Psalm 27

Psalm 27 has fourteen verses in two movements. In verses 1-6 the writer speaks about God with confidence: his enemies “stumbled and fell”, and even if an army camps against him, “in this will I be confident.” In verses 7-14 he turns and speaks to God: “Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice”. The second half is quieter and more anxious, and some scholars think the two halves were once separate psalms. Read together, they show something true about faith: confidence and pleading can live in the same person, sometimes on the same day.

At the centre of the first half is a single wish: “One thing have I desired of the Lord”, to dwell in His house, to behold His beauty, and to be hidden “in the secret of his tabernacle” in the time of trouble. The safety the psalm longs for is not only away from enemies but close to God. At the centre of the second half is the face of God. God says “Seek ye my face”, the heart answers “Thy face, Lord, will I seek”, and then comes the fear underneath: “Hide not thy face far from me”.

The heading attributes the psalm to David, and readers have connected it with the years Saul hunted him or with Absalom’s revolt, though the psalm itself names no event. Verse 10, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up”, can be read as the worst loss imaginable or as something that has already happened. Either way it says that even then, God receives. People who have been abandoned, or who live estranged from their families, often find words here they find nowhere else.

Many people pray Psalm 27 at night, in hospital waiting rooms, before a court date, or when a threat is real, and it is often chosen for funerals. It does not end with fear solved, but with an instruction to wait: “Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart”. Praying it does not require you to feel brave already. The writer admits he would have “fainted” without the hope of seeing God’s goodness “in the land of the living”, that is, in this life, not only the next.