John Calvin Commentary Psalms 144:5

"Bow thy heavens, O Jehovah, and come down: Touch the mountains, and they shall smoke." — Psalms 144:5 (ASV)

O Jehovah! bow thy heavens. After extolling, as was fitting, the great goodness of God, he requests him to provide the help for the preservation of the kingdom that was necessary in the present urgent need.

As we previously saw that he had gloried in God with heroic courage, so here he uses the same lofty terms in his prayers: that he would bow the heavens, make the mountains smoke, disturb the air with thunderings, and shoot forth arrows.

These are forms of speech by which, undoubtedly, he would remove from himself all the obstacles that stand between us and a believing grasp of God’s omnipotence, and from which we find it so difficult to emerge.

He uses almost the same phraseology in Psalm 18, but there it is in praising God for help already given, and to show that he had been preserved from above in a wonderful and unusual manner.

For although such signs as he mentions might not always have occurred when God intervened on his behalf, he had good reason to celebrate what had unexpectedly happened to him by referring to extraordinary phenomena.

In the present passage, his purpose is different. Threatened by various kinds of destruction that might overwhelm his mind with despair, he sought to realize the wonderful power of God, before which all worldly obstacles must necessarily give way.

We can be certain, at least, that he employed this figurative language for a good reason: so that he would not limit deliverance to human remedies, for nothing could be more preposterous at such a time than to measure divine power by ordinary rules.