"My Soul Is Greatly Troubled" -- The Hidden Treasures in Psalm 6

PLEASE PIN THIS IMAGE - The real meaning of Psalm 6.

Psalm 6 is depressing. On its surface, anyway. There is little about it to evoke the religious warm fuzzies that so many other psalms do.

But when you get beyond the sloppy English translations, the original poem gives a much more comforting view of God… though the actual meaning of Psalm 6 still makes it one of the most emotionally raw prayers in Scripture.

Let’s dive past shallow and shaky English translations and examine the psalm in the light of its original language as well as the culture it came from.

Divine correction equals covenant love.

“O Lord, do not rebuke me in Your anger, nor chastise me in Your hot displeasure,” the Psalm begins.

If you’ve never felt these words from Psalm 6:1 at the bottom of your soul, you haven’t been a Christian very long. Yet, this isn’t about feeling like God is punishing. The Hebrew reveals something beautiful that English obscures.

The word tokhicheni, which is translated as “rebuke,” comes from a legal root meaning “to argue a case” or “to bring charges.” The psalmist is begging God not to bring charges against him. For the ancient Israelites, this kind of correction was considered to be an act of covenant love, like a caring father guiding a beloved child.

Similarly, teyasreni, translated as “discipline,” carries the sense of formative instruction, not mere punishment. King David isn’t begging an angry God to stop being mean to him. Rather, he’s asking his covenant Father to correct him gently instead of striking out in fury.

To treat him as a son being educated, not a criminal being sentenced.

It’s a perfect illustration of how we can approach God in our own times of correction. We can appeal to His fatherly heart, knowing that even His discipline flows from love.

Two for one.

Another important aspect of the first verse is the two expressions of divine displeasure. In the New King James version, they are “anger” and “displeasure.”

The Hebrew word translated into “anger” is ’aph, which literally means “nostril.” The idea is of nostrils flaring in anger.

Chemah, translated as “displeasure,” suggests burning heat or fury. These were two different kinds of divine displeasure that could be appealed to differently.

English translations completely miss the import of the two different words, as they lose the sophisticated theological vocabulary of the original Hebrew, vocabulary that teach how to understand and approach God’s various responses to sin and injustice.

Withering like a dying plant.

Verse two reads, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am weak; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are troubled.”

The word translated as “weak,” ’umlal, doesn’t mean merely faint or tired. The connotation is of withering or wasting away. It’s the same word used for a plant dying from lack of water.

David is describing his very life force draining away.

The phrase “my bones are troubled” is equally powerful. In Hebrew anthropology, bones represented the very structure and strength of a person. For them to be “troubled” implied the deepest stage of an existential crisis.

It’s not hyperbole, as the ancient Hebrews saw emotional, spiritual, and physical suffering as being tightly interwoven. That’s because they didn’t conceive of body-soul-spirit as three separate entities, but as one integrated entity.

Three in one. A human trinity, you might say.

So if a person stated that their bones were troubled, they were saying that they were deeply distressed and anguished in every dimension of their being.

“How long?” Rude, or sacred?

“My soul also is greatly troubled; but You, O Lord – how long? [vs. 3].”

You may have been raised in a denomination that taught you never to question God. About anything. Period.

However, this verse contradicts that way of thinking. The Hebrew cry of ad-matai? appears throughout the Psalms and prophetic literature, and when it does, it’s not just a question, but also a liturgical formula of covenant complaint.

When David asks, “How long?” he’s essentially saying, “I am suffering unjustly or disproportionately. How long will You, as the covenant-keeping God, delay in restoring justice or mercy?”

Again, to our modern ears this strikes us as rude. But ancient Israelite worship encouraged this kind of raw honesty because it demonstrated confidence that the Lord would eventually respond.

So, too, can we bring our “how long” questions to God without fear of offending Him.

Wait…what?

We modern Christians would like to pretend verse five doesn’t even exist.

“For in death there is no remembrance of You; in the grave who will give You thanks?”

