Psalm 69 is a deep pleading to God for His protection and restoration. Stricken phrases run all through it, until verse 29 when the mood changes to one of more confidence and assurance. Such experiential phrases as ‘My throat is dry’, ‘I am the song of the drunkards’, ‘Let not the pit shut its mouth on me.’

This is also a psalm which gives expression and emotion to the Lord’s passion and the temptations he endured. It echoes events in the gospel story, for example, in verse 21 it says, ‘They gave me gall for my food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink’. (see Matthew 27:34, and Apocalypse Explained 519.2)

We are going to pick out some of the main themes in this long psalm and work with them spiritually. First, there is a regular use of ‘deep’, ‘sink’, ‘mire’, ‘shame’ and ‘reproach’. The spiritual idea of such words as us being ‘brought low’ has to do with our experience of temptation. Spiritual temptation originates in the desire of hell to destroy. It is an attack on what we have come to most love, especially that which concerns the Lord. It is a spiritual crisis. If we've been spiritually 'up', making progress, the hells attack our new good loves, wanting to knock us down. (See Arcana Caelestia 5036)

Another theme in the psalm is the endeavour of our enemies. They hate without any cause, they are pitiless, they sit in the gate and speak against me. They openly and endlessly plot to destroy. They include family members. Thinking about this spiritually, it's clear that hell and evil spirits have expertise and cunning to break down resistance. Always note that spiritually, ‘enemies’ are not other people but the evils and the states they inflict. (See Heaven and Hell 580)

A third theme running through is the speaker’s frequent comment that his persecution is not because of himself but because of his faithfulness to the Lord. ‘Because for Your sake I have borne reproach’ ; ‘Zeal for Your house has eaten me up and the reproaches of those who reproach You have fallen on me’. (See New Jerusalem 187) Only those who are active in regeneration will experience spiritual temptation, and regeneration cannot happen without temptation.

Another theme is that the Lord knows all that is going on in the heart, mind and state of the person experiencing this distress. ‘O God, You know my foolishness and my sins are not hidden from You.’ ; ‘You know my reproach, my shame, my dishonour; my adversaries are all before You’ . (See Apocalypse Revealed 262)

And in verse 26 there is the additional idea that the Lord has brought about this distress, which, while it is only an appearance, is a permission so that we are strengthened through it. ‘For they persecute the ones You have struck, and talk of the grief of those You have wounded.’ (Divine Providence 234)

Finally, there is the theme of the accountability of evil in bringing on the states which terrify and distress us spiritually. God knows all things, including the desires of evil, and the laws of Providence bring on the consequence – not the punishment – that evil will bring its own downfall. ‘Let their table become a snare before them, and their well-being a trap’ ; ‘Let their dwelling place be desolate; let no one live in their tents’ ; ‘Let them be blotted out from the book of the living’. (See Divine Providence 6490)

With careful scrutiny, one can see and appreciate the gradual stirring of the speaker all through this psalm, moving from abject fear, through clearer and clearer reasoning, to the point of confidently affirming the Lord and all His saving power and presence. The important takeaway for us is that we CAN make the same shift.

183. It may seem unlikely that we would deny God if we were to see divine providence and its workings clearly, because it would seem that if we were to see it clearly we could not help but acknowledge it and thereby acknowledge God. However, the opposite is the case.

Divine providence is never acting in the same direction as our deliberate love. It is always acting against it. This is because from our own inherited evil we are constantly hungering for the deepest hell, while the Lord, through his divine providence, is constantly leading us away from it and drawing us out of it, first to some milder hell, then out of hell, and eventually to himself in heaven. This effort of divine providence is going on all the time; so if we were to see or feel vividly this carrying off and pulling away, we would be outraged. God would become our enemy, and in the evil of our self-centeredness we would deny him. So to prevent us from knowing about this, we are kept in a free state where all we can know is that we are leading ourselves.

[2] Let some examples serve to illustrate this. By heredity, we want to become powerful and rich, and to the extent that these loves are not held in check, we want to become more powerful and more rich until we are the most powerful and most rich of all. Even then we are not satisfied, but want to be more powerful than God and to possess heaven itself. This obsession lies hidden deep within our inherited evil and is therefore within our life and in the very nature of that life.

Divine providence does not take this evil away instantly, because if it did we would not be alive. It takes it away quietly and gradually without our knowing anything about it. It does so by letting us act according to thoughts that we fashion rationally, and then it uses various rational, civil, and moral means to lead us away. So we are led away to the extent that we can be led in freedom. Further, no evil can be taken from us unless it surfaces and is seen and recognized. It is like a wound that is not healed until it has been opened.

[3] This means that if we were to know and see that with his divine providence the Lord is acting against the love of our life, the love that gives us the greatest pleasure, all we could do would be to go in the opposite direction, to be outraged, to fight back, and to scold, ultimately distancing the working of divine providence from our own evil by denying providence, which means denying God. We would do this particularly if we saw ourselves being blocked from success, lowered in rank, or deprived of wealth.

[4] We should realize, though, that the Lord never leads us away from striving for high positions or from gaining wealth, only from an obsession with striving for high position simply for the sake of eminence, or for self-seeking reasons, and similarly from gathering wealth solely for display or for its own sake. As he leads us away from these obsessions, he brings us into a love of service so that we look at eminence not for our own sake but for the sake of service. So it becomes something we seek for service primarily and for ourselves secondarily, and not for ourselves primarily and for service secondarily. The same applies to wealth.

The Lord tells us in many places in the Word that he always humbles the proud and raises up the humble; and what it says in the Word is characteristic of his divine providence.