Commentary on Psalms - Volume 3 - Bible Study Guides

Comm on Psalms (V3)John CalvinPSALM 79This is a complaint and lamentation of the Church when severely afflicted; in which, while thefaithful bewail their miserable and, in one sense, undeserved calamities, and accuse their enemiesof cruelty, they acknowledge that, in another sense, they have been justly chastised, and humblybetake themselves to the divine mercy. Their confidence of obtaining this, they rest chiefly uponthe fact, that they saw God’s dishonor conjoined with their calamities, inasmuch as the ungodly,in oppressing the Church, blasphemed his sacred name.A Psalm of Asaph.This psalm, like others, contains internal evidence that it was composed long after the death ofDavid. Some who ascribe it to him allege, in support of this opinion, that the afflictions of theChurch have been here predicted by the spirit of prophecy, to encourage the faithful in bearing thecross when these afflictions should arrive. But there does not appear to be any ground for such asupposition. It is not usual with the prophets thus to speak historically in their prophecies. Whoeverjudiciously reflects upon the scope of the poem will easily perceive that it was composed eitherwhen the Assyrians, after having burnt the temple, and destroyed the city, dragged the people intocaptivity, or when the temple was defiled by Antiochus, after he had slaughtered a vast number ofthe inhabitants of Jerusalem. Its subject agrees very well with either of these periods. Let us thentake it as an admitted point, that this complaint was dictated to the people of God at a time whenthe Church was subjected to oppression, and when matters were reduced to the most hopelesscondition. How cruelly the Assyrians conducted themselves is well known. And under the tyrannyof Antiochus, if a man dared simply to open his mouth in defense of the pure worship of God, hedid it at the risk of immediately forfeiting his life.Psalm 79:1-41. O God! the heathen [or the nations] have come into thy inheritance; they have defiled thetemple of thy holiness; they have laid Jerusalem in heaps. 2. They have given the dead bodies ofthy servants for food to the fowls of the heaven; the flesh of thy meek ones to the beasts of theearth. 3. They have shed their blood like water, around Jerusalem: and there was none to burythem. 4. We have been a reproach to our neighbors; a scorn and a derision to them that are aroundus.1. O God! the heathen have come into thy inheritance. Here the prophet, in the person of thefaithful, complains that the temple was defiled, and the city destroyed. In the second and thirdverses, he complains that the saints were murdered indiscriminately, and that their dead bodieswere cast forth upon the face of the earth, and deprived of the honor of burial. Almost every wordexpresses the cruelty of these enemies of the Church. When it is considered that God had chosenthe land of Judea to be a possession to his own people, it seemed inconsistent with this choice toabandon it to the heathen nations, that they might ignominiously trample it under foot, and lay itwaste at their pleasure. The prophet, therefore, complains that when the heathen came into theheritage of God, the order of nature was, as it were, inverted. The destruction of the temple, ofwhich he speaks in the second clause, was still less to be endured; for thus the service of God onearth was extinguished, and religion destroyed. He adds, that Jerusalem, which was the royal seat169