifted me—as a man lifts up a thing as high as he can, that he may cast it to the ground with greater force. Indignation and anger are confessed as God's.

The Most High's anger is true; so is the prayer that seeks mercy. Human agency in sin and the nations' agency in oppression stand under that rule without erasing second causes.

The cause is God's indignation: taken up and thrown down. Calvin elsewhere: captivity is judgment, yet the covenant people are taught to plead mercy from God's free goodness, not from their deserts.

Effectual discipline, not bare permission. The same God who threw down will arise and pity Zion.

Evening shadow; grass withering—time nearly gone. The complaint section (vv. 1–11) closes in frailty.

Feel the shortness honestly; then turn. The next verse's "But you" is the hinge of hope, not a denial of the shadow.

Days as evening shadow; grass again. Calvin will set this frailty against God's eternity so the Church may not despond.

Human withering is the dark backdrop for "thou, O LORD, art enthroned forever."

Wesley: Remembrance—thy name, Jehovah, which is called by this very word, God's remembrance, or memorial, and that unto all generations, Exodus 3:15. The turn: forever enthroned over withering days.

God's everlasting memorial grounds prayer. The afflicted cling to who God is when their own days smoke away.

Calvin: calling to remembrance the promises—especially "I will dwell in the midst of you"—he represents the godly, though languishing, as partakers of the celestial glory in which God dwells. The memorial is the gracious covenant that begets confidence of mutual relationship.

Eternity helps because God has bound himself by word to his people—not as abstract metaphysics alone.

Wesley: The set time—the end of those seventy years which thou hast fixed. Pity and favor arrive on an appointed clock God named.

Prophecy invites prayer, not passivity. The set time is fixed; the people still plead. Mercy is sincerely sought as the captivity nears its end.

Calvin: God is eternal, therefore he will have compassion upon Zion. He sets forth divine mercy as cause—good deserts of men entirely out of the question; free goodness alone. The appointed time refers to Jeremiah's seventy years. Although the time was fixed, the prophet does not cease from prayer; promises do not obscure grace.

The moed is God's good pleasure and promise; prayer uses the promise as argument, tracing safety to mercy alone.

Servants love Zion's stones and pity her dust. Attachment to ruins is covenant affection, not archaeology.

Love the Church in her brokenness. Prefer her dust to pagan splendor; keep praying for favor.

Calvin: not to be restricted to Cyrus and Darius. God's people alone are his servants who aim to obey his will. The deformed ruins are still the stones of Zion; the faithful's attachment continued when only hideous desolation was seen. The sadder the desolation, the less ought affections to be alienated.

Love of the rubble is love of God's consecrated place and promised restoration.

Nations and kings will fear the name and glory. Restoration spills outward into the earth's reverence.

The true God's glory is for the nations' fear and worship, matching Wesley's later note on Gentiles gathering (v. 22).

Calvin's arc: deliverance leads to kings and nations in subjection to God. The rebuilding of Zion is not a private ethnic comfort only.

God's glory publicly vindicated among the nations when he builds Zion.

The LORD builds; he appears in glory. Human builders serve; the builder is the LORD.

Glory's appearing answers the hidden face of v. 2. Pray for building; credit God when stones rise.

The LORD himself builds Zion and appears in his glory. Calvin: arising is God making his majesty apparent in the external act while remaining immutable.

Zion's rise is God's work displayed, the mercy of which vv. 13–14 pleaded.

He regards and does not despise the destitute's prayer. The cry of vv. 1–2 is answered in principle here.

Destitution is not a disqualification. Bring the faint prayer; it is not despised.

God regards the prayer of the destitute. Calvin's opening: the Spirit dictates this form so the shut-up may still pour out meditation before Jehovah.

The destitute are heard because of covenant mercy, not because poverty purchases favor.

Wesley: This—this wonderful deliverance shall be carefully recorded by thy people. A people which will be created will praise.

Praise spans generations. Record mercy so the unborn church may sing; evangelism and memory belong together.

Let it be written for a future generation and a people yet created. Calvin stresses encouraging greater care for the Church's welfare and confidence from God's word.

Providence writes history for praise; the future people are God's to create and keep.

Wesley: Looked—from heaven. Holy height to earth: transcendence that still sees.

Heaven's look is attentive mercy. The God enthroned forever (v. 12) is not distant in care.

From his holy height the LORD saw the earth. The look precedes loosing prisoners (v. 20).

Divine survey is the prelude to redemption acts, not bare observation.

Wesley: To loose—to release his poor captives out of Babylon, and from the chains of sin and eternal destruction. Double freedom: exile and deeper bondage.

