Growing Old with God
I have become a portent to many, but You are my strong refuge. Psalm 71:7 · Berean Standard Bible
Your life has become a kind of warning or object lesson to others—people watch you and wonder if God is really there—but that's exactly when you need to cling to God's strength most.
To be a 'portent' meant people saw something unusual or troubling in you. Maybe you're suffering visibly, or your faith is being tested publicly, or enemies are pointing to your struggles as evidence that God abandoned you.
Someone whose suffering is public, not private.
Job experienced this—his friends saw his suffering and questioned God's justice. Job held fast anyway. This is what it looks like to trust God when the whole world is watching and doubting.
The psalmist acknowledges that his suffering has made him a cautionary tale or spectacle to others, yet God remains his sure refuge despite this humiliation.
The word 'portent' (מוֹפֵת, mofet) typically denotes a sign or wonder—often something troubling or ominous. The psalmist admits that his visible affliction has become a public phenomenon; people point to him as an example, possibly interpreting his suffering as divine abandonment or punishment—a theological scandal he must address.
The vulnerable elder, now acknowledging the social shame and theological confusion his condition provokes, yet refusing to abandon faith despite this interpretive pressure.
This anticipates Job's experience and the New Testament's treatment of suffering. The psalmist's refusal to let his suffering's apparent meaning (as abandonment or punishment) overturn his faith in God's presence establishes a crucial counternarrative to the friends' logic in Job—what scholars call the 'protest theodicy' tradition.
5For You are my hope, O Lord GOD, my confidence from my youth.
6I have leaned on You since birth; You pulled me from my mother’s womb. My praise is always for You.
7I have become a portent to many, but You are my strong refuge.
8My mouth is filled with Your praise and with Your splendor all day long.
9Do not discard me in my old age; do not forsake me when my strength fails.
Read all of Psalm 71 — From youth to gray hairs, the psalmist has known God's faithfulness. Now aging and weak, he asks: do not forsake me when my strength is spent.
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