This is Messiah’s praise for deliverance or resurrection, which had been expected at the close of the preceding Psalm. He celebrates Jehovah as His rock and His horn—symbols of strength and royalty. He recites His desires in the day of His distress, and the marvelous redemption which the hand of Jehovah had wrought for Him and His Israel, when in the place of death, or amid the confederations of His enemies in the latter day. His deliverance is God’s answer to His cry. The earth then shakes. As the place of assembly shook at the voice of the Church in Jerusalem (Acts 4). For the Judge of all the earth will avenge His own elect that cry to Him. The Spirit of His mouth and the brightness of His coming will do this. (Psalm 18:8,12; 2 Thess. 2:8.)
This Psalm strikingly shows Christ in two places and two very distinct characters. For He is here both the delivered one and the deliverer. He is the one who makes this supplication, and the one who answers it. All this, of course, simply and necessarily arising from His person, divine and human as it is, from His being one with His afflicted people, and yet the Lord who rescues and blesses them: as we see Him in Isaiah 8, waiting on Jehovah who has turned His face from Israel, and in Matt. 23 Jehovah Himself with his face turned away.
David’s deliverance from the hand of Saul was the type of this; and the deliverance of Israel (with whom Messiah here identifies Himself) in the latter day will be the real deliverance here celebrated by the prophetic spirit. The rescue of Israel from the Red Sea, where the strength of Pharaoh perished, is referred to (Psa. 18:15-16); for that was another typical resurrection or deliverance. So the discomfiture of Adonizedek, who was the type of the last enemy or the willful king in the days of Joshua, is also glanced at in Psa. 18:12. (See also Psa. 144, Isa. 30:27-33, and Isa. 64:1-3.)
And the delivered one becomes the conquering and the reigning one at the close. The Lord strengthening Him, He seems equal to everything. The same hand of God that rescues Him, gives Him victory, and at last invests Him with dominion. It lights His candle, and makes Him run through a troop.
And thus this Psalm tells us, as Paul teaches in Romans 8, “whom He justified, them He also glorified.” For the Lord does not, cannot, stop with mere deliverance, but goes on to perfect His goodness in the kingdom. The song of Israel in Exodus 15 and that of the elders in Revelation 5 utter the same truth. If He translate us into the kingdom of His dear Son, it is as putting us on the sure and ready way to the inheritance of the saints in light (Col. 1). He perfects that which concerneth us.
But all this is in favor of the righteous (Psa. 18:20-27); paying just judgment to others. That is the character of the action here. For the deliverance from “the violent man” will not be so much in grace as in righteousness. The sinner is delivered only in grace, through atonement, from the curse of the accuser, the penalty of sin, and the just judgment of the law. And so the Israel of God in the day of their repentance by and by. But in conflict with the enemy, they will be righteous as David with Saul. They will suffer as martyrs or as righteous ones, and as such they will be delivered. And this just judgment, this reward of righteousness and of evil, is the character of the action in the book of Revelation (see Rev. 22:11,15), as it is of this Psalm.
2 Samuel 22 shows us that this Psalm was the utterance of David in a fitting time; and though I have just noticed it above, I may urge it again here, what a proof does this offer of the typical nature of certain pieces of history. For the deliverance of David from the hand of Saul is here published in such a style as tells us plainly that another and far more magnificent deliverance was looked at through it.
Hannah’s Song of Solomon in like manner, looks beyond the occasion of it (1 Sam. 2). Nothing is more common than this. And this is judged by some to be the meaning of those words, “No prophecy of the scriptures is of any private interpretation” (2 Peter 1). All individual events are parts of one great system of divine government.