http://biblebitbybit.blogspot.com/2016/02/psalms-129-v-3.html
Posted by Psalms on Tuesday, 9 February 2016
Psalms 129:3
The plowers plowed upon my back: they made long their furrows.
129:3. The plowers plowed upon my back. The scourgers tore the flesh as plow-men furrow a field. The people were maltreated like a criminal given over to cruel whips; the back of the nation was scored and furrowed by oppression. It is a grand piece of imagery condensed into few words. A writer says the metaphor is muddled, but he is mistaken: there are several figures, like wheel within wheel, but there is not confusion. The afflicted nation was, as it were, lashed by her adversaries so cruelly that each blow left a long red mark, or perhaps a bleeding wound, upon her back and shoulders, comparable to a furrow which tears up the ground from one end of the field to the other. Many a heart has been in like case, smitten and sore wounded by them that use the scourge of the tongue; so smitten that their whole character has been cut up and scored by calumny. The true church has in every age had fellowship with her Lord under his cruel flagellations: his sufferings were a prophecy of what she would be called hereafter to endure, and the foreshadowing has been fulfilled. Zion had in this sense been plowed as a field.
They made long their furrows. As if delighting in cruel labor. They missed not an inch, but went from end to end of the field, meaning to make thorough work of their congenial engagement. Those who laid on the scourge did it with a thoroughness which showed how hearty was their hate. Assuredly the enemies of Christ’s church never spare pains to inflict the utmost injury: they never do the work of the devil deceitfully, or hold back their hand from blood. They smite so as to plow into the man; they plow the quivering flesh as if it were clods of clay; they plow deep and long with countless furrows, until they leave no portion of the church unfurrowed or unassailed. Well did Latimer say that there was no busier plowman in all the world than the devil: whoever makes short furrows, he does not. Whoever balks and shirks, he is thorough in all that he does. He and his children plow like practiced plowmen, but they prefer to carry on their pernicious work upon the saints behind their backs, for they are as cowardly as they are cruel.
The Treasury of David by Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892)
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