Psalms 140-150 form another little Book, giving us the cries first, and then the praises, of the Israel of God in the last days. They may have been indited to serve different times and persons (as we have observed upon Psa. 120-134), but they are here together, suiting, in their full and final application, that Jewish election, whose sorrow and deliverance will close this age and usher in the kingdom. And thus they form a seasonable and beautiful close to the whole Book.
The Israel of God speak here rather as martyrs than penitents. And this is still morally fitting. For they are now on their direct way to the kingdom.
The Spirit of Christ is heard distinctly in the midst of His Israel. He takes up their sorrows and expresses them as in His own person. It is the language of one suppliant, and the enemy is addressed or referred to individually also. But it is Christ in sympathy with His Israel, and the enemy is but the head of a great faction, as other scriptures so fully tell us.
These sorrows of the Psalmist are as those of David from Saul, and not from Absalom. And those were the sorrows (martyr-sorrows) which led, in like manner, directly to the kingdom. He had consolations, however, as well as trials. The enemy persecuted him as a partridge in the mountains; the ungrateful men of Keilah, and the time-serving Ziphites, betray him; and even his companions, in the heat and anguish of a trying hour, speak of stoning him; but he has the sword of Goliath, and the prophet, and the priest with him; the refreshing too of the faith of Abigail; and the strength of the Lord against the Amalekites (in the moment of their fullest pride), that bitter and ancient enemy of Israel, whose spoil he is able to share with his beloved ones in the land. And all this is David in 1 Sam. 21; 1 Sam. 30, the days of his exile from Israel through the enmity of Saul.
And these are the days too of Jacob’s trouble, as the prophet Jeremiah speaks (Jer. 30:7); but Jacob shall be delivered out of them, as the anointed exile was led by his sorrows up to his kingdom; and as these Psalms begin with a soul in the heaviness of the night, but leave him in the joy of the returned and eternal morning—the day-break of the kingdom.