With that introduction we launch into the first verse of the octave.
Psalms 119:41 VAU. Let thy mercies come also unto me, O LORD, even thy salvation, according to thy word.
To begin, let’s define the word mercy.
Mercy - Forbearance and compassion shown by one person to another who is in his power and who has no claim to receive kindness; kind and compassionate treatment in a case where severity is merited or expected.
The psalmist judges his condition to be such that he needs multiple displays of forbearance, compassion, and kindness from his God. Hence, he prays for mercies, plural. We have innumberable sins on our account (Psalm 40:12). Each sin needs mercy. Our soul is full of troubles (Psalm 88:3). Each trouble cries for mercy. Take all this together and you find that we need mercies, untold numbers of mercies. Oh, how we need the Lord to bear with us!
Then he further defines those mercies by the expression even thy salvation.
Even - Prefixed to a subject, object, or predicate, or to the expression of a qualifying circumstance, to emphasize its identity.
That word even prefixed to the word salvation emphasizes that God’s salvation equals God’s mercies. From this verse we could define God’s salvation as His forbearance, compassion, and kindness shown toward those who deserve His severity. When God delivers us, from whatever we might need deliverance be it a sin or a trouble, He is treating us with a kindness and compassion we do not deserve. God’s salvation entails many times and circumstances when He shows us His kindness and compassion. The whole of God’s dealings with us for time and eternity is a work of salvation. There is never a moment when we do not stand in need of deliverance from something. As God’s children, whom He is willing to save, our lives are constantly supplied with “streams of mercy never ceasing,” as Robert Robinson so beautifully expressed it in that hymn Come, Thou Fount. And those streams of mercy are God’s salvation.
Now the psalmist prays for God’s mercies, even His salvation, to come unto him. You sometimes hear people in the religious world speak of our coming to salvation. But instead of us coming to salvation, it is rather a matter of salvation coming to us. You see, if God does not let His salvation come to me, I will never be able to arrive at it no matter how hard I may try. It shows respect for God’s sovereignty in the matter of salvation when I pray to Him to let His salvation come unto me. I want the deliverance that He commands, when and how He is pleased to send it, because that is the deliverance that will work best for me. Any deliverance that I get that the Lord does not send may bring me relief, but it will not be His salvation. In the long run it will do me more harm than good.
The psalmist prays for God’s mercies, even His salvation, to come unto him according to thy word. He would have no deliverance that does not agree with the word of God. He wants that salvation which God has promised in His word, a salvation that is not merely deliverance from the consequences of sin, but from sin itself. He does not want to just be delivered from the pain and inconvenience of troubles, he wants to be delivered from any sin that may have brought on those troubles or that has made those troubles worse. For when we react to troubles sinfully, we only make them worse. You should want the salvation that is according to God’s word, the salvation that makes your life as closely conformed to the holy Lord Jesus Christ as possible.
As we have already noted, by means of the word also the thought of this verse is added to the thought of the preceding verse 40. In that verse the psalmist expressed his longing after God’s precepts with a prayer for God to quicken him. If you look at everything in Psalm 119 up to verse 40, you could say that all the expressions of the psalmist flow out of his longing after God’s precepts. Therefore, the prayer of verse 41 is really attached to everything the psalmist has expressed thus far. When we consider how prone we are to let the desire for other things weaken our desire for God’s word so much so that we need continual reviving, we can appreciate that the psalmist follows up that thought with a prayer for God’s mercies! Without God’s mercies, any longing we have for God’s precepts will wither and die.
Of course, this prayer found its ultimate answer when God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, into this world “to save His people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). At this time God’s mercies, even His salvation, came unto us. Speaking of the first coming of Christ, Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, said:
Luke 1:68 Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people,
69 And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David…
72 To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant….
And this prayer will be fully and finally answered when our Lord Jesus Christ shall “appear the second time without sin unto salvation” (Hebrews 9:28). At that time God’s mercies will come unto us, even His salvation. Until then, we are “looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life” (Jude 1:21).
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