“O Lord, rebuke me not in thy wrath: neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.”
The psalmist opens with an urgent prayer not to be rebuked in God's anger or disciplined in God's wrath. The verbs 'rebuke' and 'discipline' suggest forms of divine correction, and the psalmist asks to be spared from their intensity. The opening suggests that the psalmist understands his condition as potentially the result of transgression subject to divine judgment. This psalm appears to be a prayer of one who is profoundly afflicted and fears that God's anger is the cause. The intensity of the opening establishes that the psalmist faces both physical suffering and the anxiety of divine displeasure.
Church Fathers on Psalms 38:1
A psalm to David himself, on the remembrance of the Sabbath. 1. What does this recollection of the Sabbath mean? What is this Sabbath? For it is with groaning that he “calls it to recollection.” You have both heard already when the Psalm was read, and you will now hear it when we shall go over it, how great is his groaning, his mourning, his tears, his misery. But happy he who is wretched after this manner! Whence the Lord also in the Gospel Matthew 5:4 called some who mourn…
Nicene & Post-Nicene / Ante-Nicene Fathers translations · public domain
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