He raises the poor from the dust,
from the dung he lifts the needy.
⁸To seat (them) with princes
With the princes of his people.¹

Introduction

Recently, the King of Spain, Felipe VI, met his subjects in the streets. Floods have lately ravaged Spain, and the monarch came to meet his people. While the prime minister was escorted away, the king took to the streets and met his angry and distraught people.² It was a striking scene, not the least of which is because for an American like myself, monarchs seem to be a relic of the past. It is a concept remote in time and place.

Consider—there is no comparable image in the devastation of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. Certainly, there is suffering and anger, there is a long road to recovery ahead. But Americans have no monarch to come from the throne and meet the people.

Perhaps the most striking thing about this is not that monarchs still exist, but that one could care to the point of coming to his people who are slinging mud. It was striking to see a head of state not exit stage left as the prime minister did, but to literally embrace his suffering people.

What we have here is a poignant and striking analogy that helps us to see the full orbed picture of Psalm 113. In part one, we saw the God who is above space-time, lofty and incomprehensible. In this part, we will see that God’s unfathomable otherness, his identity as incomprehensible creator, does not restrain his powerful hand. In the next part, we will look at verse 9 and other messianic connections in Psalm 113.

Poor and Needy

Hymn writer Joseph Hart wrote, “Come, ye sinners, poor and needy, weak and wounded, sick and sore.”³ The psalmist uses “poor” and “needy” to describe those whom God helps. We might expect that God, being so lofty, is unconcerned with us way down here. This is of course the animating ethos of deism. In deism, creation is a watch and God a watchmaker. Thus, once the watch is ticking, it can leave the shop until it needs a tune-up. It is a small step from this to Richard Dawkins’s “blind watchmaker.” But Scripture hardly presents God as inactive or unconcerned with his creation. In other words, you do not find deism in the Bible.

The picture is not of an aloof God but rather of a God whose power extends to the poor and the needy. There is a particular nuance to each of these terms. The poor are particularly those without social status. They are not “of noble birth” as Paul would say to the Corinthians (1 Cor 1:26). The poor are the people it is easy to ignore. They are exactly the kind of people you would not notice at all. The needy are those with material needs. They do not have the bare necessities of life. We might say they are living hand to mouth.

Together these terms point us to the opposite extreme of God. God of his plentitude is exalted; he is rich and is in no lack. And yet, his fullness and his exaltation are not causes of remoteness. His transcendence is not deistic. He sees and works for the poor and needy.

Dust and Dung

Speaking of God’s transcendence, where do the poor and needy dwell? Are they in the heights? No. They are in the dust and dung. Let us take a look at both of those. The first, the dust, brings two things to mind: the curse upon man in Genesis 3, and the American Dust Bowl.

In Genesis 3, when God is pronouncing woes and curses on the serpent, woman, and man, he tells the man, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat bread, until you return to the ground. Because from it you were taken, for you are dust and to dust you will return” (Gen 3:19).⁴ This is the same word in Psalm 113:7. The poor are on the doorstep of death by being in the dust. The fate of all mankind is to return to the dust and the poor are found closer to the dirt, closer to their fate.

The imagery that immediately comes to mind is photos of children in the Dust Bowl. It might be easy for you to imagine the black and white photos of dusty dirty children from America’s history. Woody Guthrie wrote of “the 14th day of April of 1935” that the dust from the storm,

covered up our fences, it covered up our barns,
It covered up our tractors in this wild and dusty storm.
We loaded our jalopies and piled our families in,
We rattled down that highway to never come back again.⁵

That dust covered up the poor during the Great Depression. In such dirt and suffering, and people fleeing their homes, God was there. He was not absent. His hand was not restrained from reaching even the Dust Bowl refugee.

If the dust is not enough of an image, the psalmist intensifies it. The needy are among “the dung.” One hardly needs to be told that this is not a clean place. Dust and dung are perhaps, even for us, the farthest thing from “cleaned up” we can imagine. If your dog went out and rolled in cow manure, you would have to clean her up. There is no real alternative.

But it is not just modern sensibilities that this offends. This is far from ritually clean by the standards of the Old Covenant. The poor are not just in need of a bath—they are ritually impure. The word used here is also used in Nehemiah for the “dung-gate.”⁶ We see in places like Leviticus 13:46 that the unclean person must dwell “outside the camp.” The gate in Nehemiah seems to derive its name from it being the gate through which unclean refuse traveled to outside the camp.

Before one could come into the temple, one would have to come inside the “camp” or the city. And to do so, one would presumably have to be pronounced clean. Being among the “dung” was the same as being farther from the temple. But even this does not restrain God’s hand. He will lift not just from the dust but from the dung and refuse. This is good news for you and me.

