1 Give ear to my words, Jehovah;
Consider my meditation.
2 Listen to the voice of my crying, my King and my God,
For to Thee do I make supplication.
3 Jehovah, in the morning Thou shalt hear my voice;
In the morning will I order my [prayer] to Thee and keep watch.
4 For not a God delighting in wickedness art Thou;
Evil cannot sojourn with Thee.
5 Fools cannot stand before Thine eyes;
Thou hatest all workers of iniquity.
6 Thou destroyest the speakers of falsehood;
The man of blood and deceit Jehovah loathes.
7 But I, in the multitude of Thy loving-kindness I dare come into
Thy house;
I dare fall prostrate before Thy holy temple in Thy fear.
8 Jehovah, lead me in Thy righteousness, because of them that are
spies on me;
Make Thy way level before me.
9 For in his mouth is nothing trustworthy;
Their inward part is destruction;
An open grave is their throat;
Their tongue they smooth.
10 Hold them guilty, Jehovah: let them fall by their own schemes;
In the multitude of their transgressions strike them down, for
they have rebelled against Thee.
11 Then shall all those who take refuge in Thee be glad;
For ever shall they shout for joy, since Thou dost shelter them;
And they that love Thy name shall exult in Thee.
12 For Thou dost bless the righteous;
Jehovah, as with a shield, with favour dost Thou compass him
about.
The reference to the temple in ver. 7 is not conclusive against the
Davidic authorship of this psalm, since the same word is applied in 1
Sam. i. 9 and iii. 3 to the house of God in Shiloh. It means a
palace, and may well be used for any structure, even if a hair tent,
in which God dwelt. No doubt it is oftenest used for the Solomonic
temple, but it does not necessarily refer to it. Its use here, then,
cannot be urged as fatal to the correctness of the superscription. At
the same time, it does create a certain presumption against it. But
there is nothing in the psalm to determine its date, and its worth is
quite independent of its authorship. The psalmist is surrounded by
foes, and seeks access to God. These are constant features of the
religious life, and their expression here fits as closely to the
present time as to any past.
The psalm falls into two main parts: vv. 1-7 and 8-12. The former
division deals with the inner side of the devout life, its access to
God, to whom sinful men cannot approach, the latter with the outward
side, the conduct, "the way" in which the psalmist seeks to be led, and
in which sinful men come to ruin because they will not walk. Naturally
the inward comes first, for communion with God in the secret place of
the Most High must precede all walking in His way and all blessed
experience of His protection, with the joy that springs from it. These
two halves of the psalm are arranged in inverted parallelism, the first
verse of the second part (ver. 8) corresponding to the last verse of the
first (ver. 7) and being, like it, purely personal; vv. 9 and 10
corresponding similarly to vv. 4-6 and, like them, painting the
character and fate of evil-doers; and, finally, vv. 11, 12, answering to
vv. 1-3 and representing the blessedness of the devout soul, as in the
one case led and protected by God and therefore glad, and in the other
abiding in His presence. The whole is a prayerful meditation on the
inexhaustible theme of the contrasted blessedness of the righteous and
misery of the sinner as shown in the two great halves of life: the
inward of communion and the outward of action.
In the first part (vv. 1-7) the central thought is that of access to
God's presence, as the desire and purpose of the psalmist (1-3), as
barred to evil-doers (4-6), and as permitted to, and embraced as his
chief blessing by, the singer (7). The petition to be heard in vv. 1
and 2 passes into confidence that he is heard in ver. 3. There is no
shade of sadness nor trace of struggle with doubt in this prayer,
which is all sunny and fresh, like the morning sky, through which it
ascends to God. "Consider [or Understand] my meditation"--the
brooding, silent thought is spread before God, who knows unspoken
desires, and "understands thoughts afar off." The contrast between
"understanding the meditation" and "hearkening to the voice of my cry"
is scarcely unintentional, and gives vividness to the picture of the
musing psalmist, in whom, as he muses, the fire burns, and he speaks
with his tongue, in a "cry" as loud as the silence from which it
issued had been deep. Meditations that do not pass into cries and
cries which are not preceded by meditations are alike imperfect. The
invocation "my King" is full of meaning if the singer be David, who
thus recognises the delegated character of his own royalty; but
whoever wrote the psalm, that expression equally witnesses to his firm
grasp of the true theocratic idea.
