John Calvin Commentary Psalms 74:1

"O God, why hast thou cast [us] off for ever? Why doth thine anger smoke against the sheep of thy pasture?" — Psalms 74:1 (ASV)

O God! why hast thou cast us off for ever? If this complaint was written when the people were captives in Babylon, although Jeremiah had assigned the 70th year of their captivity as the period of their deliverance, it is not surprising that waiting so long was a very bitter affliction to them, that they daily groaned under it, and that such a protracted period seemed to them like an eternity.

As for those who were persecuted by the cruelty of Antiochus, they might, not without reason, complain of God's wrath being perpetual, due to their lack of information as to any definite time when this persecution would end; and especially when they saw the cruelty of their enemies daily increasing without any hope of relief, and that their condition was constantly proceeding from bad to worse.

Having been previously greatly reduced by the many disastrous wars that their neighbors one after another had waged against them, they were now brought almost to the brink of utter destruction. It should be observed that the faithful, when persecuted by the heathen nations, lifted up their eyes to God, as if all the evils they suffered had been inflicted by his hand alone.

They were convinced that if God had not been angry with them, the heathen nations would not have been permitted to take such license in injuring them. Therefore, being persuaded that they were not encountering merely the opposition of flesh and blood, but were afflicted by the just judgment of God, they directed their thoughts to the true cause of all their calamities. This cause was that God, under whose favor they had formerly lived prosperous and happy, had cast them off and no longer deigned to count them as his flock.

The verb זנה, zanach, signifies to reject and to detest, and sometimes also to withdraw oneself to a distance. It is not of great importance in which of these senses it is taken here. We may consider the substance of what is stated to be simply this: whenever we are visited with adversities, these are not the arrows of fortune thrown against us at random, but the scourges or rods of God which, in his secret and mysterious providence, he prepares and uses for chastising our sins.

Casting off and anger must here be referred to the apprehension or judgment of the flesh. Properly speaking, God is not angry with his elect, whose diseases he cures by afflictions, as it were, by medicines. But as the chastisements we experience powerfully tend to produce in our minds apprehensions of his wrath, the Holy Spirit, by the word anger, admonishes the faithful to acknowledge their guilt in the presence of infinite purity.

When, therefore, God executes his vengeance upon us, it is our duty seriously to reflect on what we have deserved, and to consider that although He is not subject to the emotions of anger, yet it is not due to us, who have grievously offended him by our sins, that his anger is not kindled against us.

Moreover, his people, as a plea for obtaining mercy, flee to the remembrance of the covenant by which they were adopted to be his children. In calling themselves the flock of God’s pastures, they magnify his free choice of them by which they were separated from the Gentiles. This they express more plainly in the following verse.