What Does II Samuel 22:7 Mean?

David describes his prayer: "In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried to my God: and he did hear my voice out of his temple, and my cry did enter into his ears." The pattern is simple and powerful: distress, prayer, hearing. David called, God heard, and the hearing of God is the turning point of the psalm. Everything that follows, the theophany, the deliverance, the victory, flows from the single fact that God heard the cry of His servant.

The "temple" from which God hears is not Solomon's temple (which had not yet been built) but the heavenly sanctuary, the true temple of which every earthly structure is merely a copy. David's prayer ascends from the wilderness to the heavenly court, and the ears of God receive the cry of the fugitive as though he were standing before the altar. The distance between the cave in the wilderness and the throne of heaven is collapsed by prayer, and the God who dwells in unapproachable glory bends His ear to the whisper of the hunted king.

The Lord Jesus, our great High Priest, has entered the heavenly temple and opened the way for every prayer to reach the throne of God. "Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need." The access that David had through prayer the believer has through Christ, and the cry that enters the ears of God enters through the mediation of the Son who sits at the Father's right hand and intercedes for every struggling saint.