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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781433534973 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crossway |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2013 |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Sales rank: | 1,008,591 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.48(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
PEACE
If someone has lied about you, perhaps someone you trusted, you know how much it hurts. Of course people say nasty things all the time. Children can be especially cruel with their words. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether many of the apparently sophisticated criticisms of films or books are little more than adult versions of the name calling that happens in childhood. When someone writes, "I found his piece of poetry impermissibly obtuse," he may simply be using an adult way of saying, "I don't like you," or even, "You look kind of funny to me" — the sort of nastiness that is heard regularly on school playgrounds when the teacher is not looking. But the people in Psalm 120 are not only being nasty; they are being deceitful. They are saying things that are unkind, certainly, but more than simply being unpleasant, they are untrue. We do not know exactly who these people were who were speaking "lying deceit," but we do know it hurt the person who wrote the psalm.
It Feels Like You Are in a Trap
The psalmist tells us that he is in "distress" (v. 1), a word that has the idea of a narrow or confined place. He is saying here that he was feeling trapped by others' words. That is exactly the feeling you get when someone lies about you or spreads deceit about you. This distress that he is talking about is no minor emotional bumped toe or scratched knee. The distress is the experience of being locked away. When someone launches a gossip campaign against you, the result of that can be to leave you feeling stuck or imprisoned. You feel that whatever you do from this point on will be interpreted in the light of what that person said about you.
If someone said that you were jealous, then told a story with just enough truth to make the charge of jealousy seem credible to those who were listening, from then on you would fear that saying anything even vaguely critical of any program or event will be taken in light of that comment. People might say to themselves as they listen to you, "Oh, he's just saying that because he's the jealous type." Or if someone noticed that you like to read Shakespeare rather than watch Oprah's latest TV channel, he might create a story about you that gives an impression that, frankly, you are a bit of a snob. So the next time you turn up at a meeting wearing a perfectly normal outfit, pleasant-looking though not particularly expensive, you might fear that everyone will be saying in their heads, "Look at that snob. Isn't she vain!"
Slander makes you feel like you are in a trap.
It Feels Like You Have Been Shot
The psalmist tells us that they have a "deceitful tongue" (vv. 2 — 3). The word used for "deceit" here has the sense of shooting. He feels as if he is in the firing line. The psalm is not just describing someone saying something petty, an occasional sarcastic sneer perhaps. No, this is a little more clever than that, perhaps a bit more sinister. It is deliberate deceit, words aimed as carefully as a sniper aims. They are well-constructed lies. Someone or some group of people is picking up on things that the author of this psalm had said or done and then turning those things around to make him look bad. They are using his words as ammunition against him — shooting words.
This may not be slander in our modern legal sense of libel, but it is slander in the sense of lies spread around the community with the deliberate intention of causing harm, like a water-cooler conversation that you were not a part of but affects your reputation, or a few words shared about you for prayer in every prayer meeting in town, or a whisper in the ear of those who have the power to influence your career to make them look at you with disdain. If you have experienced anything like this, you know how damaging such deceit can be. You may have the wounds to show for it, wounds every bit as real as a bullet hole.
What can you do about it? After all, you probably do not know exactly what was said because you were unlikely to have been there when it was said. All you know is that you pick up a change in atmosphere when you walk into the room or a feeling that influences the tone when you are present. If you try to say anything about it, you will be guessing, and then it will be easy to characterize you as being paranoid as well. And if you happen by chance to hit the nail on the head about what is being said about you behind your back, then you can be characterized as nasty as well as vain. It feels like you are trapped in a box and cannot get out. It feels like you have taken a bullet and cannot stop the bleeding. What is the answer? As surprising as it may sound, the answer is to read this Psalm.
A Strange Place to Start
At first glance it is strange that the Psalms of Ascent start with lies and deceit, but when you think about it, that actually is the most important and natural starting point. It dispenses once and for all with the rather unhelpful limerick I heard growing up as a child: "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me." If only that were true; unfortunately, if someone calls you fat or ugly or stupid or lazy, it tends to hang over you for many, many years. Unaddressed, it can influence your entire life. So it is very important that we do good soul work to get rid of those lies and journey to the truth about ourselves in relation to God.
You may think talking about ourselves is hopelessly compromised in terms of pop psychotherapy, but it is interesting to me that in this psalm, one of the repeated refrains is directly related to the self. Deliver "me" he says (v. 2); even, perhaps rather self-indulgently, "woe to me" (v. 5). Both instances are talking about the self, and then the self in relation to this particular situation is brought by this distressed individual into the realm of God. He uses the first-person pronoun "I" a lot — this is not something about them or us, but about "me." He is making this personal, for it is personal, and he needs personal help.
1) Pray
In my distress I called to the LORD,
and he answered me.
Deliver me, O LORD,
from lying lips,
from a deceitful tongue. (vv. 1 — 2)
How does he deal with this distress? First, he prays about it. "In my distress I called to the LORD" (v. 1). He does not first tell one of his friends about it ("Did you hear what so-and-so said about me?"). He does not first tell the local authority figure, whether boss or principal or lawyer. He needs help from God first of all. "In my distress I called to the LORD, and he answered me."
The right approach is first to pray. It is no good trying to deal with lies about you before you have gone first to God. You are too raw, too likely to lash out with a hurtful word yourself and then make everything even worse. Somehow you have to go to God first and deal with it with him. I will admit that this is far easier written on the page than done at home or in a small group or at work. You see, the psalm is not merely "praying about it" in some rote or traditional fashion. The author of the psalm is actually honest with God in his heart about the distress, about the lying lips and the deceitful tongue. That is difficult, because part of what makes deceitful lies such a trap is that you never want them repeated again, not to anyone, perhaps not even to God. If someone says to you that your work is no good, the last thing you want to do is tell someone else that someone said your work is no good. You want to keep it to yourself in your little box, in your "distress," in your narrow confine.
