Catholic Commentary
A Cry for Mercy: Surrounded by Evils
11Don’t withhold your tender mercies from me, Yahweh. Let your loving kindness and your truth continually preserve me.12For innumerable evils have surrounded me. My iniquities have overtaken me, so that I am not able to look up. They are more than the hairs of my head. My heart has failed me.
Psalms 40:11–12 presents a prayer in which the speaker appeals to God not to withhold compassionate mercy while surrounded by countless evils and iniquities. The passage portrays a condition of complete siege—both external troubles and internal moral devastation—where the speaker relies on God's established covenantal character for deliverance.
When surrounded by innumerable evils—both external and internal—the Psalmist does not clean himself up before approaching God; he claims mercy because he cannot.
Catholic tradition brings a uniquely layered richness to these verses through its understanding of raḥamîm — divine tenderness — as a quality that finds its fullest expression in the Person of Jesus Christ. The Catechism teaches that "God is infinite goodness" and that His mercy is not one attribute among others but the very mode by which He engages fallen humanity (CCC 270, 1422). Pope St. John Paul II's encyclical Dives in Misericordia (1980) identifies the Old Testament raḥamîm as the most intimate biblical word for divine mercy, one that anticipates the revelation of the Father's heart in the parable of the Prodigal Son. John Paul writes that this mercy "has a feminine quality" — it is womb-love — and that it reaches its definitive embodiment in the Incarnation itself.
St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 87) would locate the "innumerable evils" of verse 12 within the theology of poena — the punitive consequences of sin that ripple through the sinner's life — teaching that only divine mercy, not human merit alone, can break their encirclement. The Council of Trent likewise affirmed that justification comes not by works alone but "by the grace of God through Christ Jesus" (Session VI, ch. 7), a doctrine that resonates with the Psalmist's radical dependence on God's unrestrained mercy.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whose "Little Way" is built on precisely this posture of helpless trust before infinite mercy, wrote that the more miserable and sinful one feels, the more confidently one must run to God — a perfect gloss on Psalm 40:11–12. Her insight and these verses illuminate each other perfectly.
Contemporary Catholics often face a particular temptation: to bring to God only the presentable parts of their lives, editing out the chaos, shame, and accumulated failures. Psalm 40:11–12 dismantles this posture entirely. The Psalmist does not dress up his crisis; he names it with painful honesty — "innumerable evils" — and then makes that very wreckage the ground of his petition. For a Catholic today, this is a model for the Sacrament of Reconciliation: you do not tidy yourself up before approaching God's mercy; you approach because you cannot tidy yourself up. The phrase "don't withhold" is itself a spiritual exercise in trust — it assumes God wants to show mercy and is looking for the slightest opening.
Practically, when a Catholic finds herself in a moment of moral failure, addiction, grief, or spiritual aridity, these two verses offer a complete prayer: name the surrounding evil honestly, then appeal to God's raḥamîm — His womb-love — rather than to any personal worthiness. This is not passive resignation but an active, even bold, claim on the character of God as revealed in Christ.
Commentary
Psalms 40:11 — "Don't withhold your tender mercies from me, Yahweh."
The Hebrew word translated "tender mercies" is raḥamîm (רַחֲמִים), a strikingly intimate term derived from reḥem, the womb. It conveys not merely pity but a visceral, maternal compassion — the kind of love a mother has for the child of her own body. The Psalmist does not ask God to give something new; he asks God not to withhold what already belongs to the divine character. The verb tikla' (תִּכְלָא), "withhold" or "restrain," implies that God's mercy is already present and flowing — the danger is that it might be held back. This is a subtle but profound act of faith: the Psalmist presupposes God's mercy exists and is oriented toward him; his prayer is that nothing impede its arrival.
The pairing with God's personal name, Yahweh — the covenant name revealed to Moses (Ex 3:14) — anchors the petition not in abstract theology but in the specific relational history between God and Israel. The Psalmist is not appealing to a distant deity but to the God who has already acted in mercy and is therefore expected to act again.
Psalms 40:12 — "For innumerable evils have surrounded me."
The causal "for" (kî) links the petition directly to the crisis: the reason mercy must not be withheld is that the situation is catastrophic. The word "surrounded" ('apapûnî, אֲפָפוּנִי) appears also in Psalm 18:4–5 and Jonah 2:5, where it describes the encircling waters of death and Sheol. This is siege language — the Psalmist is not merely beset by troubles but enclosed, with no visible exit. The word "innumerable" ('ên-mispar) is the same phrase used for the sands of the sea, conveying not just many evils but an overwhelming, uncountable host.
Importantly, the Psalmist elsewhere in this psalm acknowledges his own iniquities (v. 12b continues: "my iniquities have overtaken me"), suggesting these evils are not entirely external: they include the moral devastation the speaker feels within himself. The condition is one of total exposure — surrounded without and overwhelmed within.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
The Church Fathers heard in Psalm 40 the voice of Christ the High Priest (cf. Heb 10:5–7, which quotes vv. 6–8 explicitly). In this typological reading, verses 11–12 become the prayer of the Son of God in the Garden of Gethsemane, where He too was "surrounded" by the evils of human sin taken upon Himself, and where He pleaded with the Father. St. Augustine (, Ps. 40) reads the psalm as the voice of the — Christ the Head united with His members — so that every sufferer who prays this psalm is joined to Christ's own self-offering. The mercy implored is not merely comfort but the redemptive rescue that comes through the Passion.