Psalms 12

Psalms 12:1-8

Man’s lying words contrasted with Jehovah’s pure ones. To the chief musician, upon Sheminith. A psalm of David. The second puts in sharp contrast the lying words of men with Jehovah’s pure ones, which bring moreover with them the assurance of salvation to the soul. The outlook otherwise is dark enough, and the psalm is in the same low notes (al sheminith) as the fourth of the former series (Psalms 6:1-10). It is characteristic of antichristian times that deception should be so marked a feature, and that they should say, “With our tongues will we prevail.” Not that such words have reference necessarily to the poison of false doctrine; but that, as during an epidemic, other diseases take on more or less the prevailing form so under the shadow Of one great deception every form of deception may be hid. And yet, remembering what for the inspired writer the tongue is, we need not be at much loss for the application of the psalm before us to the world round about us today, and indeed take home to ourselves also its warnings.

1. It divides into two equal parts, in the first of which man is the subject, in the second God is before us. With man, his misery and his evil are, that, fallen away from God, believing in His love and care no more, he is become himself the object of his own self-love and care. Self rules him, subjects him, degrades, corrupts him, turns him from the minister of blessing that he should be into the oppressor and scourge of all creation under him. Here the mass are one, there is no godly man left, the faithful are gone from among the children of men. Their mouth is filled with falsehood, they have the smoothest of lips, and a double heart. Against all such Jehovah will manifest Himself, and against the tongue that speaks great things. What is it that they say? According to Delitzsch and others we should read, “To our tongues we will give strength,” that is, we will talk as loudly as we please; but such a meaning might, one would think, be more simply conveyed. Holding by the common translation, which the Revised Version retains, there results a possible meaning, which for its folly might be discarded as impossible, and which yet may be the meaning here. Nothing can, after all, be too foolish for the lying lips which are the outcome of a deceitful heart, capable of deceiving the very man who is its possessor. Do not men know that they must die? Yet is it not the business of the mass to ignore it, forget it, make the truth untrue?

And so the forty-ninth psalm speaks: “Their inward thought is that their houses shall continue forever, and their dwelling-places to all generations; they call the lands after their own names. . . . This their way is their folly; yet their posterity” -or “the men that come after them” -“approve their sayings.” Is not this in effect to say -is it not the real meaning of -“by our words we will prevail,” -“we will have the thing so by mere effrontery”? The untrue shall be true if we pronounce it true? Doubtless a man would never say this openly; would not proclaim so openly a battle with the fact; would not even frame such a thought in speech. But that is just the desperate deceit of the heart, that it can so prevail over the reason; and the numerical structure may just point to the weakness underlying the boasting of the tongue, -this mere puff of breath, as it is, -vox et praeterea nihil. And he may be fitly made to say what in fact he would not care to say, who yet in his life makes just this folly his. Lips and heart here have broken loose from the curb of divine authority: “who is lord over us?” is the cry. What more than a mere puff of breath is this, save for its wickedness? 2. Jehovah’s word comes here into swift opposition to all this; yet it is love and pity that move Him to action, -the oppression of the poor, the sighing of the needy. His promise pledges His interference; whereupon faith celebrates, before this comes, the “pure” words of the Lord, unmixed with any alloy of insincerity or untruth, -words that are like silver, the current medium of exchange, completely purified. In fact, this is realized. Jehovah keeps His people, yea, preserves them forever from the generation of the false-hearted. Yet the wicked walk around; and so it must be when “vileness” -what should be shaken out and cast away -is held in a place of honor among men. This is the condition of things now among the people once the special people of Jehovah.