From Glory To Glory: The Story Of Christ In Psalms 15–24 (Part 7)—Psalm 18 And Christ’s Cords Of Death

by on November 8, 2025 | Comment

The time when I felt closest to death was years ago as I was swimming in the Gulf of Mexico, trying to get back to shore. The trouble occurred while I was still a long distance from shore and felt this horrible burning sensation across the whole front of my body. I actually wondered for a second if I was having a heart attack because my whole body just wrenched up in pain. I did not know if I would be able to swim the rest of the way to shore.

Thankfully, I was able to get to shore though, and when I did, I found four or five huge red lines streaked all the way across my chest. I had swum right into the tentacles of a huge jellyfish. The critical thing here is that just a brush into these tentacles nearly kept me from making it safely to shore. I find myself thinking, what if I had gotten wrapped up in them? What if I had really gotten right in the middle of this jellyfish and been tied up in its tentacles? I honestly think I would have died that day. It felt as if death’s cords—its tentacles—had brushed me.

In Psalm 18, David responded to a situation where he felt death’s cords—its tentacles—wrap all the way around him. Here he reflects on when God rescued him from Saul and his armies who pursued him before he was Israel’s king.

David has a specific purpose in reflecting on these times of danger. He writes because he is offering praises back to God for delivering him from these dangers. He records his times of trouble only so that people will see how good God is in rescuing him from dire straits.

As we continue in this series about Psalms 15–24, we see that Psalm 18 prophetically records Christ’s death. Yet, its main point is that God is faithful to rescue those who follow him even from their worst distress. We see that in how he rescues King David in Psalm 18, but also in how King Jesus died in order to effect our ultimate rescue. In this article, we will consider how Psalm 18 is about the story of Christ’s incarnate ministry, turning in the next article to how we apply it personally.

Psalm 18 and the Psalter’s Scope

The book of the Psalms is a huge collection of songs with many pedagogical purposes, one of which is to teach us godly responses to the full range of experiences and emotions that we encounter in the Christian life. It instructs us about how to take everything that life throws at us back to God. It even gives us words to pray for when we do not know how to pray. It also instructs us about the king of God’s people—how to take refuge in him and to live faithfully as his citizens.

Psalm 18 falls in the run of Psalms 15–24, which tell the story of Christ’s incarnate life in reverse order, then in forward order. Psalm 15 was about his ascension, depicted as entering God’s heavenly mountain, Psalm 16 was about his resurrection as the grave could not hold him, and Psalm 17 was about his trust that the Father would raise him even though his body lay in the grave and his soul was in heaven. Psalm 18 reflects on Christ’s death itself.

Further, Psalm 18 holds a key place in developing the Psalter’s story about the king and his relationship to God’s people. As a pair, Psalms 18–19 couple together a messianic psalm with a Torah psalm, much as I argued previously that Psalm 1 and Psalm 2 work together to introduce the whole Psalter as being about the law and the gospel.1 Psalms 18–19 then ground the center of Book I (Psalms 1–41) in the concern for righteous kingship. They also mark a transition from prayers of struggle to songs of triumph for the king going forward.2

Psalm 18’s main significance is still in its proclamation of the Savior-King’s death as the means by which he would claim victory. Its placement in the grouping of Psalms 15–24 brings us near the middle point of this story, telling of the Messiah’s death.

The Saving Death of Christ

Psalm 18 falls into three big pieces, comprised of smaller sections to make it more manageable.3 In verses 1–19, David praises God and records his help. In verses 20–29, David celebrates God’s faithfulness in light of his own faithfulness. In verses 31–50, David praises God for defeating his enemies. The middle section about faithfulness is the centerpiece, literally and in terms of importance, of this whole psalm.

One striking aspect about my jellyfish story is that I can tell it with a lot more flair and interest—or so I imagine—after the fact. If I were to have told you that story while I was experiencing it, it would probably have been very pitiful, included lots of panic, and maybe even some whining. Being able to tell the story from the perspective of secured victory puts me in a place to narrate it in a livelier fashion precisely because I know how it ended.

Something similar is at work in Psalm 18, both when we understand this psalm as spoken by David and when we understand it as spoken by Christ. We must remember that every psalm is ultimately about God’s true king, and David often wrote looking forward to this king. So, Psalm 18 reflects back upon a deadly event from the perspective of ultimate victory.4

We know why David wrote this psalm because it appears almost verbatim in 2 Samuel 22.5 In 2 Samuel 21, David’s persecutor, Saul, was killed. In the second part of the chapter, David fought and was victorious against the Philistines. Coming on the tail of that background, 2 Samuel 22:1 introduces Psalm 18: “And David spoke to the Lord the words of this song on the day when the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies, and from the hand of Saul.” During this period, David probably often thought he might die.

