Psalm 30:1 I will extol thee, O LORD; for thou hast lifted me up, and hast not made my foes to rejoice over me.
God lifts the lowly, and that is something you see throughout the book of Psalms. Psalm 30:1 says, “I will extol thee, O LORD.” The idea is, “I will exalt thee.” It continues, “For thou hast lifted me up, and hast not made my foes to rejoice over me.” So, I extol God, and God lifts me. That is interesting; God lifts the lowly.
This is a psalm of up and down. Verse 1 has the idea of God pulling us up out of a pit. In fact, that is the imagery you find throughout the psalm. In verse 3 the psalmist says, “That I should not go down to the pit.” Again, verse 9 says, “What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit?” So, sometimes we are looking for water and we fall into a dry well, a pit. We are constrained, and God lifts us up out of that dry pit and offers us water.
Someone has said, “What is prayer but the voice of man in trouble.” That is exactly what this is. God lifts the lowly. If I am riding high, I don’t see my need of God. I can’t look up because I feel like I am on top. Verse 6 says, “And in my prosperity I said, I shall never be moved.” We have all been there. We think, “I am on top of the world. I don’t need anyone or anything.” And even if we did not say that about God specifically, that is deep within our hearts.
Verse 7 says, “LORD, by thy favor thou hast made my mountain to stand strong.” Sometimes we feel like we have a mountain named after us and we are standing on top of it. But then things turn. “Thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled.” So, prosperity can leave me in trouble. When I am prosperous and think I am okay, I don’t think I need God, and God will not lift me. But, when I am in the bottom of a dry well, looking up from a pit, God lifts the lowly.
Here is the follow-up to that: the lowly should exalt God. “I will extol thee…thou hast lifted me.” When someone is low and God lifts them, that person now should want to lift God up. Now God lifts us up in a different way than we lift Him up. Really, God lifts; we push. We are never going to exalt God by reaching down and bringing Him up to us. No, we lift Him up, push Him forward in our conversations, in our lives, in our attitudes, but God reaches down to lift us up out of a pit.
Why is all this important? “Hear O Lord and have mercy,” he says in verse 10. Verse 12 says, “To the end that my glory may sing praise to thee.” God lifts the lowly, and the lowly should exalt God.