David’s experience with God, shared in this Psalm, serves as a powerful message even today, 3000 years later. The center of these two verses is the phrase, “those who know your name put their trust in you.” The crucial factor is “knowing God’s name.” Either a person knows God’s name or he doesn’t. Those who do trust him, those who don’t do not trust him. “Knowing” in the context means “knowing through experience.” God’s “name” refers to his character.
Coming to know God’s name in Egypt
Exodus 5-15 vividly displays the difference. Several groups appear – Moses, Pharaoh, the people of Israel, the people of Egypt and by extension, the surrounding “nations.” Moses had come to “know God’s name” through personal experience. This culminated in his experience with God described in Exodus 33, when God showed him his glory (19And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name).
Pharaoh didn’t “know” God’s name. He mockingly asked Moses, 2“Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and moreover, I will not let Israel go.”). God arranged for Pharaoh to come to “know” by experience just who the Lord was. One by one the ten plagues were sent so that Pharaoh might “know that there is none like me [i.e. the Lord] in all the earth” (Exodus 9:14). In the end he confessed, “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods” (Exodus 18:11).
The people of Egypt also came to know about Israel’s God through the plagues and the Exodus (Exodus 7:5). The ten plagues exposed the powerlessness of the gods the Egyptians trusted in. Israel, God’s people, came to know the Lord as their Deliverer, through the same events (Exodus 6:7).
David’s experience with God
David initially came to know “God’s name” while serving as a shepherd. This gave him the confidence to trust in God when Goliath mocked the people of God. When they met on the field of battle, David told Goliath, “This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand… that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.” Further experiences with God brought David into a deeper knowledge of God’s name. From this background, David, writing under the inspiration of God, declares to us, “those who know your name put their trust in you.”
A challenge to trust God ourselves
We, who have experienced God’s help in times of trouble and have come to know his name, are encouraged to trust him as new troubles surround us. He is a “stronghold” in times of trouble, verse 9 tells us. The word “stronghold” literally means an inaccessible, secure place high up in the rim-rock of the mountains, a place of safety and security one can go to in times of danger.
We are encouraged to trust God in new times of difficulty because we have experienced his help in the past and have come to know him as a “stronghold,” a place of security and safety in difficult times.
