Send Out Your Light and Your Truth
1 Vindicate me, God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation. Oh, deliver me from deceitful and wicked men. 2 For you are the God of my strength. Why have you rejected me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? 3 Oh, send out your light and your truth. Let them lead me. Let them bring me to your holy hill, to your tents. 4 Then I will go to the altar of God, to God, my exceeding joy. I will praise you on the harp, God, my God. 5 Why are you in despair, my soul? Why are you disturbed within me? Hope in God! For I shall still praise him: my Savior, my helper, and my God.
The same poem finishes, and the way out is asked for as two guides rather than a change of circumstances.
Vindicate me, God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation. Oh, deliver me from deceitful and wicked men.
This psalm has no heading, shares the refrain of the one before it, and repeats a line from it word for word. It is almost certainly the last stanza of the same poem, separated at some point in the collection's history, and it should be read as the conclusion the previous psalm was reaching for.
For you are the God of my strength. Why have you rejected me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?
The second half of the verse is identical to Psalms 42:9, and the first half is the difficulty in miniature: he calls God his strength in the same breath as asking why he has been rejected. The collection does not treat that as incoherent. It is what holding on actually sounds like.
Oh, send out your light and your truth. Let them lead me. Let them bring me to your holy hill, to your tents.
The request that resolves both psalms, and it is not what the situation would suggest. He does not ask for the enemy to be removed, for the exile to end, or for his feelings to change. He asks for two things to be dispatched — light and truth — and personifies them as guides sent ahead to bring him home.
The pairing is exact. Light shows what is there; truth is what is actually there. Together they are the answer to a man who has spent two psalms unable to tell whether God has forgotten him, and what they are asked to do is lead.
Then I will go to the altar of God, to God, my exceeding joy. I will praise you on the harp, God, my God.
The destination is stated twice and corrected as it goes: to the altar of God — and then, immediately, to God. The altar was never the point either. The phrase rendered my exceeding joy is literally the gladness of my rejoicing, a doubling the Hebrew uses when one word will not carry the weight.
Why are you in despair, my soul? Why are you disturbed within me? Hope in God! For I shall still praise him: my Savior, my helper, and my God.
The refrain for the third time, and it closes the poem. Nothing has changed in the circumstances between its first appearance and its last. What has changed is that the request has been narrowed from vindication to guidance, and the last word of the whole piece is my God — which is the exact thing the enemies had been asking him to produce.
settled What this mark means