John Calvin Commentary Psalms 89:51

"Wherewith thine enemies have reproached, O Jehovah, Wherewith they have reproached the footsteps of thine anointed." — Psalms 89:51 (ASV)

With which your enemies, O Jehovah! have reproached you. What the Psalmist now affirms is not that the wicked torment the saints with their insulting language, but that they revile even God himself. And he makes this statement because it is a much more powerful plea for obtaining favor in the sight of God to implore him to maintain his own cause, because all the reproaches by which the simplicity of our faith is held up to scorn recoil upon himself, than to implore him to do this because he is wounded in the person of his Church, as he declares in Isaiah:

Whom have you reproached and blasphemed; and against whom have you exalted your voice, and lifted up your eyes on high? Even against the Holy One of Israel. (Isaiah 37:23)

That wicked robber Rabshakeh thought that he scoffed only at the wretched Jews whom he besieged, and whose surrender of themselves into his hands he believed he would soon witness; but God took it as if he himself had been the object whom that wicked man directly assailed. For this reason also, the prophet calls these enemies of his people the enemies of God; namely, because in persecuting the Church with deadly hostility, they made an assault upon the majesty of God, under whose protection the Church was placed.

In the second clause, by the footsteps of Messiah or Christ is meant the coming of Christ, as it is said in Isaiah 52:7:

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that brings good tidings, that publishes peace! (Isaiah 52:7)

The Hebrew word עקב, akeb, sometimes signifies the heel; but here, as in many other passages, it signifies the sole of the foot. Others translate it the pace or step, but this gives exactly the same sense. There can be no doubt that footsteps, by the figure synecdoche, is employed to denote the feet; and again, that by the feet, according to the figure metonymy, is meant the coming of Christ.

The wicked, observing that the Jews clung to the hope of redemption and patiently endured all adversities because a deliverer had been promised them, disdainfully derided their patience, as if all that the prophets had testified concerning the coming of Christ had been only a fable. And now also, although he has been once manifested to the world, yet as he has been received up into the glory of heaven, he seems to be far distant from us and to have forsaken his Church, these filthy dogs scoff at our hope, as if it were a mere delusion.