Psalm 69:28
‘Deliver me, because of my enemies! Let their eyes be darkened, so that they do not see! Let Your wrathful anger take hold of them!… Let their habitation be desolate!… Let them not come into Your righteousness! Let them be blotted out of the book of the living!’
Psalm 69:18-28.
Calvin comments: “By calling upon God ‘to draw near to his life’ — which…seemed to have (been) forsaken — he (David) exhibits a striking proof of the strength of his faith…. God will appear, to deliver him!…
“‘Let their eyes be darkened, so that they may not see!’… I have no hesitation in considering his language as a prayer that God would deprive his (David’s) enemies of reason and understanding…. God, whenever He pleases, can strike them suddenly with blindness — so that they may see nothing….
“Let their habitation be desolate!’… He desires that…God would not spare them, even after their death…. He employs the expression…in the same sense in which Isaiah (26:14) speaks of ‘the dead’…, thereby denoting those who continue…even in death itself….
“‘Let them not come into Your righteousness!’… Let their wickedness increase more and more!… The wicked are plunged into a deep gulf of wickedness by the just vengeance of Heaven, so that they may never return to a sound understanding — and so that he who is filthy may become still more filthy (Revelation 22:11)….
“‘Let them be blotted out from the book of the living!’… This…imprecation…is…most dreadful…. He denounces against them eternal destruction…, so that they might be blotted out of the book of the living (Revelation 22:19). For all those must inevitably perish, who are not found written or enrolled in the Book of Life….
“Those whom God openly rejects and casts out of His Church are…said to ‘be blotted out’…. (But) none who have once really been the children of God, will ever finally fall away or wholly be cut off!”
Calvin also says in his Institutes II:10:18 & III:24:9: “‘The wicked shall be silent in darkness’ (First Samuel 2:9)…. Howsoever pleasant the delights of the wicked, they gradually lead down to the chambers of death…. The death of such persons (is) the death of…persons cut off from the hope of resurrection…. ‘Let them be blotted out of the book of the living, and not be written with the righteous!’ (Psalm 69:28)….
“The words…indicate the abandonment of those who seemed to have a…place among the elect. As is said in the Psalm (69:28), ‘Let them be blotted out of the Book of the Living, and not be written with the righteous!'” Let not the wicked be written up in the book of the living!
