Jeremiah prophesied the coming of a new covenant, saying, "‘This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,’ declares the LORD. ‘I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people’" (Jer. 31:33). To Jeremiah, having the law in our hearts is a proper definition of what it means to be in a right relationship to God. Jesus also had much to say about the heart, often stressing that the people's hearts were calloused (cf. Matt. 13:15; Mark 7:6, 21). In regard to the law, Jesus said that the chief commandment is to "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" (Matt. 22:37).

The pit of defeat. Some people have a very different kind of pit from which they need to be lifted. It is the pit of personal defeat, whether at work or school or in the home or in some other setting or relationship. Some people would say that their entire lives have been one long and unending defeat. They have never succeeded at anything.

The New Testament perspective on the idea of an alien is found in several places, for example, in 1 Peter 2:11: "Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul." It is an appeal to live like citizens of the heavenly country to which we belong and to which we are going and not as citizens of this earth.

This is the meaning of verse 4. Verse 4 does not mean: "I am weary of this suffering; tell me when I am going to die so this will end" or "Life is too short for all I have been given to do; this is unfair." Instead, it means, as J. J. Stewart Perowne expressed it, "Make me rightly to know and estimate the shortness and uncertainty of human life, that so, instead of suffering myself to be perplexed with all that I see around me, I may cast myself the more entirely upon thee."³ This is exactly what David does in the verse immediately following this stanza, that is, in verse 7.