Big Idea: God outstrategizes evil and its perpetrators and exhausts their arsenal of weapons.

Understanding the Text

Psalm 64 is an individual lament, identifying the problem that stimulated the psalmist as the “threat of the enemy,” the “conspiracy of the wicked,” and the “plots of evildoers” (64:1–2). It sums up with the aphoristic commentary of verse 6c: “Surely the human mind and heart are cunning” (lit., “the inward person and heart are deep”). In addition to this detailed description of the problem (the malicious speech of the wicked [64:3] and the strategy of the wicked [64:4–6]), which is not always the case with the laments, the psalmist presents God’s response to the evil machinations of David’s enemies (64:7–8), followed by the human reaction to God’s work (64:9) and the pro…