Albert Barnes Commentary Psalms 34:17

"[The righteous] cried, and Jehovah heard, And delivered them out of all their troubles." — Psalms 34:17 (ASV)

The righteous cry, and the Lord heareth — That is, one of the advantages or benefits of being righteous is the privilege of crying to God, or of calling on His name, with the assurance that He will hear and deliver us.

No one has ever yet fully appreciated the privilege of being permitted to call upon God—the privilege of prayer. There is no blessing conferred on humanity in our present state superior to this, and no one can fully understand the force of the argument derived from this in favor of serving God.

What a world this would be—how sad, how helpless, how wretched—if there were no God to whom the guilty, the suffering, and the sorrowful could come; if God were a Being who never heard prayer at all; if He were a capricious Being who might or might not hear prayer; if He were a Being governed by fitful emotions, who would now hear the righteous, and then the wicked, and then neither; and who dispensed His favors in answer to prayer by no certain rule!

And delivereth them out of all their troubles —

1. He often delivers them from trouble in this life in answer to prayer.
2. He will deliver them literally from all trouble in the life to come.

The promise is not, indeed, that they will be delivered from all trouble on earth, but the idea is that God is able to rescue them from trouble here; that He often does so in answer to prayer; and that, in the case of every righteous person, there will be a sure and complete deliverance from all trouble in the life to come. Compare the notes at Psalm 34:6; see also Psalm 34:19.