“Deal bountifully with Your servant, that I may live and keep Your word. Open my eyes, that I may behold wonderful things from Your law. I am a stranger in the earth; do not hide Your commandments from me. My soul is crushed with longing after Your ordinances at all times. You rebuke the arrogant, the cursed, who wander from Your commandments. Take away reproach and contempt from me, for I observe Your testimonies. Even though princes sit and talk against me, Your servant meditates on Your statutes. Your testimonies also are my delight; they are my counselors” (Psa 119:17–24).
And because we belong to God’s perfectly obedient Servant, his prayer becomes our prayer.
How well known Psalm 119 is as a psalm about the Torah! But look more closely, and we discover something surprising: the man who loves God’s Torah is also a suffering servant. Twice in the Gimel stanza, the one praying calls himself “Your servant.” As we have already seen throughout the Psalter, this devotion to God’s Torah has royal overtones, fulfilling Deuteronomy’s command that Israel’s king continually read and obey God’s Torah (Deut 17:18–20; see Psalms 1–2; 19–21; 110, 118–119). Indeed, David himself twice calls himself “Your servant” in Psalm 19 (vv. 11, 13).
But this Torah-loving royal servant suffers. He is a crushed stranger in the earth (vv. 19–20), held in contempt while princes sit and speak against him (vv. 21–23). Yet rather than being consumed by their words, God’s servant meditates on God’s words (v. 23).
This portrait leads us once again to Isaiah’s suffering servant. He too is despised before rulers (Isa 49:7). And like the servant of Psalm 119, he is an obedient disciple whose ear is opened to God’s word and who does not turn back, even when his back is beaten, his beard plucked, and he is spit upon and humiliated (Isa 50:4–7).
And because we belong to God’s perfectly obedient Servant, his prayer becomes our prayer. Here we encounter a beautiful irony. When we pray the servant’s prayer, “Open my eyes, that I may behold wonderful things from Your Torah,” God opens our eyes to behold the most wonderful thing of all. For then we see how the Torah and the Psalms point us to God’s suffering servant!