Wait. I thought that to be absent from the body was to be present with the Lord. I thought there was an afterlife.

This verse makes it sound like… there isn’t?

Or that death equals eternal torment in a place as far from God as the east is from the west.

The first thing you need to understand is that the word “Sheol” never, ever referred to a place of eternal conscious torment. It was a realm of silence and non-being where worship ceased. Before Yeshua came to defeat death, some believe, death meant the soul falling into a deep, unconscious sleep. Kind of like undergoing anesthesia, they died one second and felt like the next second they were translated into heaven – though they had actually spent hundreds and thousands of years in oblivion until Yeshua’s resurrection.

That place of unconscious waiting was what the ancient Hebrews called “Sheol.”

David’s fear in this verse isn’t punishment after death, but that death was going to cut off his ability to be in covenantal relationship with God through worship and praise.

He was basically saying, “Look, Father, if you let me die, You won’t have me around to adore and honor You anymore.”

It was a stark appeal to God’s desire to be in relationship with His children.

Today, it is a stark reminder that our present moments of praise and relationship with God are precious, and that we shouldn’t take them for granted.

Honor, shame, and social death.

Verse seven reads, “My eye wastes away because of grief; it grows old because of all my enemies.”

In ancient Hebrew culture, having enemies wasn’t just about physical threat. It also represented a challenge to a person’s honor and standing in the community. The enemies in question were people who would benefit from the psalmist’s downfall, making this as much about social death as physical danger.

The wasting away of eyes has nothing to do with macular degeneration, but a profound grief that encompasses the shame of being publicly opposed and potentially defeated. Back then, shame equated to devastation of a person’s identity and relationships.

Swimming in tears.

“I am weary with my groaning; all night I make my bed swim; I drench my couch with my tears,” David laments in Psalm 6:6.

There’s nothing wrong with the translation here, as it captures the vividness of the original language well. However, unless you’re a Hebrew scholar or have been taught the entire Bible by a Hebrew scholar, you’re not going to know that all the moisture in this verse is reference to agricultural irrigation.

Which was integrated, by God’s commands, into Temple worship.

In addition, in Near Eastern culture prolonged crying and fasting were external markers of lament. They were public signs of grief before God.

David’s private mourning mirrors the water rituals of temple worship, turning his body’s distress into a legitimate part of prayer. The psalm teaches us that gut-wrenching emotion isn’t something to hide or be embarrassed about, but to present before God in transparent vulnerability and angst. It give us permission to bring our whole selves, including physical response to pain, into God’s presence without fear or shame.

When prayer transforms reality.

Psalm 6:8-9 reads, “Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity; for the Lord has heard the voice of my weeping. The Lord has heard my supplication; the Lord will receive my prayer.”

As with similar psalms, this one pivots from despair to confidence in God in the space of a nanno-second. Why this oft-repeated literary technique?

For the ancient Hebrews, prayer was a transformative act that could realign the sufferer with divine reality even before circumstances changed. The word shama, translated as “heard” and “received,” carries the meaning of intent hearing with intent to act. The sowers of discord must flee because of God’s imminent response.

This isn’t about asking God for a BMW and mansion on a lake and then thanking Him for the answer, as some kind of magical name-it-and-claim-it formula. Rather, these verses teach us that prayer itself can be the hinge between despair and hope, not because it changes God’s mind, but because it changes our perspective on our circumstances.

Because it revs up our faith.

To sum up…

A deep understanding of Psalm 6 helps us to:

• approach God’s correction with confidence in His fatherly love;
• bring our whole selves – body, mind, and spirit – into prayer;
• express honest protest and complaint as acts of faith;
• understand that prayer itself can be transformative;
• recognize the social and relational dimensions of our struggles; and
• trust in God’s precise understanding of our various needs.

The psalm may be a type and shadow of the confidence that believers should have in spiritual warfare, as the power of Christ through faith can defeat every invisible enemy.

I encourage you to read Psalm 6 with these new insights in mind. You will come away from it much more enriched than before.

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