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 19:2.
The prophet or suppliant is moved by the same deep and aggrieved heart as Isaiah, when he in spirit looked on the same scene of desolation. He would fain know how long the misery was to last. (Psa. 74:10, Isa. 6:11.)
The suppliant further pleads the promises which secure Israel and the earth. (See Psa. 74:17, with Gen. 8:22; and Psa. 74:16 with Jer. 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. 32:12-13.) And the Lord says Himself, that in the present preserving of Israel and their final establishment, He has respect to His own name (Deut. 32:27.) 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.
Note— Psalm 74:7 may remind us of the Chaldean invasion (2 Kings 25:9); Psalm 74:4 may call the idols on the battlements, or the abomination of desolation, to our thoughts. (Dan. 9:27, Matt. 24:15.)