John Calvin Commentary Psalms 38:2

"For thine arrows stick fast in me, And thy hand presseth me sore." — Psalms 38:2 (ASV)

For thy arrows go down in me. He shows that he was compelled by urgent need to ask for relief from his misery, for he was crushed under the weight of the burden he bore. This rule should always be observed in our prayers: to keep God’s promises before us.

But God has promised that He will chastise His servants, not according to what they deserve, but as they are able to bear. This is the reason why the saints so often speak of their own weakness when they are severely oppressed with affliction. David very properly describes the affliction he suffered by the terms the arrows and the hand, or the chastisement of God. If he had not been convinced that it was God who afflicted him in this way, he could never have been led to seek deliverance from his affliction from Him.

We know that the great majority of people are blinded during God's judgments and imagine that these are entirely chance events; scarcely one in a hundred discerns God's hand in them. But, in his sickness, as in all his other adversities, David views the hand of God lifted up to punish him for his sins.

And certainly, the person who judges his affliction only by the pain it causes, and sees it in no other way, is no different from the beasts of the field. Since every chastisement from God should remind us of His judgment, the true wisdom of the saints is, as the prophet declares:

“to look to the hand of him who smiteth” (Isaiah 9:13).

The pronoun thy is therefore emphatic. David’s words are as if he had said: I do not contend with a mortal man, who can shoot his arrows only with a force proportional to his own strength, but I contend with God, who can discharge the arrows from His hand with an altogether overwhelming force.