14 As fire burning a wood, and as a flame causing fire on the mountains,
For my wrath is a flaming fire, burning to the deep parts of the underworld, burning up the earth with her increase, and firing the deep roots of the mountains.
For evil was burning like a fire; the blackberries and thorns were burned up; the thick woods took fire, rolling up in dark clouds of smoke.
Your designs will be without profit, and their effect will be nothing: you will be burned up by the fire of my breath. And the peoples will be like the burning of chalk: as thorns cut down, which are burned in the fire.
O let the heavens be broken open and come down, so that the mountains may be shaking before you, As when fire puts the brushwood in flames, or as when water is boiling from the heat of the fire: to make your name feared by your haters, so that the nations may be shaking before you; While you do acts of power for which we are not looking, and which have not come to the ears of men in the past.
And say to the woodland of the South, Give ear to the words of the Lord: this is what the Lord has said: See, I will have a fire lighted in you, for the destruction of every green tree in you and every dry tree: the flaming flame will not be put out, and all faces from the south to the north will be burned by it. And all flesh will see that I the Lord have had it lighted: it will not be put out.
Who may keep his place before his wrath? and who may undergo the heat of his passion? his wrath is let loose like fire and the rocks are broken open by him.
For though they are like twisted thorns, and are overcome as with drink, they will come to destruction like stems of grass fully dry.
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Commentary on Psalms 83 Matthew Henry Commentary
Psalm 83
This psalm is the last of those that go under the name of Asaph. It is penned, as most of those, upon a public account, with reference to the insults of the church's enemies, who sought its ruin. Some think it was penned upon occasion of the threatening descent which was made upon the land of Judah in Jehoshaphat's time by the Moabites and Ammonites, those children of Lot here spoken of (v. 8), who were at the head of the alliance and to whom all the other states here mentioned were auxiliaries. We have the story 2 Chr. 20:1, where it is said, The children of Moab and Ammon, and others besides them, invaded the land. Others think it was penned with reference to all the confederacies of the neighbouring nations against Israel, from first to last. The psalmist here makes an appeal and application,
This, in the singing of it, we may apply to the enemies of the gospel-church, all anti-christian powers and factions, representing to God their confederacies against Christ and his kingdom, and rejoicing in the hope that all their projects will be baffled and the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church.
A song or psalm of Asaph.
Psa 83:1-8
The Israel of God were now in danger, and fear, and great distress, and yet their prayer is called, A song or psalm; for singing psalms is not unseasonable, no, not when the harps are hung upon the willow-trees.
Psa 83:9-18
The psalmist here, in the name of the church, prays for the destruction of those confederate forces, and, in God's name, foretels it; for this prayer that it might be so amounts to a prophecy that it shall be so, and this prophecy reaches to all the enemies of the gospel-church; whoever they be that oppose the kingdom of Christ, here they may read their doom. The prayer is, in short, that these enemies, who were confederate against Israel, might be defeated in all their attempts, and that they might prove their own ruin, and so God's Israel might be preserved and perpetuated. Now this is here illustrated,