49 Remember the word to Thy servant, On which Thou hast caused me to hope. 50 This is my comfort in my affliction, That Thy promise has given me life. 51 The proud have derided me exceedingly, From Thy law I have not declined. 52 I have remembered Thy judgments [which are] from of old, Jehovah, And I have comforted myself. 53 Fiery anger has seized me because of the wicked, Who forsake Thy law. 54 Thy statutes have been songs for me, In my house of sojourning. 55 I remembered Thy name in the night, Jehovah, And observed Thy law. 56 This good has been mine, That I have kept Thy precepts. This section has only one verse of petition, the others being mainly avowals of adherence to the Law in the face of various trials. The single petition (ver. 49) pleads the relation of servant, as giving a claim on the great Lord of the household, and adduces God's having encouraged hope as imposing on Him an obligation to fulfil it. Expectations fairly deduced from His word are prophets of their own realisation. In ver. 50, "This" points to the fact stated in _b_--namely, that the Word had already proved its power in the past by quickening the psalmist to new courage and hope--and declares that that remembered experience solaces his present sorrow. A heart that has been revived by life-giving contact with the Word has a hidden warmth beneath the deepest snows, and cleaves the more to that Word. Vv. 51-53 describe the attitude of the lover of the Law in presence of the ungodly. He is as unmoved by shafts of ridicule as by the heavier artillery of slander and plots (ver. 23). To be laughed out of one's faith is even worse than to be terrified out of it. The lesson is not needless in a day when adherence and obedience to the Word are smiled at in so many quarters as indicating inferior intelligence. The psalmist held fast by it, and while laughter, with more than a trace of bitterness, rung about him, threw himself back on God's ancient and enduring words, which made the scoffs sound very hollow and transient (ver. 52). Righteous indignation, too, rises in a devout soul at sight of men's departure from God's law (ver. 53). The word rendered "fiery anger" is found in xi. 6 ("a wind of _burning_"), and is best taken as above, though some would render _horror_. The wrath was not unmingled with compassion (ver. 136), and, whilst it is clearly an emotion belonging to the Old Testament rather than to the Christian type of devotion, it should be present, in softened form, in our feelings towards evil.