John Calvin Commentary Psalms 102

O Jehovah! hear my prayer. This earnestness shows, again, that these words were not intended to be spoken by the careless and light-hearted, as doing so would have grossly insulted God. In speaking this way, the captive Jews testify to the severe and excruciating distress they endured, and to the ardent desire for some relief that burned within them.

No person could speak these words without profaning the name of God, unless he was, at the same time, moved by a sincere and earnest feeling of the heart. We should particularly note the fact already mentioned: that we are in this way stirred up by the Holy Spirit to the duty of prayer on behalf of the common welfare of the Church.

While each person adequately cares for his own individual interests, there is scarcely one in a hundred affected as he should be by the calamities of the Church. Therefore, we have all the more need for encouragement, just as we see the prophet here trying, by an accumulation of words, to correct our coldness and laziness.

I admit that the heart should move and direct the tongue to prayer; but, as it often weakens or is slow and sluggish in its duty, it needs to be helped by the tongue. There is a reciprocal influence here. Just as the heart, on the one hand, should precede the words and shape them, so the tongue, on the other, aids and remedies the coldness and lethargy of the heart.

True believers may indeed often pray not only earnestly but also fervently, even though not a single word is spoken. There is, however, no doubt that by crying the prophet means the intense expression that grief compels us to utter.

Hide not your face from me in the day of my affliction. The prayer that God would not hide his face is far from being unnecessary. As the people had been languishing in captivity for nearly seventy years, it might seem that God had forever turned away his favor from them. But they are, nevertheless, commanded, in their extreme affliction, to turn to prayer as their only remedy. They affirm that they cry in the day of their affliction, not as hypocrites are accustomed to do, who utter their complaints in a disorderly way, but because they feel that they are then called by God to cry to him.

Make haste, answer me. Having spoken more fully of these forms of expression elsewhere, it is enough for now to briefly observe that when God permits us to lay open our weaknesses before him without reserve, and patiently bears with our foolishness, he shows great tenderness toward us. To pour out our complaints before him like little children would certainly be to treat his Majesty with very little reverence, if he had not been pleased to allow us such freedom. I purposely use this illustration so that the weak, who are afraid to draw near to God, may understand that they are invited to him with such gentleness that nothing may hinder them from approaching him familiarly and confidently.

For my days are consumed like smoke. These expressions are hyperbolic, but they still show how deeply the desolation of the Church ought to wound the hearts of God's people. Therefore, let everyone carefully examine himself on this point. If we do not prefer the Church to all other objects of our concern, we are unworthy of being counted among her members. Whenever we encounter such forms of expression, let us remember that they reproach our slothfulness in not being affected by the afflictions of the Church as we ought.

The Psalmist compares his days to smoke, and his bones to the stones of the hearth, which, over time, are consumed by the fire. By bones he means human strength. And, if people were not devoid of feeling, such a melancholy spectacle of God's wrath would surely have the effect of drying up their bones and wasting away all their vigor.

My heart is smitten, and dried up like grass. Here he employs a third comparison, declaring that his heart is withered, and completely dried up like cut grass. But he intends to express something more than that his heart was withered, and his bones reduced to a state of dryness.

His language implies that as the grass, when it is cut down, can no longer receive juice from the earth, nor retain the life and vigor which it derived from the root, so his heart, being, as it were, torn and cut off from its root, was deprived of its natural nourishment.

The meaning of the last clause, I have forgotten to eat my bread, is that his sorrow has been so great that he has neglected his ordinary food. The Jews, it is true, during their captivity in Babylon, did eat their food; and it would have been evidence of their having fallen into sinful despair had they starved themselves to death.

But what he means to say is that he was so afflicted with sorrow as to refuse all delights and to deprive himself even of food and drink. True believers may, for a time, abstain from their ordinary food when, by voluntary fasting, they humbly beseech God to turn away His wrath, but the prophet does not here speak of that kind of abstinence from physical nourishment.

He speaks of an abstinence that is the effect of extreme mental distress, which is accompanied by a loathing of food and a weariness of all things. At the end of the verse, he adds that his body was, as it were, consuming or wasting away, so that his bones clung to his skin.

I have become like a pelican of the wilderness. Instead of rendering the original word as pelican, some translate it as bittern, and others as the cuckoo. The Hebrew word used here for owl is rendered by the Septuagint as νυκτικοραξ, which signifies a bat. But as even the Jews are doubtful about the kind of birds intended here, let it be enough for us simply to know that in this verse there are pointed out certain melancholy birds, whose dwelling place is in the holes of mountains and in deserts, and whose note, instead of being delightful and sweet to the ear, inspires those who hear it with terror.

I am removed, as if to say, from the society of men, and have become almost like a wild beast of the forest. Although the people of God dwelt in a well-cultivated and fertile region, yet the whole country of Chaldea and Assyria was to them like a wilderness, since their hearts were bound by the strongest ties of affection to the temple, and to their native country from which they had been expelled. The third similitude, which is taken from the sparrow, denotes such grief as produces the greatest uneasiness. The word צפור, tsippor, generally signifies any kind of bird; but I have no doubt that it is here to be understood as the sparrow. It is described as solitary or alone, because it has been bereaved of its mate; and so deeply affected are these little birds when separated from their mates, that their distress exceeds almost all sorrow.