Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust: His truth shall be thou shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. Psalm 91:3-6
I was thinking about the terror that has struck fear into a world that for the most part knows not our Sovereign God. I went to my favorite teacher Dr. John Gill and consulted him on the text above. Let me share his exposition with you. “V.3 – “Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler.” These are the words of the psalmist either speaking to himself for the encouragement of his own faith and trust in the Lord, or to the man that dwells in the secret place, and under the shadow of the most High; which the latter seems most agreeable. By the “fowler” and his “snare” may be meant either Saul, who laid wait for David, spread snares for him and hunted him as a partridge on the mountains from whom he was delivered; or rather any tyrannical enemy and persecutor of the saints who lay snares for them; and these are broken by the Lord, and so they escape as a bird out of the hands of the fowler Ps.124:6-7. Or it may, best of all, be understood of Satan and his temptations, which are as snares that he lays to catch the people of God from which they are delivered by the power and grace of God. “From the noisome pestilence; the most pernicious and destructive one which may be literally understood of any perilous virus; from which the Lord, by his powerful providence, sometimes protects his people, when in danger of it. V.2, “I will say of the Lord” or to the Lord: these are the words of the psalmist, expressing his faith in the Lord in the following words, taking encouragement from the safety of the godly man above described. “David said, I will say to the Lord, he is my refuge; a refuge in every time of trouble, outward or inward: a refuge when all others fail; and is himself a never failing one, a strong refuge, which none can break through and into, and in which all that have fled there and dwell are safe: “and my fortress”; what fortifications, natural or artificial, are to a city and its inhabitants, is God to his people, and much more. “And my God, in him will I trust”; his covenant God, his God in Christ, and who would ever continue so; and was a proper object of his trust and confidence, both as the God of nature, and the God of grace; who is to be trusted in, both for temporal and spiritual blessings, and at all times. “”V. 4, He shall cover thee with his feathers, as birds do their young who cannot cover themselves: this they do from a tender regard to them, whereby they both keep them warm, and protect them from those that would hurt them. This represents the helpless state of the children of God, who are, like to young birds, weak and unable to defend themselves: the tender regard of God unto them, as the eagle and other birds have to their young. “V.5, Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night. The terrible things that happen in the night; as fire, storms and tempests, invasion of enemies, murders, thefts, and robberies: a good man, when he has committed himself and his family to the care and protection of God by prayer, has no reason to be anxiously careful of these things, or to indulge a slavish fear about them. “V.6, Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness. Some think, and not without cause, that what is figuratively expressed in the preceding verse (v.5) is here explained; and indeed the “pestilence” may well be called the “terror by night”: the name of the plague [or Coronavirus], at a distance, is terrible; the near approach of it is more so; when it enters a country, city, or town, what fleeing is there from it? And in the night season it is more dreadful than in the day; not only to think of it in the gloomy watches of the night, but to see the vast numbers carried out to be interred, and to hear the dismal cry, Bring out your dead: and so it is here said to “walk in darkness.”
My words are, in all that the Psalmist proposes God’s people are to take courage; they are never out of hand but ever in the hand of our Covenant God.
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