Psalm 57, a prayer for safety from enemies.
This psalm is filled with powerful images, both of the protection and safekeeping of the Lord and of the treacherous ploys of the hells to pull us down. Small wonder then that the opening words of this psalm is the intense cry, “Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me! For my soul trusts in You.”
This psalm, like all of them, is sharing with us at an inner level the spiritual states of the Lord when he was in the world. He experienced the attacks of evil and their subtlety and he experienced the strengthening of his will as he owned his whole commitment to God within him to keep him safe.
For us, the psalm reminds us that in our lives we experience the way that our devotion to the Lord brings us into an increasing knowledge of our own weak and self-centred states and how, as we deal with these by our own will and determination, we come even more strongly into greater devotion, gratitude and surrender to the Lord. (Arcana Caelestia 9296)
The psalm itself comes in three parts: The first part (Verses 1-3) is a heartfelt cry from the speaker of his need of the Lord to guard and protect him from danger. The second part (Verses 4-6) is a description of the dangers that lie in wait for the person who is devoted to the Lord, ending with the belief that the evil will fall into the very pit they have prepared for their victim. The third part is a paean of hope and praise in God with song and music, and with a declamation of a steadfast heart which knows and trusts the Lord’s power and mercy. (Arcana Caelestia 9283)
The imagery used in the second section is particularly graphic with very rich spiritual meanings which describe how the hells entice and seek to trap us in our own weaknesses.
‘Lions’ represent the apparent power of hell which seeks to destroy and tear our faith to pieces. (See True Christian Religion 123 at the end of the passage.)
Men whose ‘teeth are spears and arrows’ describe the apparent determination of evil to attack us by speaking what is false and accusatory to harm us. (Heaven and Hell 575). This is the same with the phrase ‘Their tongue a sharp sword.’
‘They have prepared a net’ stands for the deviousness and underhandedness of evil seeking to make us feel trapped by being caught up in the net of our own unworthiness and human fallibility.
Equally, evil digs a pit for us, intending for us to fall into it by some wrong judgment or unthinking claim on our part (Apocalypse Explained 666.5). But as the psalm says, those caught up in seeking evil are themselves the ones who fall into their own prepared pit.
This graphic psalm ends with the voice of singing, since one who has experienced the horrors of evil and the violent attacks of hell into our own personal thoughts and intentions cannot but sing out the praise of the Lord when deliverance is made. ‘I will sing and praise. I will awaken the dawn.’ (Apocalypse Revealed 279)
