Psalm 74

Psalm 74  •  2 min. read  •  grade level: 9
We have in this Psalm a sample of very tender and sorrowful pleading with God. It is evidently the utterance of the Remnant in sight of the desolation of Zion. The enemy is seen triumphing in the full pride of victory over God’s house and people, and the congregation of the Lord left to reproach without sign or prophet. The desire is, that the Lord will show Himself as the kinsman-avenger of Israel. For under the law, the kinsman was to ransom, to avenge, and to build up the brother’s house. And this is a cry to Him to act as an avenger. At the exodus from Egypt He had so acted, and that is pleaded here. He had then, as their kinsman, both ransomed Israel out of Egypt, and avenged Israel upon Egypt, dividing the waters for His people, and breaking the heads of leviathan. Deborah celebrates Jehovah as an avenger in Judges 5, and the heavens celebrate the Lord God as the same in Revelation 19:22For true and righteous are his judgments: for he hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand. (Revelation 19:2).
The suppliant further pleads the promises which secure Israel and the earth. (See Psa. 74:17,17Thou hast set all the borders of the earth: thou hast made summer and winter. (Psalm 74:17) with Gen. 8:2222While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. (Genesis 8:22); and Psa. 74:1616The day is thine, the night also is thine: thou hast prepared the light and the sun. (Psalm 74:16) with Jer. 33:2020Thus saith the Lord; If ye can break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, and that there should not be day and night in their season; (Jeremiah 33:20).) He pleads also the covenant, and that this cause was God’s cause. And this is according to their mediator Moses, in his day, who pleaded the fathers, and the covenant of promise, and the honor of the name of Him who had redeemed them from Egypt. (See Ex. 32:12-1312Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. 13Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swarest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of will I give unto your seed, and they shall inherit it for ever. (Exodus 32:12‑13).) And the Lord says Himself, that in the present preserving of Israel and their final establishment, He has respect to His own name (Deut. 32:2727Were it not that I feared the wrath of the enemy, lest their adversaries should behave themselves strangely, and lest they should say, Our hand is high, and the Lord hath not done all this. (Deuteronomy 32:27).) And, in the rehearsal of His ways with Israel, in Ezekiel 20 we have the same thought again and again.
The desolation of Zion here contemplated is either that by the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, of the Romans, or of the Willful King in the latter day. Indeed, in the judgment of God, Judea is one scene of desolation, from the days of the Chaldean till the enemy fall on the glorious holy mountain, and the kingdoms become the Lord’s.