This Psalm makes a more discerning investigation, and enters into the position of the righteous One amongst the people—His being thrown entirely on the Lord for keeping righteousness, so that He may have no part with the wicked. Willing that the righteous should smite Him, He will pray for them in their trials, though they rebuke and reprove Him. All He wants is righteousness, but He desires to be preserved from the dainties of the wicked; snares they had laid around, but He was turning himself to God and desiring this only—practical acceptance with Him, Jehovah, and to Him only therefore He looks. Instructive lesson!
Though willing to be smitten by the righteous, this verse implies still an owning of them, but their liability to heavy chastisements; but, as He prayed in their calamities, for a blessing is in it, in the kharata (Thou cuttest off) so when chastened and overthrown they would hear His words, for indeed they were sweet. He knows it before the Lord; in the day of visitation there would be hearkeners. Thus the Spirit of Christ took up the people—Israel proved in Jerusalem; as for the enemies, it was deliverance from, and judgment.
Here He looks at the relentless evil and violence, murder committed against the nation. He calls them in that, in Spirit, "Our bones," still; still the individual believer, for it was now on earth (a question on earth), would escape, while the wicked would fall into their own nets. Look at David in the time of Saul, and there is much to guide in the understanding of the Psalm. Prayer is the position in which he puts himself—praying the Lord to put a watch over him.
We must remember that whatever the glory, the Lord is not only against the enemies, but with the sorrows of the suffering Remnant, and expresses them all in perfectness as His own. The Lord seems to me here to assert the spirit of the righteous man, first praying for the keeping of his heart from evil, and actual separation from evil men, then willingness to receive reproof from the righteous. Yet whatever their calamities, He still prays for them. The Spirit acts in intercession in the midst of them. When troubles come, then will they hear His voice, His words, for they are sweet. Thus verse 7 is their actual state and ruin, but (v. 6) the eye of faith, by the Spirit, is to the Lord.
9, 10. In the actual activities of the wicked, the Spirit of the righteous man reckons on escape. It is the Spirit of Christ expressing itself in the trial of the righteous man, but in His energy in the midst of the trials of that day.