God’s Word for You

Psalm 141:5-7 Plowing is done to sow seed

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Friday, August 8, 2025

5 Let a righteous man strike me—it is mercy.
  Let him rebuke me—it is oil on my head.
  Do not let my head refuse it.
  For my prayer is still against their evil deeds.

Here David says what his son Solomon would phrase in a similar way: “Wounds from a friend can be trusted” (Proverbs 27:6). When a friend rebukes me because of a sin or an error, I know that it is for my good, and for the good of God’s kingdom. When an enemy speak kindly to you, he is about to stab you in the back (if he hasn’t already). It is not affection speaking, but the fuming breath of the devil who wants to destroy you in your sins. The devil says, “You’re doing just fine. Keep it up. Don’t worry about a thing.” But you are stepping off a cliff. A friend will be willing to hurt you when it will help. All the better if he does it in private, but whether he does that or not, the rod he strikes you with is the from the heart of a friend. So his striking words are mercy. His rebuke is like the oil that the ancients used for every kind of medicine. We might say, “His words are aspirin.” When the Lord himself strikes us, he does so with his word, and we cannot hide. “The voice of the Lord strikes with flashes of lightning; the voice of the Lord shakes the desert” (Psalm 29:7-8). His rod of correction imparts wisdom (Proverbs 29:15).

At the end of the verse David adds, “For my prayer is still against their evil deeds.” “They” of course are those from verse 4, wicked men and their wicked deeds. So David is praying that he will not refuse the oil of correction, because he truly does not want to sin with wicked men, even though the three great enemies, the devil, the world, and his own flesh, lean toward sin all the time. Such is the burden of the fallen Christian: to know Christ, but to be drawn toward sin. “I fail to do the good I want to do. Instead, the evil I do not want to do, that is what I keep on doing” (Romans 7:19). But like Paul, David realizes the truth of this. “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” And David prays: “Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him” (Psalm 32:2). David wants to be delivered from such evildoers, to be kept from all harm, so that he can lift his eyes to God’s throne in heaven.

6 Their rulers will be thrown down the sides of the cliff,
  then they will hear that my words were pleasant.
7 As when one plows and breaks up the earth,
  so our bones are scattered at the mouth of the grave.

These two verse have difficulties, but that shouldn’t keep us from considering them. In fact, considering what they don’t mean will help us to see more clearly what they do mean. Verse 6, about the rulers thrown over the cliff, can only mean what it says, that the leaders (rulers or judges) will be overthrown. In their downfall, pictured literally here as being thrown down a cliff, they will see their error and understand the gospel that David proclaimed and believed, his “pleasant words.” The unusual thing in this verse is that the Hebrew text says that they will fall down “the hands of the cliff,” maybe meaning the destructive power of the rocks, the sharp outcroppings that do the worst damage to the falling man. But the second part of the verse might be subordinate to the first and not sequential. That means either that they might acknowledge that David’s words were right (as they die, “dashed to pieces like pottery,” Psalm 2:9), or that, following punishment, that they had time to consider, to believe, and repent—trusting at last in God’s unfailing love. The intention of the Lord is that sinners would come to repentance, but the reality is that many sinners do not.

Verse 7 is not hard to translate, but it is not easy to understand. If it means that believers’ bones are scattered at the mouth of a grave by their enemies, then the enemies were thinking that this was an act of desecration. But not so the righteous! The verse can’t mean that. The verse began in hope, “As when one plows and breaks up the earth.” This is not how an ancient burial happened. It isn’t even the way we would describe digging a grave in the soil today. Such dirt is broken open with a shovel (and this isn’t how ancient burials were done, at any rate). David says “plowing, breaking up the soil.” Plowing is only done in order to sow seed. Therefore this can only be a description of the body buried in anticipation of the resurrection. It is cryptic to some enemies, perhaps, but understandable to us, to those who have faith. “When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed… but God gives it a body as he has determined” (1 Corinthians 15:37-38). This is a passage of joy, and not of doubt. “He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy carrying sheaves with him” (Psalm 126:6). This is the harvest of the resurrection, the true harvest of joy.

Verse 7, then, becomes the best candidate for identifying which words David spoke that his enemies would find “pleasant” following repentance. For as I have said many times, we are blessed to believe and to confess the great final sentences of the Creed:

“I believe in the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.”

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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