John Calvin Commentary Psalms 9:1

"I will give thanks unto Jehovah with my whole heart; I will show forth all thy marvellous works." — Psalms 9:1 (ASV)

I will praise the Lord. David begins the psalm in this way, to induce God to help him in the calamities with which he was now afflicted. As God continues His favor towards His own people without intermission, all the good He has until now done to us should serve to inspire us with confidence and hope, that He will be gracious and merciful to us in the future.

There is, indeed, in these words a profession of gratitude for the favors which he has received from God; but, in remembering His past mercies, he encourages himself to expect help in future emergencies; and by this means he opens the gate of prayer. The whole heart is understood as an upright or sincere heart, which is opposed to a double heart.

Thus he distinguishes himself not only from gross hypocrites, who praise God only with their lips outwardly, without their hearts being in any way affected, but also acknowledges that whatever he had until now done which was commendable proceeded entirely from the pure grace of God.

Even irreligious men, I admit, when they have obtained some memorable victory, are ashamed to defraud God of the praise which is due to Him. But we see that as soon as they have uttered a single expression in acknowledgment of the assistance God has afforded them, they immediately begin to boast loudly and to sing triumphs in honor of their own valor, as if they were under no obligations whatever to God.

In short, it is pure mockery when they profess that their exploits have been done by the help of God; for, after having made an offering to Him, they sacrifice to their own counsel, skill, courage, and resources. Observe how the prophet Habakkuk, representing one presumptuous king, wisely reproves the ambition common to all (Habakkuk 1:16).

Indeed, we see that the famous generals of antiquity, who, upon returning victorious from a battle, desired public and solemn thanksgivings to be decreed in their name to the gods, had no real intention of honoring their false deities. Instead, they only abused their names under a false pretext, thereby obtaining an opportunity to indulge in vain boasting, so that their own superior prowess might be acknowledged.

David, therefore, with good reason, affirms that he is unlike the children of this world, whose hypocrisy or fraud is revealed by the wicked and dishonest distribution they make between God and themselves, claiming for themselves the greater part of the praise they pretended to ascribe to God.

He praised God with his whole heart, which they did not; for it is certainly not praising God with the whole heart when a mortal man dares to appropriate the smallest portion of the glory God claims for Himself. God cannot tolerate His glory being appropriated by a creature, even in the smallest degree; so intolerable to Him is the sacrilegious arrogance of those who, by praising themselves, obscure His glory as much as they can.

I will tell of all thy marvellous works. Here David confirms what I have already said: that he does not speak in this psalm of only one victory or one deliverance. For he proposes for his meditation, in general, all the miracles God had wrought on his behalf.

He applies the term marvellous not to all the benefits he had received from God, but to those more significant and memorable deliverances which exhibited a bright and striking manifestation of divine power. God would have us acknowledge Him as the author of all our blessings; but on some of His gifts He has engraved more evident marks to awaken our senses more effectually, which are otherwise, as it were, asleep or dead.

David’s language, therefore, is an acknowledgment that he was preserved by God, not by ordinary means, but by the special power of God, which was conspicuously displayed in this matter, since He had stretched out His hand in a miraculous manner, and beyond the common and usual way.