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¹ Save me, O God, by your name;
    vindicate me by your might.
² Hear my prayer, O God;
    listen to the words of my mouth.

³ Arrogant foes are attacking me;
    ruthless people are trying to kill me—
    people without regard for God.

⁴ Surely God is my help;
    the Lord is the one who sustains me.

⁵ Let evil recoil on those who slander me;
    in your faithfulness destroy them.

⁶ I will sacrifice a freewill offering to you;
    I will praise your name, Lord, for it is good.
⁷ You have delivered me from all my troubles,
    and my eyes have looked in triumph on my foes. (Psalm 54)

We tend to read things in a linear fashion, from beginning to end.  We assume, therefore, that the point of whatever it is that we’ve read comes at the end.  But in the scriptures, that’s not necessarily the case. 

Material that is written for the ear instead of the eye, that is, material that was transmitted orally in a largely illiterate culture, often has a different logic to it.  Instead of linear, it is cyclical, such that the main point falls in the middle instead of at the end. 

You can picture it like the ripples of the water when a pebble is thrown in.  The pebble falls in the middle, and the implications radiate outward in all directions in the form of waves.  This is the reality of acoustics as well: sound waves also radiate outward from the centre.  Such is the logic of an oral culture and its rhetoric. 

You’ll find this logic of composition all over in the scriptures: in the prophets, the psalms, the gospels, even in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that Pastor Michael and I recently did some preaching through.  You may have heard a different selection of verses to mark out a section and a different emphasis come out of our preaching on this letter than you’ve heard before, because we were looking for the point in the middle of a section, instead of at its end (see, for instance, how the cross shows up at the beginning, end, and middle of 1 Corinthians 1:17-2:2).

So it is here in Psalm 54.  Looking at this psalm acoustically you can see the parallel rings that radiate out from the centre.

Verses 1-2 and 6-7, the verses that mark the beginning and ending of the psalm, both speak to God’s salvation and the activity of worship.  Verses 1-2 ask that God save, deliver, and hear prayer.  Verses 6-7 report that God has done just that, even as the psalmist continues in prayers and offerings of praise and thanks.

Verses 3 and 5 speak of the foe.  Verse 3 names these people as ruthless and faithless people bent on killing.  Verse 5 sets the faithfulness of God against the faithlessness of the enemy, and asks God to deal with them accordingly, that the faithful God might let their ruthless, faithless ways recoil upon them. 

Verse 4 is the centre.  It is the pivot around which the whole psalm moves.  It is the affirmation of faith that changes the first half of the psalm into the second half. 

The psalmist says this in that central verse: “surely God is my help; the Lord is the one who sustains me.”  This is the reality that causes the psalmist to ask that faithless people be dealt with by the faithfulness of God.  It is the reality that transforms the prayer for salvation in verses 1-2 into deliverance and praise by verses 6-7.

Because God is our help and sustainer, we can trust that he will hear when we pray, that he will save us when we ask, and that he will remain faithful even when we are surrounded by faithlessness.