Psalm 70 is a short one, with virtually the same wording as Psalm 40's verses 13-17.

It is in four succinct parts.

1: Make haste to help me, God.

2: Deal with whatever wants to hurt me.

3: Let whatever seeks You rejoice and be glad in You.

4: I am poor and needy. Make haste to help me, God; You are my deliverer, do not delay.

This is one of those psalms where much is said in just a few words.

It begins and ends with the repeated chorus, ‘Make haste, O God.’ Spiritually, to make haste is not about a short period of time, but more about the certainty of things. The speaker wants God to act and bring an end to the tension of conflicting states. (Arcana Caelestia 5284)

One clear point is that the speaker has come to see, to know, and to feel, the difference between the kind of thoughts which invade our weakness, our poverty, and our impotence, and those which openly give confidence to trust, to assurance and to reliance on the Lord. ‘Let those who love Your salvation say continually, “Let God be magnified!” (Divine Love and Wisdom 413)

To ‘magnify the Lord’ is in effect to make the Lord magnificent. Spiritually, magnificence is to become aware to the point of awe of how great is the being, purpose and power of the Lord, who is in reality the All in All, in whom we live and move and have our being. One passage in our spiritual teachings says that if we were to think about the size of the Lord, He would be the size of the universe, about which we have only a limited idea. (Heaven and Hell 85)

In speaking about the ploys and cunning of those who seek my life – really who seek to determine that the loves of my life are like theirs – the request is for them to become ashamed and confounded, and so to turn back from this. This view is how the angels in heaven wish anything for those caught up in the delights of evil, that they may even feel ashamed of this and so desist from it. This is also the Divine desire for them, even though the Lord knows how all things will come to pass. (Apocalypse Revealed 681)

The curious phrase, ‘Aha, aha!’ is one which occurs in several psalms and is about the quality in evil which seeks to accuse, to stir up such thoughts of guilt and wrong in a person’s mind and then to confront the person of their culpability.

An interesting shape to this psalm is that it begins and ends personally with the speaker confessing his need to be delivered. In between this, the awareness is of all that goes on in hell and in heaven, almost on the cosmic scale.

412. We can see and confirm what I have been talking about in a kind of image in the way the heart answers to love and the lungs to discernment as already described [371-393], since if the heart answers to love, then its limited forms, its arteries and veins, answer to desires, with the ones in the lungs answering to desires for what is true. Further, since there are other vessels in the lungs (called airways) that make respiration possible, these vessels answer to perceptions.

We need to be fully aware that the arteries and veins in the lungs are not desires and that the breaths are not perceptions and thoughts, but that they are corresponding functions. They are actually responsive or synchronized. It is the same for the heart and the lungs. They are not love and discernment, but are corresponding functions; and since they are corresponding functions, we can see one in the other. Anyone who knows the whole structure of the lungs from anatomy and makes a careful comparison with discernment can see quite clearly that discernment does nothing on its own. It neither senses nor thinks on its own, but does everything because of desires proper to love. The ones in discernment are called the desire already described for knowing, understanding, and seeing [what is true]. All the different states of the lungs depend on blood from the heart and from the vena cava and aorta; while the breathing that takes place in the bronchial tube occurs in keeping with their state, since breathing stops when the inflow of blood stops.

I could disclose a great deal more by comparing the structure of the lungs to the discernment that it answers to, but since not many people are familiar with the science of anatomy, and since it beclouds a subject to explain or support it by unfamiliar examples, I may not say more about this. I am wholly convinced by what I know about the structure of the lungs that love marries itself to discernment by means of its desire and that discernment does not marry itself to any desire of love. Rather, it is married willingly by love so that love may have a sensory and active life.

At all costs, we must realize that we have two forms of breathing, one of the spirit and one of the body. The breathing of the spirit depends on the fibers that come from the brain, and the breathing of the body depends on the blood vessels that come from the heart and from the vena cava and aorta.

Clearly, too, it is thought that gives rise to breathing and it is love's desire that gives rise to thought, since thought without desire is exactly like breathing without a heart--impossible. We can therefore see that love's desire marries itself to discernment's thought, as just stated. It is the same with the heart in the lungs.