Groans heard; the doomed set free. The release is sincerely for captives who cry; both temporal and eternal loosing are in view.

To hear prisoners' groans and loose those appointed to death. Calvin's captivity frame: God restores temple and city and frees his people according to promise.

The loosing is God's effectual pity on Zion's prisoners, the fruit of the appointed time.

Wesley: To declare—that they might publish the name and praises of God in his church. Freedom's end is praise in Zion.

Salvation aims at declaration. Freed mouths fill Jerusalem with the name.

Declaration of the name and praise in Zion and Jerusalem. Restoration serves worship.

The Church's public praise is why prisoners are loosed—God's glory in the midst of his people.

Wesley: When—when the Gentiles shall gather themselves to the Jews, and join with them in the worship of the true God. Peoples and kingdoms assemble.

One worship for Jew and Gentile. The gathering is hope for the nations' true praise.

Peoples and kingdoms gather to worship. Calvin: the poem beseeches God to bring kings and nations in subjection to himself.

Zion's rebuilding has a catholic horizon—the nations' worship under the one LORD.

Wesley: He—God. The way—in the midst of the course of our lives. Some think the psalmist speaks of the whole commonwealth as of one man. Strength broken midcourse; days shortened.

Personal and corporate frailty intertwine. The plea that follows seeks life until promises ripen—especially the Messiah.

Calvin: the manifestation of Christ was the goal of the race; they complain of being afflicted in midcourse. Days shortened as they looked to the fullness of time at Christ's revealing. They do not find fault as if God deceived; they strengthen hope of a favorable issue.

Midcourse is measured toward the Messiah's day; captivity felt like a violent shortening of that life.

Wesley: Do not wholly destroy thy people Israel. In the midst—before they come to a full possession of thy promises and especially of that fundamental promise of the Messiah. Thy years—though we die, yet thou art the everlasting God.

On a christology both sides share, the fundamental promise of the Messiah anchors the plea. Keep a people until the Christ is possessed in fullness of promise.

Calvin: cut me not off in the middle of my days—the Church's perfect age arrives at Christ's coming. They plead the covenant that God would maintain them until he renewed the world under the Anointed. His years from generation to generation ground confidence because he is eternal in his word as well as essence.

The midst of days is before the Messianic fullness; God's everlasting years secure the plea.

Of old: earth founded; heavens the work of your hands. Creator address in the afflicted's mouth.

Shared christology: Hebrews 1:10–12 applies this to the Son. Wesley's Messiah-promise (v. 24) meets the apostolic reading—both camps confess the Creator spoken of here as the eternal Christ.

Calvin: compared with God the whole world is a form that vanishes; yet the Church is upheld by his word. Hebrews 1 applies these verses to Christ—Jehovah, Creator, eternal and immutable—proof of his essential divinity.

Shared with Arminians: apostolic christology stands. The hands that founded earth are the Son's; camps agree here against Arian subtraction.

Wesley: Perish—as to their present nature and use. Heavens and earth wear out; God remains. Change like a robe.

Shared christology: Hebrews cites the wearing out and remaining of the Son. Creation's mortality underlines the Savior's permanence both camps preach.

Calvin: heavens shall perish—subject to corruption through the fall, and so renewed as to warrant saying they perish. Seek stability nowhere but in God. The apostolic use in Hebrews identifies this remaining One as Christ.

Creation changes; the Son does not. The Church's hope is not the garment of the cosmos but the One who changes it.

You are the same; years have no end. Immutability comforts the midcourse cry.

Shared christology: "thou art the same" is read of Christ in Hebrews 1 and echoes in Hebrews 13:8. Both camps refuse a mutable redeemer.

Calvin: But thou art He—the Eternal, necessarily eternal, unchangeable and imperishable. Years shall not fail. Applied to Christ: eternity and immutability ascribed to him who is called Jehovah.

Shared confession: the sameness of God is the sameness of the Son. Affliction's answer is an unchanging Christ.

Wesley: Continue—though the heavens and earth perish, yet we rest assured that our children, and their children after them, shall enjoy an happy restitution to, and settlement in their own land. Security of offspring after cosmic wearing.

Promise to servants' children invites faith and obedience across generations. Restitution is trusted; children must still walk as servants' seed, not presume on blood alone.

Calvin: he asks the Church's preservation not as a mere part of the human race but because God raised it above the world's revolutions. Dwell means an abiding inheritance. Seed means not all descendants without exception—many degenerate—but those who do not turn aside from their parents' faith. The covenant extends to future ages; cast the anchor of faith in heaven.

Establishment before God's face is holy union and electing faithfulness, not bare biology.