For David, Psalm 18 was likely his reflection on victory spanning years of the threat of death. He summarized that tribulation in verses 4–5:

The cords of death encompassed me;

the torrents of destruction assailed me;

the cords of Sheol entangled me;

the snares of death confronted me.

Christopher Ash commented, “This encapsulates all the dangers David endured; in the end, this is the whole experience of sin and death, supremely in the passion of Christ and now overflowing into the sufferings of his people.”6 James Hamilton further opened up that connection:

Whereas David was threatened by the powers of Death, Belial, and Sheol (18:4–5 [MT 18:5–6]), those powers actually got their cords and snares on Jesus, who died and was buried. Whereas the earthquake that accompanied Yahweh’s intervention on David’s behalf was metaphorical (18:7 [MT 18:8]), earthquakes accompanied the death and resurrection of Jesus (Matt 27:54; 28:2).7

So, David wrote about his own trouble in a way where, under the Spirit’s inspiration, he was also talking about Christ’s death.

Then, verses 6–7 are about how earthquakes and upheaval occurred in God’s anger as his king called in distress while the cords of death wrapped around him.

In my distress I called upon the Lord;

to my God I cried for help.

From his temple he heard my voice,

and my cry to him reached his ears.

Then the earth reeled and rocked;

the foundations also of the mountains trembled

and quaked, because he was angry.

Ash explains that Psalm 18 then becomes an extended commentary on Matthew 27:51 when, at Christ’s death, “The curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split.”8 Even Psalm 18 brings into view the earthquakes that accompanied the moment when Christ succumbed to death’s cords.

Yet, because Psalms 15–18 have been telling Christ’s story backwards, we already know that he rose from death and ascended into heaven victorious. The perspective in this psalm is like telling you about my jellyfish encounter from the vantage of knowing that it turns out alright, so I can tell it with a positive emphasis. Psalm 18 is mostly taken up with praise. But that praise is focused on God delivering his servant from the cords of death. As this psalm is about the true king of God’s people, the event in view is how death’s cords truly bound Jesus Christ in his death on the cross.

Christ’s Death as Our Deliverance

John Goldingay highlighted how the tension between Psalm 18 and the narrative of Samuel and Kings is Davd’s character, since that historical section does not portray David in as shining a light as this Psalm does.[9] This tension about David’s claim to righteousness is exactly why this psalm is about Christ. Verses 22–24 gives us a snapshot of the point of Psalm 18’s whole middle section:

For all his rules were before me,

and his statutes I did not put away from me.

I was blameless before him,

and I kept myself from my guilt.

So the Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness,

according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight.

Because of this appeal to righteousness, W. Robert Godfrey rightly notes that this psalm more fully belongs to Christ than to David.10 Christ is the truly blameless one, speaking through David about how the Father would raise him from the dead because of his perfect righteousness. This psalm is Christ’s praise to the Father for recognizing how he earned his own resurrection, and thereby also earning our resurrection unto everlasting life.

Psalm 18 is also about how Christ provides for the forgiveness of our sin. Because that earthquake that expresses God’s anger in verses 6–7 is directed toward the enemies of the king. And yet, the fulfillment of that earthquake happened at the cross.

This turn of events arises because Christ the king absorbed God’s anger due to his enemies and died in our place. God’s anger shook the earth as his Son satisfied divine justice as our representative. The king whose enemies should have been shaken was shaken in place of his enemies, so that his enemies might be made his friends.

For all who have faith in Christ, we have great reason to sing this praise. Our greatest enemy, death, is defeated. In Christ, we are victorious. His righteousness becomes ours, and death’s cords are loosed from us. He is our deliverance.

Notes

  1. Harrison Perkins, “An Introduction To The Psalter On The Law And The Gospel: Psalms 1–2,” Heidelblog, February 10, 2024.
  2. O. Palmer Robertson, The Flow of the Psalms (P&R, 2015), 66–79.
  3. W. Robert Godfrey, Learning to Love the Psalms (Reformation Trust, 2017), 63; similarly, Christopher Ash, The Psalms: A Christ-Centered Commentary, 4 vol. (Crossway, 2024), 2:190; James M. Hamilton Jr., Psalms, 2 vol., Evangelical Biblical Theology Commentary (Lexham Academic, 2021), 1:229, 243; Carissa Quinn, The Arrival of the King: The Shape and Story of Psalms 15–24, Studies in Scripture and Biblical Theology (Lexham Academic, 2023), 124.
  4. Allen P. Ross, A Commentary on the Psalms, 3 vol. (Kregel Academic Press, 2011–16), 1:461.
  5. Godfrey, Learning to Love the Psalms, 63.
  6. Ash, Psalms, 2:193
  7. Hamilton, Psalms, 1:248.
  8. Ash, Psalms, 2:187.
  9. John Goldingay, Psalms, 3 vols., Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms (Baker Academic, 2006–8), 1:281.
  10. Godfrey, Learning to Love the Psalms, 65.

© Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

You can find this whole series here.

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