John Calvin Commentary Psalms 13:2

"How long shall I take counsel in my soul, Having sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?" — Psalms 13:2 (ASV)

How long shall I take counsel in my soul? We know that people in adversity yield to discontent, and look around them, first in one direction and then another, searching for remedies. Especially when they see that they are destitute of all resources, they greatly torment themselves and are distracted by a multitude of thoughts. In great dangers, anxiety and fear compel them to change their purposes from time to time, when they cannot find any plan on which they can settle with certainty.

David, therefore, complains that, while thinking of different methods of obtaining relief and deliberating with himself now in one way and now in another, he is exhausted to no purpose by the multitude of suggestions that pass through his mind. By joining to this complaint the sorrow which he felt daily, he points out the source of this anxiety.

As in severe sickness the sick would desire to change their place every moment, and the more acute the pains that afflict them are, the more fitful and eager they are in shifting and changing; so, when sorrow seizes upon people's hearts, its miserable victims are violently agitated within, and they find it more tolerable to torment themselves without obtaining relief than to endure their afflictions with composed and tranquil minds.

The Lord, indeed, promises to give the faithful the spirit of counsels (Isaiah 11:2), but he does not always give it to them at the very beginning of any matter they are engaged in; instead, he allows them for a time to be hindered by long deliberation without reaching a definite decision, or to be perplexed, as if they were entangled among thorns, not knowing where to turn or what course to take.

Some explain the Hebrew word יומם, yomam, as meaning all the day long. But it seems to me that by it is rather meant another kind of continuance, namely, that his sorrow returned and was renewed every day. At the end of the verse, he deplores another evil: that his adversaries triumph over him the more boldly when they see him wholly enfeebled and, as it were, wasted by continual languor.

Now this is an argument of great weight in our prayers; for there is nothing that is more displeasing to God, and that he will tolerate less, than the cruel insolence that our enemies display when they not only gloat over our misery but also rise up all the more against us, and treat us all the more disdainfully the more they see us oppressed and afflicted.