Psalm 7 is a prayer, and offers praise to the Lord for deliverance.

Verse 1 opens with an affirmation of trust in the Lord, as well as a prayer to be saved from persecution. This touches on a key point: our relationship with the Lord goes both ways. The Lord can save us when we continually put our trust in Him; however, He cannot save us at a moment’s notice if we only call to Him in desperation (see Swedenborg’s work, True Christian Religion 329[4]).

The first two verses deal with this point well. If we are not living the Lord’s truths through our actions, there is nothing to deliver us when evils tear at our souls.

Verses 3 to 5 address the issue of intentional harm. If we - even as followers of the Lord - repay evil to someone who is at peace with us, this psalm declares that we will be overtaken by our enemies, trampled down, and our honor cast into the dust.

The spiritual meaning here is to acknowledge that we are all capable of evil. We all will stray from the Lord’s commandments from time to time, even if we tell ourselves that we could not, or would not wish to. Far better to admit this than to face the consequences of denial (see Swedenborg’s work, Arcana Caelestia 141).

Verses 6 to 11 pray for the Lord’s righteousness to prevail against evil. This middle section of the psalm presents a somewhat misleading picture of God’s anger; although the text tells us He is “angry with the wicked every day”, it is not individual people, but wickedness itself that He fights. This is supported by the beginning of verse 9: “Let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end.” He opposes wickedness because it prevents people from experiencing the joys of heavenly life.

The last part of the psalm describes the many ways that evil brings about its own downfall. This knowledge can help us understand our personal experiences with wickedness and temptation. If we become ensnared in evils, we will live in fear and suffering of our own making (Arcana Caelestia 3718).

Psalm 7 serves as a reminder that our true enemies are within, and become evident in our unregenerate and unrepentant states (see Swedenborg’s work, Divine Providence 147). We need to battle against these evils, so that they no longer hold power over us.

Taken collectively, the psalms describe the Lord’s inner states during his life in the world, which makes this idea especially relevant. Our work in regeneration mirrors His temptations and the work of glorifying His human.

147. Let me briefly mention how the Lord expels the compulsions to evil that besiege our inner self right from our birth, and how he provides desires for what is good in their place when we use our apparent autonomy to put away evils as sins.

I have already explained [75, 139] that we have an earthly mind, a spiritual mind, and a heavenly mind, and that we are wholly locked into our earthly mind as long as we are caught up in our compulsions to evil and their pleasures. During all this our spiritual mind is closed. However, as soon as we look into ourselves and realize that our evils are sins against God because they are against divine laws, and therefore try to refrain from them, the Lord opens our spiritual mind and comes into our earthly mind by way of its desires for what is true and good. He comes also into our rational processes and from there rearranges the things in our lower, earthly mind that have been in disorder. This is what feels to us like a battle, or like a temptation if we have indulged in these evil pleasures a great deal. There is actually a psychological pain when the pattern of our thoughts is being inverted.

This is a battle against things that are actually within us, things that we feel are part of us; and we cannot fight against ourselves except from a deeper self, and only because of a freedom there. It then follows that the inner self is fighting against the outer self at such times, is doing so in freedom, and is forcing the outer self to obey. This is self-compulsion; and we can see that it is not inconsistent with our freedom and rationality, but quite in accord with them.