We are not exempt from God’s mercy, even if we are wealthy, well-groomed, and think highly of ourselves. Paul says that we were dead in our trespasses and sins (Eph 2:1).⁷ Apart from God’s work, we too are not much. We too are “poor and needy.” C. S. Lewis hits the nail on the head when he writes of us moderns,

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.⁸

Those mud pie-making children are us. We are the “sinners, poor and needy.” And praise be to God, hallelujah, that his hand reaches to us down in the dirt, dung, and mud. Praise be to God that the creator of the universe sticks his hand right into the refuse to pull us out.

God’s hand does not just tussle our hair either. He lifts, he exalts, he makes us to sit with princes. If we are worried about being on the outside, God brings us in. If we are worried, we need to clean ourselves up first, the same hymn reminds us: “All the fitness he requireth, is to feel your need of him.”⁹ By the hand of faith, we grasp and receive the whole Christ who raises us up in union with him in his exaltation. Indeed, Christ by his Spirit raises us to his very table, which we gather round, both the highborn and the low. 

Christ The Hand of God

It is no exaggeration to attribute the meeting of the immanence and the transcendence of God to the person and work of Christ. It is perhaps puzzling how the same God whose temple requires uncleanliness to be “outside the camp” can at the same time reach his hand out to the dung heap to elevate the needy. But Jesus shows us how he does this.

Consider, if you will, Mark 9. The first two stories of this chapter are probably familiar— the transfiguration, and the healing of the boy whose father exclaims, “I believe, help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). Two things are of note in these stories. The first is that in the Synoptic Gospels, these stories are always side by side. This indicates that they are a unit. They belong together.

The second thing to note before taking a closer look at Mark 9 is that Mark has no account of the birth of Christ. Where Matthew and Luke teach the incarnation of the Word at the outset of their Gospels, Mark begins with the commencement of Jesus’ ministry.

The transfiguration is familiar. Right after Peter’s confession of Christ, Peter, James, and John ascend a mountain and see Christ, along with Moses and Elijah, in his glory. On the way back down, Jesus explains that they are not to tell anyone until “the Son of Man be raised from the dead” (Mark 9:9). When they finally meet the other nine disciples, they find them in a crowd. The nine could not heal a boy convulsed by a “speechless and deaf spirit” (9:18, 25). But Jesus, of course, is able. And the boy “became like a corpse, that the many said that he died. But Jesus grasped his hand, he lifted him and he rose” (9:26–7).

Throughout chapter 9, this verb “to rise” occurs four times, once for the boy and three times for the resurrection of Jesus Christ (9:9, 10, 31). The boy was, at least by all appearances, dead—that is what everyone around him said. And Jesus grasps the dead, poor boy, and he raises him. Jesus comes down from his glory to bring life to the afflicted, the sick, and the dead.

This is a powerful picture of the incarnation in Mark’s gospel. Jesus had to come down from his glory to continue his march toward the cross. Why? Because the dead needed to be raised by faith. And Jesus, the Word incarnate, magnificently bright in his glory (Mark 9:3), is the hand of God by which he comes down the mountain to raise and exalt the poor and needy—the sick boy. Mark’s point is that the Son of Man must suffer and die to raise the poor and needy. And this is because he is the God of Psalm 113.

Conclusion

The picture the King of Spain cuts of a monarch among the mud is a small glimpse into what this Psalm tells us about our God. It is a dim reflection of Christ coming down the mountain. Christ comes down to enter into our need, our dust and dung, even our death and graves. But hallelujah, Jesus walks out of the tomb on the third day, leading believing sinners in his victory parade out of their tombs and to his heavenly banquet. In the next part we will look at the final verse and how it points us both backwards to Old Testament history and forwards to Jesus Christ.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are the author’s translation.
2. The AP has run a story on this with accompanying video at Joseph Wilson, “Spain’s king stood his ground under a mud barrage. What will the iconic moment mean for his reign?” Associate Press, November 4, 2024.
3. Joseph Hart, “Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy,” 1759.
4. This verse continues the established wordplay between hāᵓādām, Adam’s name, “mankind” or “the man,” and hāᵓǎdāmâ, “the ground.” The man comes from and returns to the topsoil or dust of the earth.
5. Woody Guthrie, “The Great Dust Storm,” track 1 on Dust Bowl Ballads (RCA Victor, 1940), Spotify.
6. Nehemiah 2:13; 3:13ff; 12:31.
7. It is worth remembering that death defiled the ritually clean in the Old Testament, cf. Leviticus 11:31–6.
8. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), 2.
9. Hart, “Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy.”

©Luke Gossett. All Rights Reserved.

You can find the whole series here. 

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Post authored by:

• Luke Gossett

  

  Rev. Luke Gossett (MA Westminster Seminary California; MA and PhD Candidate, Catholic University of America) is the pastor of Ascension Presbyterian Church (a mission of the OPC Presbytery of the South) in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. His dissertation focuses on the linguistic functions of the Hebrew word for “now.” Luke has been married to his wife, Jennifer, since 2014, and they have three wonderful children.

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