There is one last point of application to look at in this week's psalm. We need to remember here that because Jesus lives we also live, and because he has been victorious we also shall be victorious. It will not be by avoiding our share of this world's oppression. Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble” (John 16:33). Jesus had trouble himself, and we are called to follow in his footsteps. Yet Jesus also said, “Take heart! I have overcome the world” (v. 33). Will we? Yes. But we will triumph as he did, which means not by escaping oppression but by going through it, surviving it here and ultimately passing through the portal of death to resurrection.
The victory we are speaking of here will never go to Satan. It goes to Jesus. In fact, it is his already. For he has triumphed, and we now shout, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever” (Rev. 11:15).
What should we pray for in regard to those who persist in evil? That they should repent and be converted, of course. But if they do not? Surely we are not to pray that they might prosper!
Israel's "youth” was the time when the nation was first coming into existence in Egypt. Hosea quotes God as referring to the Egyptian years this way, saying, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1). These were years of persecution and oppression, as the Pharaoh first extracted hard slave labor from the people and then, when he perceived that they were growing in numbers anyway, began to kill the newly born male children. Moses, the emancipator, was born and survived in these latter days of this excessively cruel oppression.
This psalm is a lot like Psalm 124 in its theme and form, especially in its call for repetition of the opening line by someone like a cantor at the poem's start. In the earlier poem the cantor throws out the lead line (“If the LORD had not been on our side—"), then calls for its repetition by the people: “let Israel say—if the LORD had not been on our side when men attacked us.” At this point the people are presumably with him, repeating or singing the psalm, which describes their deliverance and survival by God.
