The ethos of the church’s worship is found in poor, needy, and desperate sinners finding solace and relief in the God of their salvation.
An intriguing feature of Psalm 70 arises once you realize that it’s almost an exact copy of another psalm attributed to King David, Psalm 40. Verses 13 to 17 of the latter are nearly identical to the seventieth, begging the question, “Why is this repeated?” Those who wish to discredit the Bible’s validity and authority have sometimes used this instance of supposed biblical plagiarism as evidence of human editors encroaching on the canon. This, they say, is just another in a long string of examples that prove that the “God-breathed” Scriptures are nothing more than a compendium of ancient writings that have been copied, pasted, and edited into a story that mostly centers on Jewish history. Of course, this is nothing but hearsay without a shred of evidence other than the penchant for doubt and skepticism that lurks inside the human heart.
We don’t know why King David borrowed from himself with these two psalms. For what it’s worth, parroting or regurgitating one’s own compositions isn’t all that unheard-of in the music industry, with self-poachers ranging from the likes of Bach to Beethoven to Hans Zimmer, and even Sir Paul McCartney. There’s something deeper going on with Psalm 70, though, and I’m convinced that it speaks to the essence of what it means to worship the Lord. Jerome F. D. Creach, an Old Testament professor for Pittsburg Theological Seminary, asserts, “Psalms 40:13–17 and 70 are both preceded and followed by psalms that express hope for deliverance from trouble and from enemies. The material before and after presents the eschatological hope of the psalmist, namely, that present troubles will be swept away in the day of God’s judgment, that God’s future will bring justice for those currently oppressed.” [1]
1. Worship Beyond Sentiment
Worship, of course, is a word that has all but lost its resonance due to excessive overuse. Within Christian circles, there’s talk of “worship music,” “worship leaders,” “worship teams,” “worship sets,” and “worship nights.” But beyond just a trendy marketing slogan, what does it really mean to worship something? A common way to understand this is “ascribing worth” to someone or something as one’s preeminent source of life, hope, and meaning. Worship means to revere or exalt that person or thing as ultimate. In the ecclesiastical sense, the object of worship is the “one God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” [2] To worship him means to exalt him as the one whose control extends over everything and as the one to whom you owe everything. Indeed, to worship the Lord is, to adopt Rev. Alexander Maclaren’s definition, an “exclamation of adoring wonder at the incomparable greatness of the ever-giving God.” [3]
Accordingly, we can say that worship is not a “feeling,” even though that’s often the way we understand it. While worship can (and perhaps should) involve our emotions, associating worship with some sort of emotional experience is a false equivalency. Worship is a declaration; it’s something we affirm that’s always true, as the psalmist does in verse 4: “God is great!” (Ps. 70:4). Taking the seventieth psalm’s title at face value — “For the memorial offering” — a picture is painted of David entering the Tabernacle with this song on his lips, praising the Lord the entire time. He’s doing as we are later told to do by the apostle Paul: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1).
2. The Honesty Worship Requires
The first thing this psalm presses upon us is the simple yet searing lesson that worship begins with honesty. Both at the beginning and end, the worshiper is invited, compelled even, to acknowledge their need (Ps. 70:1, 5). This call to worship is uniquely tailored to extract that plain, albeit profound, admission, “I need some help.” David, and whoever else was singing, couldn’t dodge this reality, nor could they try to gloss over it. No matter what difficulty they were navigating or deficiency they were coping with, they needed relief. This is where all true “spiritual worship” begins, which is why in both the opening and closing stanzas, David confesses his desperate need and finds solace for that need in the God who meets his needs.
Worship begins with honesty.
Notably, he doesn’t turn inward, to himself, nor to the power and position that were at his disposal to solve his problems. He wasn’t looking to find relief in anything he could muster, intuit, or accomplish. In other words, to worship the Lord necessarily precludes any notion of “self-help.” Attending a “worship service” to hear “worship music” that does little more than tell you how to help yourself doesn’t constitute true worship. After all, the only person you’ve worshiped is you, which doesn’t equate to experiencing the relief you so desperately crave. Part of our “reasonable service” and “spiritual worship” of the triune God, therefore, inevitably involves a recognition and confession of just how needy, weak, and wretched we are.
This goes against what we’re inclined to believe about ourselves, especially given how predisposed we are to nurturing our self-esteem. None of us likes to admit that we need help, nor are we eager to say we can’t help ourselves. Yet until you come to grips with the fact that you are “poor and needy” (Ps. 70:5), worshipping God “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23) will always be a hollow affair. If we’re downplaying our need, not only are we being dishonest, we’re also doing a disservice to the God who delights to rescue, save, and heal the needy. We’re missing what church is about, and who it’s for: to paraphrase Anglican theologian Richard Sibbes, “a common hospital where all are sick of some spiritual disease.” [4]
Gathering with the Body of Christ, therefore, is less about receiving a weekly dose of “spiritual steroids” so we can go out and slay our giants.
Yet we often refuse to let that be the prevailing way we come to church. Instead of being seen as sick, we’d rather be regarded as put-together, pristine, and polished. However, all that does is put up barriers between us and those around us who are just as broken. We’re fooling no one but ourselves by pretending we’re not among the needy and the desperate, not to mention the fact that it shuts us off from experiencing the mercy and grace of the God who is predisposed to help those in need. Ours is a God who is “near to the brokenhearted” and “the crushed in spirit” (Ps. 34:18). And this is no begrudging ministry he performs. Rather, he delights to “heal the brokenhearted and bind up their wounds” (Ps. 147:3). This is just who he is (Isa. 57:15; 61:1; Mark 2:15–17). Gathering with the Body of Christ, therefore, is less about receiving a weekly dose of “spiritual steroids” so we can go out and slay our giants. Instead, it’s more like entering a triage center with other broken and battered sinners, knowing and believing that there’s only one Physician who has the cure we so desperately need.
