John Calvin Commentary Psalms 102:10

"Because of thine indignation and thy wrath: For thou hast taken me up, and cast me away." — Psalms 102:10 (ASV)

On account of your anger and your wrath. He now declares that the greatness of his grief proceeded not only from outward troubles and calamities, but from a sense that these were a punishment inflicted upon him by God. And surely there is nothing which should wound our hearts more deeply than when we feel that God is angry with us.

The meaning then amounts to this—O Lord! I do not confine my attention to those things which would engage the mind of worldly men; but I rather turn my thoughts to your wrath. For were it not that you are angry with us, we would have been still enjoying the inheritance given us by you, from which we have justly been expelled by your displeasure.

When God then strikes us with His hand, we should not merely groan under the strokes inflicted upon us, as foolish men usually do, but should chiefly look to the cause so that we may be truly humbled. This is a lesson which it would be of great advantage for us to learn.

The last clause of the verse, You have lifted me up, and cast me down, may be understood in two ways. As we lift up what we intend to throw down with greater violence against the ground, the sentence may denote a violent method of casting down, as if it had been said, You have crushed me more severely by throwing me down headlong from on high, than if I had merely fallen from the station which I occupied.

But this seems to be another amplification of his grief. Nothing is more bitter to an individual than to be reduced from a happy condition to extreme misery.

The prophet mournfully complains that the chosen people were deprived of the distinguished advantages which God had conferred upon them in the past, so that the very remembrance of His former goodness, which should have afforded them consolation, embittered their sorrow.

Nor was it the effect of ingratitude to turn the consideration of the divine benefits, which they had formerly received, into a matter of sadness, since they acknowledged that their being reduced to such a state of wretchedness and degradation was through their own sins. God has no delight in changing, as if, after having given us some taste of His goodness, He intended immediately to deprive us of it.

As His goodness is inexhaustible, so His blessing would flow upon us without intermission, were it not for our sins which interrupt its course.

Although, then, the remembrance of God’s benefits should assuage our sorrows, it is still a great aggravation of our calamity to have fallen from an elevated position and to find that we have so provoked His anger as to make Him withdraw from us His benignant and bountiful hand.

Thus, when we consider that the image of God, which distinguished Adam, was the brightness of the celestial glory, and when, on the contrary, we now see the ignominy and degradation to which God has subjected us as a token of His wrath, this contrast cannot surely fail to make us feel more deeply the wretchedness of our condition.

Whenever, therefore, God, after having stripped us of the blessings which He had conferred upon us, gives us up to reproach, let us learn that we have so much the greater cause to lament, because, through our own fault, we have turned light into darkness.