Noteworthy is the intensely personal tone of the invocation in both
its clauses, as in the whole of these first verses, in every clause of
which "my" or "I" occurs. The poet is alone with God and seeking to
clasp still closer the guiding hand, to draw still nearer to the
sweet and awful presence where is rest. The invocation holds a plea in
itself. He who says, "My King and my God," urges the relation, brought
about by God's love and accepted by man's faith, as a ground for the
hearing of his petition. And so prayer passes into swift assurance;
and with a new turn in thought, marked by the repetition of the name
"Jehovah" (ver. 3), he speaks his confidence and his resolve. "In the
morning" is best taken literally, whether we suppose the psalm to have
been composed for a morning song or no. Apparently the compilers of
the first Psalter placed it next to Psalm iv., which they regarded as
an evening hymn, for this reason. "I will lay me down and sleep" is
beautifully followed by "In the morning shalt Thou hear my voice." The
order of clauses in ver. 3 is significant in its apparent breach of
strict sequence, by which God's hearing is made to precede the
psalmist's praying. It is the order dictated by confidence, and it is
the order in which the thoughts rise in the trustful heart. He who is
sure that God will hear will therefore address himself to speak. First
comes the confidence, and then the resolve. There are prayers wrung
from men by sore need, and in which doubt causes faltering, but the
happier, serener experience is like that of this singer. He resolves
to "order" his prayer, using there the word employed for the priest's
work in preparing the materials for the morning sacrifice. Thus he
compares his prayer to it, and stands at the same level as the writer
of Psalm iv., with whose command to "offer the sacrifices of
righteousness" this thought again presents a parallel.
A psalmist who has grasped the idea that the true sacrifice is prayer is
not likely to have missed the cognate thought that the "house of the
Lord," of which he will presently speak, is something other than any
material shrine. But to offer the sacrifice is not all which he rejoices
to resolve. He will "keep watch," as Habakkuk said that he would do, on
his watch-tower; and that can only mean that he will be on the outlook
for the answer to his prayer, or, if we may retain the allusion to
sacrifice, for the downward flash of the Divine fire, which tells his
prayer's acceptance. Many a prayer is offered, and no eyes afterwards
turned to heaven to watch for the answer, and perhaps some answers sent
are like water spilled on the ground, for want of such observance.
The confidence and resolve ground themselves on God's holiness,
through which the necessary condition of approach to Him comes to be
purity--a conviction which finds expression in all religions, but is
nowhere so vividly conceived or construed as demanding such stainless
inward whiteness as in the Psalter. The "for" of ver. 4 would
naturally have heralded a statement of the psalmist's grounds for
expecting that he would be welcomed in his approach, but the turn of
thought, which postpones that, and first regards God's holiness as
shutting out the impure, is profoundly significant. "Thou art not a
God that hath pleasure in wickedness" means more than the simple "Thou
hast not pleasure" would do; it argues from the character of God, and
glances at some of the foul deities whose nostrils snuff up sensual
impurity as acceptable sacrifice. The one idea of absolute contrariety
between God and evil is put in a rich variety of shapes in vv. 4-6,
which first deal with it negatively in three clauses (_not a God_;
_not dwell_; _not stand in Thy sight_) and then positively in other
three (_hatest_; _shalt destroy_; _abhorreth_). "Evil shall not
sojourn with Thee." The verb is to be taken in its full meaning of
sojourning as a guest-friend, who has the right to hospitality and
defence. It thus constitutes the antithesis to ver. 7. Clearly the
sojourning does not mean access to the temple, but abiding with God.
The barriers are of the same nature as the communion which they
hinder, and something far deeper is meant than outward access to any
visible shrine. No one sojourned in the temple. In like manner, the
"standing in Thy sight" is a figure drawn from courts, reminding us of
"my King" in ver. 2 and suggesting the impossibility of evil or its
doers approaching the Divine throne.
But there is more than a negative side to the relation between God and
evil, which the psalm goes on to paint in sombre colours, for God not
only does not delight in sin, but hates it with a hatred like the
physical loathing of some disgusting thing, and will gather all His
alienation into one fatal lightning bolt. Such thoughts do not exhaust
the truth as to the Divine relation to sin. They did not exhaust the
psalmist's knowledge of that relation, and still less do they exhaust
ours, but they are parts of the truth to-day as much as then, and
nothing in Christ's revelation has antiquated them.
