This Psalm manifests itself very clearly. It is Messiah leading the praise of His righteous people in the latter day for the Lord’s destruction of their great enemy, and the consequent anticipated enthronement of Messiah in Zion. There is also a fine insultation over the enemy now thus fallen, kindred with that which the Spirit of Christ breathes in the prophet Isaiah over the king of Babylon (Isa. 14), and a recital of the cry of the afflicted ones in the day of their calamity.
The world is also declared as learning righteousness from God’s judgments in the latter day (Psa. 9:16), as in Isaiah 26:9. And the nature of those judgments also—the taking of the wicked in their own snare, as in Psalm 7:10; Psa. 35; Psa. 67; Psa. 94; Psa. 109; Psa. 112. Haman’s destruction is the type of this (Esther 7; 10); and the cross is gloriously the illustration of the same, for there by death he that had the power of death was destroyed.
The falling and perishing of the enemy at the presence of God (Psa. 9:5) is strikingly illustrated in scripture, in days of divine visitation or judgment. (See Psa. 114; Ex. 14:24-25; John 18:6.) Here it is anticipated in the doom and downfall of the great infidel or antichristian enemy of the last day. (See Rev. 19.) How awfully will the nations then learn themselves to be “but men” (Psa. 9:20), though they had been drinking in and practicing the old lie of the serpent, “ye shall be as gods.”