Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 17:15

"As for me, I shall behold thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with [beholding] thy form." — Psalms 17:15 (ASV)

I —emphatic. The satisfaction of worldly men is in their wealth and family honours, that of the poet in the sun of God’s presence and the vision of His righteousness. (Compare to Note, Psalms 11:7).

Instead of “likeness,” render image, or appearance. But what does the poet mean by the hope of seeking God when he wakes? Some think of rising to peace after a perplexing trouble; others of health after suffering; others of the sunlight of the Divine grace breaking on the soul. But the literal reference to night in Psalms 17:3 seems to ask for the same reference here.

Instead of waking to a worldling’s hope of a day of feasting and pleasure, the psalmist wakes to the higher and nobler thought that God—who in sleep (so like death, when nothing is visible), has been, as it were, absent—is now again, when he sees once more (Septuagint), found at his right hand (compare to the end of Psalm 16), a conscious presence to him, assuring him of justice and protection.

But as in Psalm 16, so here, we feel that in spite of his subjection to the common notions about death, the psalmist may have felt the stirrings of a better hope. Such “cries from the dark,” even if they do not prove the possession of a belief in immortality, show how the human heart was already groping its way, however blindly, towards it.