Let your steadfast love comfort me
according to your promise to your servant.

Psalm 119:76 ESV

As we have already seen, the psalmist is clearly writing from a place and time of affliction. His enemies encircle him like wolves, taunting him. Yet, like Job, he has not cursed God; rather, he has pointedly declared his absolute commitment to the LORD. This verse before us is a great example of why the psalmist still trusts God.

Let your steadfast love comfort me. First, he appeals to God’s steadfast love for comfort. Comfort, we should note, is far more than a relief from hardship and an easing of one’s burdens; rather, comfort means to impart strength. That is why the Holy Spirit is called our Comforter. Rarely does He pull us out of affliction and into places of relaxation; instead, the Spirit gives us the strength to endure whatever suffering that He has sovereignly ordained that we must pass through. Similarly, the psalmist is looking for God’s love to strengthen him for whatever afflictions still lay before him.

Rightly does he look to God’s steadfast love for this strength. As Psalm 136 declares twenty-six times, “his steadfast love endures forever.” Indeed, just like the words of God’s mouth, His love is firmer than the earth beneath our feet and more enduring than the heavens above our heads. The day shall come when both are wiped away and replaced by the new cosmos, yet the love of God will never pass away. Thus, like Noah fled for refuge from the flood into the ark, so too does the psalmist flee to God’s steadfast love to carry him safely through his afflictions.

Yet what hope or assurance does the psalmist have that God’s steadfast love will indeed be his comfort? The second half of the verse is the answer: according to your promise to your servant. As the entirety of this psalm attests, this promise is God’s Word, the Scriptures. Specifically, the psalmist may be thinking of God’s great revelation of Himself to Moses upon the mountain, where He passed before the prophet and said, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love to thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 34:6-7).

Whichever passages of Scripture were upon the psalmist’s mind and heart, he took them personally. Regardless of how long ago the Spirit inspired Moses or one of the other prophets to write God’s holy Word, the psalmist took those inspired words as applying directly to him as one of God’s servants. Of course, today we have Paul’s direct statement that all Scripture is profitable for us as the people of God, so how much more confidence ought we to have that the promises of the Bible are God’s promises to us, His servants?

By the very great promises of God for us in His Word, may we cling to our Lord’s steadfast love for comfort in the midst of affliction.