The Cords of Death

David begins recounting in poetic lines what the Lord has done for him, how he saved him and gave him victory.

Sometimes the psalms seem strange or foreign to us. And when they do, that’s because they are. We struggle to understand Shakespeare, and he wrote in English less than 500 years ago. David wrote the psalms three thousand years ago, in a language no one even spoke for nearly two thousand years, from a cultural context that hasn’t existed for at least that long. Of course they seem strange to us.

Yet at the same time the psalms still speak to us, and they are able to do that because they are very human, human in a way that transcends any one culture. Many of the psalms come from the tragedies and the joys of everyday life, and that we understand. They are also the words of a faith that still exists, a faith that has grown to be sure, a faith that has flowered as ancient promises have come true, but the same faith nonetheless.

And the psalms are poetry. They use all the literary devices available to the ancient writers who wrote them. It’s important that we understand this when we approach them. This is not the same genre of literature as an electronics repair manual or a western dime novel, writing styles with which we are more familiar.

If you can remember back to your basic high school literature classes you know that even modern writings have levels and depth, symbols and mood, all of those things that we used to be forced to think about when all we really wanted to do was enjoy a good story. Well, the psalms have all that, too. They are Hebrew poetry with meter and alliteration (some of which is lost in translation) and rhyming patterns of thought—like paralleling and contrasting lines.

They are poetry. But they are more than just poetry. They are divine poetry. They are inspired—God-breathed. And they are part of a greater whole. They fit into the redemptive historical narrative of the Bible. They will tell us about David and his struggles and his triumphs and his faith and his doubts and all of that, but while they are doing that they will also be telling the story of Christ, or more accurately pre-telling or previewing or foreshadowing what God will accomplish for us in Christ.

That’s what this psalm is about. Psalm 18 is about the triumph God gave David over his enemies, and the praise David gives God in writing this song about it. In it we will rejoice with David, see a little of our own salvation, and finally rest our eyes upon Christ the one who leads us in ultimate triumph. So let’s get started with the predicament David finds himself in in verses 4-5.

Psalm 18:4-5 ESV

The cords of death encompassed me;

the torrents of destruction assailed me;

the cords of Sheol entangled me;

the snares of death confronted me.

In verse 4 David begins describing what he summarized in verse 3. In fact, the entire sixteen verses we are going to cover this week serve as an extended description of what David declared to be so in verse 3. Verse 3 said this (ESV):

(3) I call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised,

and I am saved from my enemies.

Someone says, “How did that happen?” And David says, “Well, let me explain. It started like this…”

(4) The cords of death encompassed me;

the torrents of destruction assailed me;

One commentator I read summarized David’s words this way: “I almost died.” I don’t know why that made me chuckle when I read it, but it did. And it’s accurate!

What David is doing is painting a picture of how his very life was on the brink. He was staring death in the face, as it were. The cords of death, the cords that bind your soul to take it away, they were surrounding him. The torrents of destruction… (do you see the parallelism in the poetry?) A torrent is defined as a violent, copious, outpouring of something—in this case, destruction…assailed him.

Now in verse 5 he comes back to parallel the first line of verse 4. He says:

(5) the cords of Sheol entangled me;

the snares of death confronted me.

Look at the parallels—cords, torrents, cords, snares, followed by death, destruction, Sheol…

What is Sheol? Sheol is the Hebrew name for the underworld, the place of the dead. It was Hades in Greek. It had other names in other languages. It was universally understood in the ancient world that when you died you went somewhere. The Hebrews understood that place to be Sheol, where the soul awaited the resurrection and the final judgment.

Thus in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, they are both depicted as being in the same place, Sheol or Hades, only separated by a great gulf which was fixed between the righteous and the wicked. So when David says “the cords of Sheol entangled me,” he is speaking of the place of the dead and using it as a synonym for death itself.

So again, the parallels—cords, torrents, cords, snares, followed by death, destruction, Sheol, and death. These encompassed, assailed, entangled, and confronted David. Piling up these descriptives like this serves to emphasize how dire a situation David finds himself in. He is on the edge of death.

So what does he do? Come back tomorrow.