Psalm Chapter 31 - To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David

Psalm 31: The Broken Vessel and the Large Room

Here is a man who knows what it is to be forgotten — "as a dead man out of mind," he says, "like a broken vessel." The image is precise and terrible: not a vessel that has been emptied, which might be filled again, but one that has been shattered, fit only for the rubbish heap. And yet this same man, in the same psalm, makes one of the most extraordinary declarations of trust in all of Scripture: "My times are in thy hand." Not my good times, not my comprehensible times, but all of them — the slander, the conspiracy, the grief that consumes his eyes and his belly and his very bones. What rescues the psalm from despair is not a change in circumstances but a change in vision. David discovers that God has "set my feet in a large room." The walls of his suffering have not closed in; they have, astonishingly, opened out. And then comes that magnificent image of the divine hiding place — "the secret of thy presence" — where the proud and the slanderous cannot follow. It turns out the broken vessel was being carried all along.

00:00 In Thee I Trust
00:30 A Rock and a Fortress
01:00 Gladness in Mercy, Grief in Trouble
01:30 Forgotten as a Dead Man
02:00 My Times Are in Thy Hand
02:30 The Secret of His Presence
03:00 Be of Good Courage