3. Urgent Faith, Present Help
Along with the psalmist’s willingness to admit his need is his awareness that his need was urgent, which we can gather from his prayers for God’s speedy deliverance that bookend this psalm (Ps. 70:1, 5). David understands that his needs are so intense that there’s no time to waste. “Act quickly, God,” he cries. You almost get the sense that if there were a delay, then he might not survive. He wasn’t singing the praises of some “theoretical helper” or abstract deity who lingers at a distance from his followers and their troubles. No, he was crying out to the God who actually steps in to intervene and save his beloved. His urgent, anxious prayer was answered in the one who was his help and his deliverer (Ps. 70:5).
I’ll always remember when I had appendicitis, but not for the reasons you might imagine. I ended up going to a clinic instead of the emergency room, which meant treatment had to wait until after a ride in an ambulance. The place we went to couldn’t give me the help I urgently needed. We are often guilty of doing the same thing with our spiritual sicknesses. Perhaps we’re honest with our needs and our problems, but where are we going for relief? Who are we looking to for healing?
We who have a great need for God also have a great God for our need.
Resorting to other remedies to meet the deepest needs of our souls will never result in true, lasting relief. We can’t medicate our spiritual sickness with emotional distractions, treat our guilt with busyness, numb our fear with control, or handle sin with self-help. Going to anything other than God and his Word is like going to a clinic when what you really need is an operating room. David’s honesty, urgency, and desperation didn’t drive him into himself. Rather, his gaze was directed outward to the God who not only meets his needs, but also takes all of those needs on himself as his very own. This is what the gospel announces is ours in, with, and through the Christ of God: we who have a great need for God also have a great God for our need.
4. A Song for the Haunted and Hurting
Sandwiched in between David’s confessions of need and his urgent pleas for deliverance is his “expectation” that God would come through for him (Ps. 70:2–4). In all likelihood, he draws on past experiences to frame the occasion for this song. His life was like a Rolodex of grief, suffering, and frustration, which means he didn’t have to manufacture scenarios or force these words out. David’s early years saw him constantly hunted, oppressed, pursued, slandered, and persecuted. Some of those pressures were external (Saul, Absalom, or the Philistines), some were internal (emerging from his own sin), and some were spiritual (as he dealt with the accusations of the evil one). Regardless, through this psalm, David gives God’s people a vocabulary and a song for all their grief and guilt. And although it might not be staring down literal hunters, every human being feels haunted by something, with regret and shame being among the chief culprits.
There are moments or even whole seasons in life when it seems like the enemy uses all of the twisted bits of our past to get the better of us. Satan’s most pointed torment often comes as he gloats in our weaknesses, taunting us with all those things we can’t seem to forget. He uses how “poor and needy” we are to stop us from worshipping. “You’re pathetic,” he sneers. “You think God’s gonna come through for you, after what you’ve done?” But despite how deeply we might sense that that is true, David’s words, which are the words of God, tell us something much different — namely, that those who seek relief and solace in and with God alone are sure to find it (Ps. 70:4). And those who find it are made to rejoice and revel in it, forever singing praises to the God who leaves every enemy counfounded (Ps. 70:2–3). “God’s deliverance,” Maclaren says, “gives occasion for fresh praise.” [5]
5. The Bold Hope of the Poor and Needy
The worshiper’s humble yet faithful expectation is that God will do as he has done in the past. The church’s steadfast anthem is encapsulated in an early eighteenth-century hymn of Isaac Watts, the opening lines of which read, “O God, our help in ages past, / Our hope for years to come.” We are made to “be glad” in the salvation that is assured and promised to us in the Word. This isn’t presumption; it’s faith, and faith is the backbone of worship. The good news, of course, is that God doesn’t hold any of us at arm’s length because of how “poor and needy” we are. Rather, that’s exactly what qualifies us to come to him in the first place (Heb. 4:16).
In a sermon from 1871, entitled “Pleading,” Charles Spurgeon puts it this way: “O seeker, hasten I pray thee, to the mercy seat with this upon thy lips: ‘I am poor and needy, I am sinful, I am lost; have pity on me.’ With such an acknowledgment thou beginnest thy prayer well, and through Jesus thou shalt prosper in it . . . the Lord loves holy boldness in poor sinners; He would have you be bolder than you think of being. It is an unhallowed bashfulness that dares not trust a crucified Saviour.”
To conclude with Jerome F. D. Creach, Psalm 70 “reminds us that praise, when properly framed, emerges from the depths of life.” [6] This gets to the heart of the apostle’s admonition that our “spiritual worship” emerges from presenting “our bodies as living sacrifices” (Rom. 12:1). The ethos of the church’s worship is found in poor, needy, and desperate sinners finding solace and relief in the God of their salvation — in the one who meets our every need by giving us his very self.
[1] Jerome F. D. Creach, “Psalm 70,” Interpretation 60.1 (2006): 65.
[2] Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical Notes, Vols. 1–3 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1877), 27.
[3] Alexander Maclaren, The Psalms, Vol. 2: Psalms XXXIX—LXXXIX (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1902), 21.
[4] Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax (Edinburgh: Maclaren & Macniven, 1878), 45.
[5] Maclaren, 19.
[6] Creach, 66.
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