seekeroftruth
Well-Known Member
Psalm 102[a]A prayer of an afflicted person who has grown weak and pours out a lament before the Lord.
1 Hear my prayer, Lord;
let my cry for help come to you.
2 Do not hide your face from me
when I am in distress.
Turn your ear to me;
when I call, answer me quickly.
3 For my days vanish like smoke;
my bones burn like glowing embers.
4 My heart is blighted and withered like grass;
I forget to eat my food.
5 In my distress I groan aloud
and am reduced to skin and bones.
6 I am like a desert owl,
like an owl among the ruins.
7 I lie awake; I have become
like a bird alone on a roof.
8 All day long my enemies taunt me;
those who rail against me use my name as a curse.
9 For I eat ashes as my food
and mingle my drink with tears
10 because of your great wrath,
for you have taken me up and thrown me aside.
11 My days are like the evening shadow;
I wither away like grass.
12 But you, Lord, sit enthroned forever;
your renown endures through all generations.
13 You will arise and have compassion on Zion,
for it is time to show favor to her;
the appointed time has come.
14 For her stones are dear to your servants;
her very dust moves them to pity.
15 The nations will fear the name of the Lord,
all the kings of the earth will revere your glory.
16 For the Lord will rebuild Zion
and appear in his glory.
17 He will respond to the prayer of the destitute;
he will not despise their plea.
18 Let this be written for a future generation,
that a people not yet created may praise the Lord:
19 “The Lord looked down from his sanctuary on high,
from heaven he viewed the earth,
20 to hear the groans of the prisoners
and release those condemned to death.”
21 So the name of the Lord will be declared in Zion
and his praise in Jerusalem
22 when the peoples and the kingdoms
assemble to worship the Lord.
23 In the course of my life(b) he broke my strength;
he cut short my days.
24 So I said:
“Do not take me away, my God, in the midst of my days;
your years go on through all generations.
25 In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands.
26 They will perish, but you remain;
they will all wear out like a garment.
Like clothing you will change them
and they will be discarded.
27 But you remain the same,
and your years will never end.
28 The children of your servants will live in your presence;
their descendants will be established before you.”
a. Psalm 102:1 In Hebrew texts 102:1-28 is numbered 102:2-29.
b. Psalm 102:23 Or By his power
This commentary is from the easy English site.
Psalm 102 has 2 stories! The first was when a young man who was dying wrote the psalm. The other was when, 300 years later, the Jews in Egypt translated the psalm into Greek. (Jews are people who were born from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their children.) They changed the end. They did not change it very much. But then the young man who was dying meant Jesus!
The first young man lived about 540 B.C. B.C. means years Before Christ came to the earth. The young man was a Jew. But he did not live in Judah. The Babylonian army had beaten Judah and taken many of the people to live in Babylon. We call this the exile. It started in 606 B.C. and ended 70 years later. The prophet Jeremiah had said the *exile would go on for 70 years. A prophet is someone who speaks or writes God’s words. He wrote "After you have lived 70 years in Babylon, I (the LORD) will come to you. I will do what I said I would do. I will cause you to come back to this place (Judah)" (Jeremiah 29:10). Now the young man that wrote the psalm must have known this. He wrote in verse 13, "The time has come when this should happen". He knew that God would do what he had promised. LORD is a special name for God. It is a special name that his servants used. They agreed that they would love and obey him. Then he would protect them (stop people hurting them).
We do not know why the young man was ill. We know that he was young because he wrote in verse 23 "He (God) has made me ill in the middle of my life". So, he was not an old man. He did not remember Judah. But he wanted to live long enough to go with them when the Jews returned home. So he prayed in verse 24, "Do not let me die in the middle of my life". We pray when we talk to God. We call what we say to him a prayer.
Christians thought of the young man dying as Jesus. But why did the Jews change the end of the psalm when they translated it from Hebrew into Greek? Hebrew was the language that the Jews spoke in 540 B.C., but later they spoke either Aramaic or Greek. Now there were no vowels in the Hebrew language when they wrote it down. Vowels are the letters a, e, i, o and u. In 250 B.C., when they translated it into Greek, the Jews used one set of vowels. Later, when they wrote the Hebrew down many years later, they used another set of vowels. Most of the psalm is the same in both Hebrew and Greek, but the end is different.
This commentary is from studylight.org.Some have supposed that David might have written it, but the depiction of Jerusalem in ruins (Psalms 102:13) points rather to the times of the Captivity.
On the basis of Psalms 102:13-21, the date seems to have been in the time of the captivity ... Beyond all question, the language used would express the feelings of many pious Hebrews in the times of the exile, such as the sorrow, the sadness, the cherished hopes, and prayers of many a one in that prolonged and painful captivity.
There are three divisions of the psalm: (1) Psalms 102:1-11 describes the terrible sufferings of the afflicted one. (2) Psalms 102:12-22 dwells upon the hopes for relief. (3) And Psalms 102:23-28 speaks of the unchanging God as contrasted with the changing world.
I've been saying this over and over and over.... God controls time. God can take us quickly before a truck squishes us flat as a fritter.... or he can let us stay and we'll have to heal from being squished flatter than a fritter.
When the people wouldn't change.... when they kept thinking they knew more than God.... when they kept bringing in those shiny little idols and worshiping them.... when they kept worshiping Molech the god used to burn babies alive while the people sang loudly to cover the screams..... God had Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, take them into captivity..... when the captivity began.... most of the men were either murdered or castrated..... those who survived were taken on a three or four month march to Babylon where they were slaves.
One commentary says David wrote this poem..... but if it's about returning from exile... it's after David's time.....
One commentary says it was written by someone who was was living in Babylon, had heard the stories of Judah, and longed for home. This man knew God controls everything. This man knew that to God this 70 years of captivity was hardly a nano-second in time. This man was longing for Judah.
Apparently the man is well aware of God.... and he seems to be aware of the writings of Daniel too..... Daniel [yep the one from the Lion's Den] had a dream about all this.... and he wrote it down.... Daniel said the people would be in captivity for 70 years and then they would get to return..... this guy wanted to live long enough to see Judah again.
But then again.... what do I know.... these men went to seminary.... they must know what they are talking about... I just can't figure them out.....
