Catholic Commentary
Confidence in God's Goodness and the Call to Hope
13I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of Yahweh in the land of the living.14Wait for Yahweh. Be strong, and let your heart take courage. Yes, wait for Yahweh.
Psalms 27:13–14 expresses the psalmist's hard-won confidence that he will experience God's goodness in his present earthly life, despite facing despair that nearly overwhelmed him. Verse 14 then calls for active, tense waiting on God—not passive resignation but spiritually demanding hope requiring full inner strength and courage.
Hope is not serene confidence—it's the hard-won refusal to despair, the muscle of trust that says "I will see God's goodness in this life" even when darkness pulls you toward collapse.
The verse may be read as self-address, communal exhortation, or both. In its liturgical context — this psalm was likely used in Temple worship and later in synagogue and Church prayer — the worshipper encourages the whole assembly, just as he has encouraged himself. The spiritual logic is: because I have seen (v. 13), therefore I can exhort you to wait (v. 14). Personal testimony becomes communal formation.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the Christological reading of the Fathers, the "goodness of the LORD in the land of the living" finds its fullest expression in the Incarnation — God's tûb made visible and tangible in the flesh of Jesus Christ (cf. John 1:14: "we have seen his glory"). The "land of the living" becomes the terrain of the Resurrection: Christ is the first to inhabit eternal life in a glorified body, inaugurating the full revelation of divine goodness on earth. The call to "wait for the LORD" takes on eschatological depth: the Church, as the Bride awaiting the Bridegroom, prays these words in maranatha — "Come, Lord Jesus" (Rev 22:20).
Catholic tradition illuminates these verses with singular depth on two fronts: the theology of hope and the mystical life.
On Hope: The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines hope as "the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the Holy Spirit" (CCC 1817). Verse 13 exemplifies precisely this structure: the psalmist's confidence rests not in his own resilience but in what he believes he will see — a promised encounter with the living God. The verse thus anticipates the classic Thomistic distinction between hope as a passion (natural) and hope as a virtue (infused by grace). Only infused hope, rooted in God's own faithfulness, can survive the near-despair the psalmist describes.
St. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, reads verse 14 as addressed to the soul struggling with acedia — the spiritual torpor that masquerades as patience. For Augustine, true waiting (expecta) is an act of love: "Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee." The Augustinian resonance is precise: waiting for the LORD is not the absence of movement but the most intense form of directed desire.
St. Thomas Aquinas (ST II-II, q. 17–20) identifies pusillanimity — small-souledness, the failure to aspire to great things from God — as a vice opposed to hope. The psalmist's double imperative (hazaq / ya'ametz) is an antidote to pusillanimity: the soul is commanded to stretch itself, to bear the tension of unfulfilled desire without collapsing into either presumption or despair.
Pope Benedict XVI, in Spe Salvi (2007), writes: "The one who has hope lives differently" (§2). Verses 13–14 embody this Benedictine thesis: the psalmist's hope transforms his posture in the present — he can be strong, take courage, endure — because the future is trustworthy in God's hands.
For a contemporary Catholic, Psalm 27:13–14 speaks directly into the experience of prolonged, unanswered prayer — the illness that does not lift, the estranged child who does not return, the vocation that does not clarify, the culture that seems to accelerate away from the Gospel. The temptation in such seasons is not usually dramatic apostasy but a slow settling into quiet despair, a numbing of expectation.
These verses offer a concrete counter-practice. First, name the near-despair honestly — the psalmist does not pretend it wasn't there. Suppressed spiritual desolation does not resolve; it calcifies. Second, re-anchor confidence not in felt consolation but in the object of faith: the goodness of God, already demonstrated historically in the Incarnation and Resurrection, will be seen again. Third, treat waiting as a discipline, not a default. Concretely: bring the specific unresolved desire to daily prayer, repeat the exhortation of verse 14 aloud, and seek a confessor or spiritual director who can help distinguish genuine waiting in hope from avoidance or passivity.
The repetition in verse 14 is itself a spiritual method: say it twice, because once is not enough when the heart is faltering.
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Commentary
Psalms 27:13 — "I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living."
The Hebrew opens with a dramatic, almost defiant particle (lûlê) — often translated "unless" or "I believe" — suggesting the psalmist is recovering from a near-collapse of faith. The full construction might be rendered: "I would have despaired unless I had believed I would see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living." This tiny grammatical detail is enormously revealing: confidence here is not a serene, untested disposition. It has been won against the pull of despair. The psalmist does not pretend the darkness was not real; he confesses that only faith kept him from being swallowed by it.
The object of his confidence is double: to see (Hebrew ra'ah), and to see the goodness (tûb) of the LORD. "Seeing" in the Psalter carries the weight of a covenant encounter — not mere intellectual acknowledgment but the experiential, life-altering perception of God's active presence (cf. Ps 63:2; 17:15). The tûb of the LORD is His dynamic, overflowing beneficence — the same word used of Creation in Genesis 1 ("God saw that it was good"), here applied to the living God's action in the psalmist's own biography. Crucially, this seeing is expected "in the land of the living" (be'eretz hayyîm) — within this present earthly life, not deferred entirely to an afterlife. The psalmist dares to believe that God's goodness is not merely a posthumous reward but a present, historical reality to be experienced in the body, in time, in the world.
Psalms 27:14 — "Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!"
The repetition of "wait for the LORD" (qavveh el-YHWH) at both the opening and closing of the verse is a rhetorical inclusio that brackets the inner exhortation like a door frame. The verb qavveh is rich: it denotes not passive, limp waiting but a taut, expectant stretching toward — the same root (qavah) as the word for a rope under tension, or the neck straining to see over a crowd. It is active, embodied, muscular hope.
Between the two imperatives to wait, the psalmist inserts: "be strong (hazaq) and let your heart take courage (ya'ametz libbekha)." The verb hazaq ("be strong") is the word Joshua hears from God before crossing the Jordan (Josh 1:6–9). It is commissioning language — the charge given to those about to face real danger. The additional phrase ("let your heart take courage") targets not just the will but the — the seat of integrated thought, feeling, and decision in Hebrew anthropology. Together, these imperatives acknowledge that waiting on God is not passive resignation but a spiritually demanding act requiring all of one's inner resources.