Catholic Commentary
Confidence in God's Sustaining Faithfulness
7Though I walk in the middle of trouble, you will revive me. You will stretch out your hand against the wrath of my enemies. Your right hand will save me.8Yahweh will fulfill that which concerns me. Your loving kindness, Yahweh, endures forever. Don’t forsake the works of your own hands.
Psalms 138:7–8 expresses the psalmist's confidence that God will sustain and revive him through affliction and danger, fulfilling His covenant promises. The passage contrasts the reality of present trouble with assurance of divine intervention and completion, grounding this faith in God's eternal steadfast love.
God does not remove your suffering—He meets you inside it and completes what matters most in you.
The Typological Sense
In the fullest typological reading, the one who walks through the "middle of trouble" and is revived by God points forward to Christ, who descends into the depths of human suffering and death and is given life — tĕḥayyēnî — by the Father in the Resurrection. The fulfillment that "concerns" the Messiah is the completion of redemption, which no power of hell or human enmity could abort. The right hand of God that saves (v. 7) is ultimately the Risen Christ, seated at the Father's right hand (Psalm 110:1).
Catholic tradition reads these verses within the framework of divine Providence — the doctrine that God not only creates but governs all things toward their appointed end. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "God's almighty providence... works with, through, and in the activity of creatures" (CCC 308), and that "even divine chastisements... call for this filial trust" (CCC 227). Psalm 138:8 is a lyric statement of exactly this truth: the Lord's purpose is not defeated by creaturely tribulation.
St. Augustine, commenting on the Psalms, sees the revival promised in verse 7 as a foreshadowing of the soul's renewal through grace. In Enarrationes in Psalmos, he writes that the enemies of the soul — pride, concupiscence, despair — are routed not by our own strength but by God's outstretched hand, the same hand that is identified with the Word of God made flesh.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (I, Q. 22), grounds God's providential governance in His love: because God wills the good of what He has made, He cannot abandon the "works of His hands" mid-creation. This is the philosophical backbone of the psalmist's trust in verse 8. It is not wishful thinking; it is a deduction from the nature of God.
Pope St. John Paul II's Salvifici Doloris (1984) illuminates the first verse directly: Christian suffering has meaning not because God removes it, but because He walks within it, vivifying the sufferer through union with the crucified Christ. "In bringing about the Redemption through suffering, Christ has also raised human suffering to the level of the Redemption" (SD 19). Verse 7's promise of revival is thus fulfilled not despite the cross, but through it — a truth only the Incarnation makes fully coherent.
These two verses speak with particular force to Catholics navigating long-term, unresolved suffering — chronic illness, persistent family estrangement, vocational uncertainty, or spiritual aridity. The temptation in protracted trial is to interpret God's silence as abandonment. Verse 8 directly counters this: the absence of immediate resolution is not evidence that God has forgotten you; it is the space in which gāmar — His completing work — is still underway.
Practically, a Catholic might pray these verses as a daily affirmation before entering a situation of known difficulty — a difficult workplace, a medical appointment, a tense family encounter. The structure of Psalm 138:7 invites us to name the trouble honestly ("I am walking through this") before claiming the promise ("You will revive me"). This prevents the prayer from becoming escapism and keeps it rooted in incarnate reality.
For those in spiritual direction, verse 8 — "Yahweh will fulfill that which concerns me" — can become a mantra of surrender, replacing anxious self-management with covenantal trust. It echoes the Ignatian suscipe ("Take, Lord, and receive") and the Marian fiat, training the soul to release outcomes to the One whose steadfast love, as the verse insists, endures forever.
Commentary
Psalms 138:7 — "Though I walk in the middle of trouble, you will revive me"
The Hebrew verb translated "walk" (אֵלֵךְ, 'ēlēk) is the same root used in Psalm 23:4 ("though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death"), and its use here is deliberate: the psalmist is not standing still in affliction but moving through it. The trouble (tsarah, צָרָה) is real and present, not hypothetical — it is the same word used throughout the Psalms for acute distress, anguish, and danger. David does not minimize the reality of suffering.
The pivot of the verse is the confident future tense: "you will revive me." The Hebrew tĕḥayyēnî (תְּחַיֵּנִי) means literally "you will give me life" or "you will preserve my life." It is a verb rooted in ḥāyāh — life itself — and carries the force of divine vivification, not mere survival. God does not simply spare the psalmist from trouble; He infuses him with life within it. This is the signature move of biblical faith: not the removal of the cross, but the transformation of the one who carries it.
The second half of the verse — "against the wrath of my enemies, you will stretch out your hand, and your right hand will save me" — makes clear that the source of trouble is opposition. The outstretched hand (יָד, yad) evokes the great saving acts of the Exodus (Exodus 6:6, 15:12), grounding the psalmist's personal crisis in Israel's corporate redemptive memory. What God did for the people at the Reed Sea, He will do for this individual soul in distress.
Psalms 138:8 — "Yahweh will fulfill that which concerns me"
The Hebrew yigmōr Adonai ba'adî (יִגְמֹר יְהוָה בַּעֲדִי) is arrestingly strong. Gāmar means to complete, to bring to perfection, to finish what has been begun. The Septuagint renders this kyrios antapodōsei hyper emou — "the Lord will repay on my behalf" — capturing the covenantal logic: God owes it to His own promises to see this through. This is not the psalmist's presumption; it is his theology. Yahweh is a God who finishes what He starts.
The verse concludes with a petition that is simultaneously an act of faith: "your steadfast love (hesed, חֶסֶד), O LORD, endures forever — do not forsake the works of your hands." The word hesed is the covenant-love that is the very character of Israel's God, appearing throughout Psalm 136 as a refrain. Here it becomes the ground of appeal: your love is everlasting, you will complete what you have begun. The "works of your hands" is the psalmist himself — a creation whom God has not finished shaping.