The Song of Dancing

Psalm 30 is called “A Psalm of David, a song at the dedication of the temple,” which is interesting because David didn’t build the temple. The word “temple” doesn’t actually appear in the Hebrew; it’s the word for “house.” Scholars have suggested that perhaps David wrote this psalm to dedicate his own royal palace or when he set up the tent in Jerusalem for the ark or when he acquired the land on which Solomon would build the temple or when Solomon did build the temple and someone wrote a song in the tradition of David’s poetry. This psalm is also connected in the Jewish tradition to the festival of Hanukkah, which comes from the word for “dedication” in this psalm’s title. Despite all of these possible contexts, the temple doesn’t actually feature much in these verses at all. Instead, it is a personal psalm of thanksgiving for God’s deliverance from trouble. David begins, “I will extol you, O LORD, for you have drawn me up and have not let my foes rejoice over me.” There’s a play on words here: “extol” means to lift something high in praise, and “drawn me up” is the phrase used for lifting a bucket out of a well. Because God has rescued a drowning man, David will lift up the name of the LORD. It’s not as though we can raise God any higher than he already is, but we can acknowledge and worship him as the true sovereign, omnipotent Creator and Savior. David continues, “O LORD my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me. O LORD, you have brought up my soul from Sheol; you restored me to life from among those who go down to the pit.” Three times in three verses, David repeats, “O LORD,” along with three things that God has done: he has rescued, he has healed, and he has restored. We don’t know the specific situation or trouble, because the psalms will often use words like “healing” and “restored” interchangeably for physical, spiritual, and relational salvation. There’s been a powerful reversal in David’s life: he once was sinking down to the place of the dead, but suddenly he was given a second chance at life. Now, David wants to tell his story in the spirit of grateful praise.

As David turns his attention to his fellow worshipers, he has an important lesson to teach us in verses 4-5: “[4] Sing praises to the LORD, O you his saints, and give thanks to his holy name. For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” What a remarkable line! It pictures sorrow and tears as unwelcome overnight visitors, but the last Hebrew phrase is striking: “at dawn, a shout of joy!” The contrast is between what is momentary and what is eternal. One scholar writes, “Though the lives of the faithful sometimes include ‘weeping’ (sometimes because their misdeeds have incurred God’s ‘anger,’ and sometimes just because of suffering that comes from living in a fallen world), that weeping does eventually come to an end. The ‘morning’ is a figure for the time at which God gives relief, and it might not arrive until the last day, but in any event it is sure to come.” David will return to this idea in a moment, but first he wants to warn us about what brought him to the place of distress: “As for me, I said in my prosperity, ‘I shall never be moved.’ By your favor, O LORD, you made my mountain stand strong; you hid your face; I was dismayed.” David confesses that in a time when his life was easy, he got careless and overconfident. He forgot that everything he has, all the blessings of his life, any stability like a mountain comes not from himself but from God’s ongoing, sustaining care. What’s interesting is that David’s words here echo (almost exactly) the words of the wicked man in Psalm 10:6: “I shall not be moved.” And yet in other psalms like 15, 16, and 17, the same phrase is used in a positive sense, like the righteous “shall never be moved.” So here’s the principle: life’s pendulum is always swinging, and so we rely on God entirely for everything. Any time we try to put our confidence in our prosperity or strength, we will crumble. But when we admit our frailty and our need for the blessing of God, we will not be moved no matter what storms may batter us. When God revealed his character to Moses on Mt. Sinai, he said that he is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. His just discipline is over in the blink of an eye, but his grace and pleasure is forever. Weeping may tarry with the night, but joy comes with the morning.

Having learned the hard lesson of relying on God alone, David pleads for mercy, “To you, O LORD, I cry, and to the Lord I plead for mercy: ‘What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness? Hear, O LORD, and be merciful to me! O LORD, be my helper!’” The word “profit” is a commercial word, so there’s a way to read these verses in a crudely cost-benefit analysis kind of way: “Hey God, if you let me die, you’ll lose a valuable worshiping asset!” But that’s not what David is doing, and the clue is the word “dust.” “Will the dust praise you?” It’s the same word used in Genesis 2 when God makes man out of dust and in Genesis 3 when we are destined to return to the dust after we die. For David, the whole purpose of our existence is to worship the LORD; that is what makes life worthwhile. At the end of the psalm, we return to the exuberance that we had in the beginning: “You have turned for me my mourning into dancing; you have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness, that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent. O LORD my God, I will give thanks to you forever!” A scholar commented, “It is all quite uninhibited, in the buoyant spirit of the David who ‘danced before the Lord with all his might.’” David gives thanks for his answered prayers, and he vows to spread the word of his gratitude for all to hear. The personal gets celebrated in public. David started the psalm in the pit, and he ends with a gleeful jig. I love the phrase “you have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness.” As God did for Adam and Eve in the garden, he gently takes off our filthy clothes of shame and offers us the finest garments of glory. Perhaps David dances all the more because of all that he has experienced, the great rescue of the LORD.