“Hide me from the plans of evil men”

We often think of the Psalms as spiritually oriented in content. Just last week we talked about seeing and longing for God. But much of the distress in the Psalms is interpersonal. The drama is human drama.

When I was fresh out of college, I worked for four years in a psychiatric hospital. Part of my time was spent with patients who were struggling with addiction. They would come in, stay for a few weeks, get clean and sober, and then go back out into the world. That’s when the real test began.

And that test was primarily relational and social. Yes, the addiction itself would beckon and tempting, but the social grooves of the addiction, the relational patterns, were the biggest predictors of relapse. Friendships and social connections were formed around the addiction. These were your people, your friends. People you cared about, shared memories with, liked. Loved even. It’s one thing to stop taking a drug, but quite another to completely cut yourself off from a network of friends and social connections. And yet, a step back from these relationships would inevitably lead to relapse.

Of course, the social nature of addiction is not exactly what Psalm 64 is talking about. I share it primarily as an illustration of how much of the moral drama in our lives is relational drama. Where the human drama of addiction is more enabling and codependent, the relationships in Psalm 64 are more hostile and antagonistic:

God, hear my voice when I’m in need.
Protect my life from the terror of the enemy.
Hide me from the plans of evil men,
from the multitude of evildoers,
who sharpen their tongues like swords
and shoot bitter words like arrows,
shooting at innocent people from hidden places.

From kids being bullied in schools to workplace bullying to domestic violence to persecuted communities to social marginalization to online doxxing to prejudice, there is a long history of pain here. We are surrounded by cruelty.

Some of these may seem like small things. But constant hostility, even on a small scale, can rob life of joy. People have committed suicide over it. I think, from Samuel 1, of Hannah’s despair in the face of Peninnah’s constant teasing. The scale of the drama is domestic and intimate, with only two people, but the hostility of this one person ruins Hannah’s life. It doesn’t need a crowd. A single mean person can do the trick.

Let’s not spiritualize the Psalms too much, to put it mildly. Yes, there are many Sunday morning hymns in the collection. But the prayers for help often occur in the midst of everyday life, in the midst of human drama. Like Hannah, we cry out to the Lord in those small spaces of pain and sorrow.