The psalmist's vocabulary is full of synonyms for sin, which witness to
the profound consciousness of it which law and ritual had evoked in
devout hearts. First, he speaks of it in the abstract, as "wickedness"
and "evil." Then he passes to individuals, of whom he singles out two
pairs, the first a more comprehensive and the second a more specific
designation. The former pair are "the foolish" and "workers of
iniquity." The word for "foolish" is usually translated by the moderns
"arrogant," but the parallelism with the general expression "workers of
iniquity" rather favours a less special meaning, such as Hupfeld's
"fools" or the LXX.'s "transgressors." Only in the last pair are special
forms of evil mentioned, and the two selected are significant of the
psalmist's own experience. _Liars_ and _men of blood and craft_ are his
instances of the sort of sinners most abominable to God. That
specification surely witnesses to his own sufferings from such.
In ver. 7 the psalmist comes back to the personal reference,
contrasting his own access to God with the separation of evil-doers
from His presence. But he does not assert that he has the right of
entrance because he is pure. Very strikingly he finds the ground of
his right of entry to the palace in God's "multitude of mercy," not in
his own innocence. Answering to "in Thy righteousness" is "in Thy
fear." The one phrase expresses God's disposition to man which makes
access possible, the other man's disposition to God which makes
worship acceptable. "In the multitude of Thy mercy" and "in Thy fear,"
taken together, set forth the conditions of approach. Having regard to
ver. 4, it seems impossible to restrict the meaning of "Thy house" to
the material sanctuary. It is rather a symbol of communion,
protection, and friendship. Does the meaning pass into the narrower
sense of outward worship in the material "temple" in the second
clause? It may be fairly taken as doing so (Hupfeld). But it may be
maintained that the whole verse refers to the spiritual realities of
prayer and fellowship, and not at all to the externalities of worship,
which are used as symbols, just as in ver. 3 prayer is symbolised by
the morning sacrifice. But probably it is better to suppose that the
psalmist's faith, though not tied to form, was fed by form, and that
symbol and reality, the outward and the inward worship, the access to
the temple and the approach of the silent soul to God, are fused in
his psalm as they tended to be in his experience. Thus the first part
of the psalm ends with the psalmist prostrate (for so the word for
"worship" means) before the palace sanctuary of his King and God. It
has thus far taught the conditions of approach to God, and given a
concrete embodiment of them in the progress of the singer's thoughts
from petition to assurance and from resolve to accomplishment.
The second part may be taken as his prayer when in the temple, whether
that be the outward sanctuary or no. It is likewise a further carrying
out of the contrast of the condition of the wicked and of the lovers
of God, expressed in terms applying to outward life rather than to
worship. It falls into three parts: the personal prayer for guidance
in life, the contemplation of evil-doers, and the vehement prayer for
their destruction, corresponding to vv. 4-6, and the contrasted prayer
for the righteous, among whom he implies his own inclusion.
The whole of the devout man's desires for himself are summed up in
that prayer for guidance. All which the soul needs is included in
these two: access to God in the depths of still prostration before His
throne as the all-sufficient good for the inner life; guidance, as by
a shepherd, on a plain path, chosen not by self-will but by God, for
the outward. He who has received the former in any degree will in the
same measure have the latter. To dwell in God's house is to desire His
guidance as the chief good. "In Thy righteousness" is capable of two
meanings: it may either designate the path by which the psalmist
desired to be led, or the Divine attribute to which he appealed. The
latter meaning, which is substantially equivalent to "because Thou art
righteous," is made more probable by the other instances in the psalm
of a similar use of "in" (_in the multitude of Thy mercy_; _in Thy
fear_; _in the multitude of their transgressions_). His righteousness
is manifested in leading those who seek for His guidance (compare
Psalm xxv. 8; xxxi. 1, etc.). Then comes the only trace in the psalm
of the presence of enemies, because of whom the singer prays for
guidance. It is not so much that he fears falling into their hands as
that he dreads lest, if left to himself, he may take some step which
will give them occasion for malicious joy in his fall or his calamity.
