Psalm 7: The Pit We Dig for Ourselves | Psalm Devotional

Psalm 7 is a long prayer, and there was no good place to break it, so we read the whole thing. David begins in trouble again, calling out to God for refuge. This episode of Morning Psalms and Prayers focuses on verses 1 and 2 and verses 14 through 16.

In the opening verses, David pours out his heart with honest, vivid words. We do not need to fancy up our prayers. Calling out to God also means giving up our own efforts to save ourselves and trusting him to do it.

Then the psalm gives a picture of sin. The wicked man conceives evil, digs a pit, and falls into it himself. The devotional asks where our own plans and schemes trap us, and points us to look up to Christ, who reaches down to forgive and cleanse us.

📖 Click to Show the Transcript of this Devotional

Good morning and welcome to morning Psalms and Prayers for Thursday, June 4th. Today we're going to be looking at Psalm 7, but we begin with a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer once again. Let us pray.

Almighty and everlasting God, give to us the increase of faith, hope, and love, and that we may obtain that which you promise, make us to love that which you command, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

As I said, we're going to be in Psalm 7. It's a bit of a longer one. I looked at splitting it up into two different parts, but I came to the conclusion that probably the best thing to do is to do the whole thing because there just wasn't a good spot to break it off. So we'll be a little bit longer on this video today, and I'm even making it longer by talking about it. So let's just go hear the word of the Lord from Psalm 7.

O Lord my God, in you do I take refuge. Save me from my pursuers and deliver me. Lest like a lion, they tear my soul apart, rending it in pieces with none to deliver. O Lord my God, if I have done this, if there is wrong in my hands, if I have repaid my friend with evil or plundered my enemy without cause, let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it. Let him trample my life to the ground and lay my glory in the dust. Arise, O Lord, in your anger. Lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies. Awake for me, you have appointed a judgment. Let the assembly of the peoples be gathered about you. Over it return on high. The Lord judges the peoples. Judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness and according to the integrity that is in me. O let the evil of the wicked come to an end, and may you establish the righteous, you who test the minds and hearts, O righteous God. My shield is with God, who saves the upright in heart. God is a righteous judge and a God who feels indignation every day. If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword. He has bent and readied his bow. He has prepared for him his deadly weapons, making his arrows fiery shafts. Behold the wicked man conceives evil and is pregnant with mischief and gives birth to lies. He makes a pit digging it out and falls into the hole that he has made. His mischief returns upon his own head and on his own skull his violence descends. I will give to the Lord the thanks due to his righteousness, and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord Most High.

As we begin looking at this today, we're looking at verses 1 and 2. O Lord my God, in you do I take refuge. Save me from all my pursuers and deliver me. Lest like a lion, they tear my soul apart, rending it in pieces with none to deliver. You have to love the way David starts out these prayers, right? He is in trouble, and we're finding David in trouble rather often here, right? We've seen this before, that he's asking for help from God. But you just have to love the way he starts him out. O Lord my God, in you I take refuge. He calls out to God to save him, and we've talked about this multiple times, that this needs to be our response, that we're calling out to God just as the psalmist does here. But I love his imagery. Lest a lion tear my soul apart, rend it to pieces with none to deliver. You know, I think we can feel like that sometimes. We feel completely overwhelmed by what is going on in our lives. And this shows us some ways to approach God.

I've mentioned this so many times before, but it's okay to pour out our hearts in this way. We don't have to fancy up our prayers because we think that God needs to hear it nice, or we need to be nice when we pray. But if we're really, really hurting, we need to be honest with how we're going, or how things are going for us. We need to be truly honest as we go to prayer. And that's an important part of looking at the Psalter, because we're seeing ways in which to pray. We're learning to pray by looking at God's Word. These would have been the songs of the people of God in the Old Testament. These would have been the Psalms and the songs that Jesus sang, that his disciples sang. And we're learning here the heart of the Christian faith, and that we're seeing this calling out to God and expecting him to deliver us. Ultimately, that is what we're expecting, right? We're expecting God to save us in Christ. That is what we believe will happen.

And so to call out, it's saying that I am abandoning all my own efforts to save myself, but I'm going to trust in you, God. I'm going to take away all of me and let you be the one who saves. I'm not going to try and save myself with my own works, but instead I'm going to trust in you and your salvation.

And then secondly, I wanted to look at verses 14 through 16. "Behold, the wicked man conceives evil, and is pregnant with mischief, and gives birth to lies. He makes a pit, digging it out, and falls into the hole that he has made. His mischief returns upon his head, and on his own skull his violence descends."

I wanted to point this out because I think it's such a good description of sin. I think it really points out to us how we sort of become entrapped by sin. It starts out in us, and we have wickedness that we plot, and we become pregnant. It conceives evil. We become pregnant with that mischief, and we lie about our intentions and about what we want to do. We either lie to ourselves or to someone else, or even we attempt to fruitlessly lie to God. But yet what does the description continue with? He makes a pit, digging it out. Okay, makes a pit. A pit is supposed to trap someone else, right? But what does the psalmist say? It falls into the hole that he has made. He's caught with his own trap. And so often our sin, that is what happens to us in our sin, we plot and we conspire, and we are trying to get the best for ourselves, but ultimately what do we do? We build a trap of sin for ourselves. It destroys us. It hardens our hearts. It makes us, it causes us to move away from God.

And so that's just a reminder to us of this image, it's such a reminder to us of what our sin does. We make a pit, we've got good ideas, and then we fall in ourselves. And I think we've all dug a hole at some point in our lives. Imagine doing that. Imagine the futility of that. To dig a hole and then to just fall in. That you were on the edge and you just biffed it, right? And so this is the continuing theme here. This mischief returns upon his own head and on his own skull, this violence descends. Our sin gets us ourselves. And that is why we want to turn away from sin, because it's fruitless. It not only is going against God, but it damages us. The things that we even think we're doing that would benefit us, it's actually harming us. It's a pit that we trap ourselves in.

And so may we turn away from our sin. May we turn away from that trap, turn away from that pit. And the only way that we can truly do that is by trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ. By saying that, "I am going to trust in you. I'm going to trust your ways instead of mine." And so may we not dig a trap for ourselves. Instead may we instead look up. Instead of looking at that hole and plotting a hole, may we look up, may we look to the Lord Jesus Christ and put our trust in him and follow his ways. Because that is the way that we avoid this pitfall of sin.

And the good news is that even when we do fall into that trap, God is there for us. God is there reaching down to us. Just as Christ came down to us from heaven to save us from our sin, he is there to forgive us of our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. What wonderful news for us as believers as we head out into the world today. Let us go to prayer.

Gracious God, O Lord our God in you do we take refuge. Save us from our pursuers and deliver us. We know that you are the one who cares for us and delivers us. We put our trust in you and put aside the belief that we can do anything to save ourselves apart from you. We rest in your grace to pull us out of the pit of sin.

We lift up to you today those in our congregation who are suffering sickness and injury. We ask for your healing hand to be upon them and that you would bless them with strength. We ask for effectiveness in the treatments they are receiving. If they have to travel for these treatments we pray that you would bless them with safety. We also lift up the medical professionals that are working with them and that you would give their hands skill and grant wisdom to their minds. Most importantly bless the sick with the peace that passes all understanding and comes from your sure promise of salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ.

As we start another day we pray that through your word and spirit we would be reminded that our shield is with you. We know that you save the upright in heart and we pray that we would be blessed today with the confidence that we have upright hearts not because of anything that we have done but because you have blessed us with faith in Jesus Christ. In whose name we pray. Amen.

Well, hope your Thursday is a great one.

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