If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?
Ver. 3. If the foundations be destroyed] If all things be turned "topsy turvy" in the state, and no regard had to right or wrong, Sed vi geritur res, ut in regno Cyclopico; if Saul, notwithstanding mine alliance to him, and innocence toward him, his many fair promises to me, and those hazards and hardships I have suffered for his sake, will needs go on to hunt me up and down, as a partridge in the mountains, and to seek mine utter undoing, what can I do to help it? how can it be but the most righteous must have his share of sufferings? See Psalms 82:5 .
What can the righteous do?] More than glorify God, by suffering his will, and patiently wait for better times, comforting himself (as in the next verse) in this confidence, that God is in heaven, &c. Some render it, What hath the righteous done? The wicked will say that he hath undone all, and that David with his accomplices are the causes of all the public calamities and confusions. So the primitive persecutors charged the Christians (Christianos ad leones. Tertul.), and Papists do still the Protestants, to be the troublers of the states, the seed men of sedition, the disturbers of the Church's peace, &c., when as indeed themselves are flagella Reip. flabella seditionis, the only traitors and troublers of Israel; with Athaliah, they cry out, Treason, treason, when they themselves are the greatest traitors and incendiaries of Christendom. We may confidently say, with the psalmist, The foundations are destroyed, but what hath the righteous done? Some render the words thus, But those purposes or counsels (of Saul and his flatterers, Psa 11:2) shall be destroyed (Saul shall be frustrated in his hope, therefore I will not flee into the mountains), but what hath the righteous done? That is, I have done nothing unrighteously against Saul, therefore I will not fly, &c.