Wherever a man is earnestly God-fearing, many eyes watch him, and
gleam with base delight if they see him stumble. The psalmist, whether
David or another, had that cross to carry, like every thorough-going
adherent of the religious ideal (or of any lofty ideal, for that
matter); and his prayer shows how heavy it was, since thoughts of it
mingled with even his longings for righteousness. "Plain" does not
mean _obvious_, but _level_, and may possibly include both freedom
from stumbling-blocks ("Lead us not into temptation") and from
calamities, but the prevalent tone of the psalm points rather to the
former. He who knows his own weaknesses may legitimately shrink from
snares and occasions to fall, even though, knowing the wisdom of his
Guide and the help that waits on his steps, he may "count it all joy"
when he encounters them.
The picture of the evil-doers in ver. 9 is introduced, as in ver. 4,
with a "for." The sinners here are evidently the _enemies_ of the
previous verse. Their sins are those of speech; and the force of the
rapid clauses of the picture betrays how recently and sorely the
psalmist had smarted from lies, flatteries, slanders, and all the rest
of the weapons of smooth and bitter tongues. He complains that there
is no faithfulness or steadfastness in "his mouth"--a distributive
singular, which immediately passes into the plural--nothing there that
a man can rely on, but all treacherous. "Their inward part is
destruction." The other rendering, "engulfing ruin" or "a yawning
gulf," is picturesque; but _destruction_ is more commonly the meaning
of the word and yields a vigorous sense here. They plot inwardly the
ruin of the men whom they flatter. The figure is bold. Down to this
pit of destruction is a way like an open sepulchre, the throat
expanded in the act of speech; and the falsely smoothed tongue is like
a slippery approach to the descent (so Jennings and Lowe). Such
figures strike Western minds as violent, but are natural to the East.
The shuddering sense of the deadly power of words is a marked
characteristic of the Psalter. Nothing stirs psalmists to deeper
indignation than "God's great gift of speech abused," and this
generation would be all the better for relearning the lesson.
The psalmist is "in the sanctuary," and there "understands their end,"
and breaks into prayer which is also prophecy. The vindication of such
prayers for the destruction of evil-doers is that they are not the
expressions of personal enmity ("They have rebelled against Thee"),
and that they correspond to one side of the Divine character and acts,
which was prominent in the Old Testament epoch of revelation, and is
not superseded by the New. But they do belong to that lower level; and
to hesitate to admit their imperfection from the Christian point of
view is to neglect the plain teaching of our Lord, who built His law
of the kingdom on the declared relative imperfection of the ethics of
the Old. Terrible indeed are the prayers here. _Hold them
guilty_--that is, probably, treat them as such by punishing; _let them
fall_; _thrust them out_--from Thy presence, if they have ventured
thither, or out into the darkness of death. Let us be thankful that we
dare not pray such prayers, but let us not forget that for the
psalmist not to have prayed them would have indicated, not that he had
anticipated the tenderness of the Gospel, but that he had failed to
learn the lesson of the law and was basely tolerant of baseness.
But we come into the sunshine again at the close, and hear the
contrasted prayer, which thrills with gladness and hope. "When the
wicked perish there is shouting." The servants of God, relieved from
the incubus and beholding the fall of evil, lift up their praises. The
order in which the designations of these servants occur is very
noteworthy. It is surely not accidental that we have them first
described as "those that trust in Thee," then as "all them that love
Thy name," and finally as "the righteous." What is this sequence but
an anticipation of the evangelical order? The root of all is trust,
then love, then righteousness. Love follows trust. "We have known and
believed the love which God hath to us." Righteousness follows trust
and love, inasmuch as by faith the new life enters the heart and
inasmuch as love supplies the great motive for keeping the
commandments. So root, stem, and flower are here, wrapped up, as it
were, in a seed, which unfolds into full growth in the New Testament.
The literal meaning of the word rendered "put their trust" is "flee as
to a refuge," and that beautifully expresses the very essence of the
act of faith; while the same metaphor is carried on in "defendest,"
which literally means _coverest_. The fugitive who shelters in God is
covered by the shadow of His wing. Faith, love, and righteousness are
the conditions of the purest joy. Trust is joy; love is joy; obedience
to a loved law is joy. And round him who thus, in his deepest self,
dwells in God's house and in his daily life walks, with these angels
for his companions, on God's path, which by choice he has made his
own, there is ever cast the broad buckler of God's favour. He is safe
from all evil on whom God looks with love, and he on whom God so looks
is he whose heart dwells in God's house and whose feet "travel on
life's common way in cheerful godliness."