Psalm 41: An Indepth Look

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God’s Mercy: Asked and Delivered


Throughout the Bible there is a continuous theme of God’s mercy bestowed upon his people. A perfect illustration of this overlying theme is Psalm 41. This psalm is a prayer of God’s compassion for those when they are feeling sick or abandoned. Psalm 41 gives the story of psalm’s plea for God’s mercy and the deliverance he receives from God’s blessings.
The structure of psalm 41 is made up of four different parts. The first part begins with verse 2 and goes through to 4. These introductory three verses help to reveal to its readers that the Psalm is a giving praise to Yahweh for the blessings he has bestowed to his faithful. (It is these beginning three verses of God’s love that helps its readers to understand that this has been based on a previous experience of the mercy of God.) The second section of this psalm begins with verse 5 and goes until verse 11. In verse 5, the psalmist begins with the story of why he is giving thanks by giving his initial plea to the Lord, “Once I prayed, ‘Lord, have mercy on me; heal me, I have sinned against you.’” The psalmist quickly moves on to the petition of why he praying for help by describing his woes of gossip by his enemies and even a close friend about his illness. It is here that the friend and the enemies have implied that this is not an ordinary illness but a divine intervention illness cause as punishment for a sin. The author continuously describes the gossip that goes on behind his back by his enemies waiting for his death. There is even a point when the psalmist tells of a friend, “…who had my trust, who shared my table,” spoke against him. (Psalm 41:10) Here there are two very distinct parallelisms from two different stories in the Bible. The first comes from Job 19:19 where Job states, “All my intimate friends hold me in horror; those whom I love have turned against me!” Very clearly here the two au...