Understandable, though, as the desire is to keep the deceit as secret as you can, often that just makes it all worse. As William Blake wrote, "I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow." The poison eats away at you. Somehow you have to be honest enough — shall we say, brave enough — to start by telling God about it. I am not saying that is easy, but I am saying it is where you are going to find healing. That, at least, is the testimony of the person who wrote this psalm. "In my distress I called to the LORD, and he answered me" (v. 1), which allows him to become confident that God will "deliver" him (v. 2). He has gained the certainty that in God's sovereignty even lying lips will be turned to his deliverance.
Would you like that deliverance? First pray. Go to God in prayer, and you will find that he has a deliverance plan even for slander. Perhaps not straight away from the malicious consequences of the lies that have been spread about you, but straight away from adding to the malignancy by spreading lies back. It takes strength to be someone who stops gossip rather than keeps on spreading it around, especially when the wounds are yours, not someone else's. And that sort of strength (deliverance) can be found only in God: "Deliver me."
2) Tell the Pain to God
The psalmist does not just go to God and ask him for help. Important as that is, having prayed about it, in the context of that prayer the psalmist unleashes the ugliness that the pain has caused in his own soul.
What shall be given to you,
and what more shall be done to you,
you deceitful tongue?
A warrior's sharp arrows,
with glowing coals of the broom tree! (vv. 3 — 4)
Honestly, I can't quite decide whether verses 3 and 4 are a confession of the psalmist's personal anger and wish to get back at the horrible so-and- so who has been so mean to him, or a prophetic denunciation of God's judgment, or even a description of the inevitable result for the person who told the lies. In the end you fall into your own trap, and it is worse for you than for your victim.
Usually it is said that these verses are some sort of prophetic denunciation, but I'm a little uncomfortable with that. There certainly are instances in the Bible of righteous anger, but I find, at least in my personal experience, that whatever little righteous anger I have is least likely to be purely righteous anger when the wrong done is against me. I suspect it is usually rather tarnished by unrighteous anger too. I see a little too much here of the personal vindictiveness that you would not expect from someone trying to fulfill the Old Testament mandate of loving your neighbor or of helping your enemy when his ox or donkey is in trouble — these sorts of teachings that were as much mandated in the Old Testament law as they were in the New Testament teaching of love for neighbor and enemy.
We know that judgment is coming on all those who sin and do not repent, but as the apostle Paul wrote, quoting from the Old Testament, "'Vengeance is mine, I will repay,' says the Lord. ... If your enemy is hungry, feed him" (Rom. 12:19 — 20). I do not think the psalmist is "letting them have it" in his heart. His knee-jerk reflex to pray suggests a far too mature spirituality for that kind of childishness. But I do think the sting of his anger is being drawn out by God in prayer. You see, what happens when someone hurts you is only half the cruelty. The real danger is that you'll become someone like that and start to hurt other people in turn. That vicious cycle is the standard pattern, whether of verbal or physical abuse, unless the grace of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ intervene, as they do here.
Verses 3 and 4 are really a form of confession. The deceit is shooting at him, and now he wants God to shoot back at them with sharp arrows and with glowing coals of the broom tree, fiery darts that would not go out. The broom tree coals once lit, we are told by an ancient commentator, were known to last without going out for a very long time. He wants the deceit that others have spread about him to come down on them ten times worse, if not more. It is a confession.
It is also, of course, a kind of prediction. Proverbs is full of the reality that if we set traps for other people, in the end the trap falls upon us. That is the kind of world that God has created — sin eventually results in judgment even in the here and now and only grows toward final judgment. That Wisdom Literature understanding of the moral universe, the world in which we live, is in the background here, no doubt, but this psalm is not written to the person doing the lying. It is written by the victim of the lying. Somehow in this place, in verses 3 and 4, he has to get the emotions — the dark, even demonic emotions — to the surface and then take them to the only place where they can be safely dealt with, God himself.
When I start to talk like that, you can begin to see why so often the Psalms were used in the New Testament to point to the cross. Psalm 110 is frequently quoted in the New Testament for that purpose. One ancient Christian writer actually recommended that when someone is beginning to find out about Christianity, he read the Psalms before reading the New Testament, which may be stretching things a bit too far, but you will know what he meant when you read the Psalms carefully. They are not only the language of the soul, the spirituality of the heart; they are not just a spiritual form of psychotherapy; they are theotherapy. They are the place where the objective doctrine combines with the subjective experience, and the questions that this combustible fire raises are all answered at the cross of Jesus, where love and justice meet.
Let this psalm take you there. Take all the bitterness you have swallowed over time, as you have replayed in your heart the nasty things that have been said about you, and leave it in God's hands. That might mean saying some things about those experiences in the safety of your relationship with God that would be as equally eye-opening as what the psalmist wrote in verses 3 and 4. Between you and God have confidential dealings so that you can then emerge on the other side. It probably will not be a one-off experience, but it will be a lifetime journey — the journey of forgiveness not just seven times but seventy times seven, as Jesus put it, the journey of the truth that I need forgiving just as much as anyone who has lied about me.
3) Real Peace
The last thing the psalmist does is even more remarkable. Some songs are trite because they are overly triumphalistic, too certain that everything is always going to be fine, that the sun will always shine upon your steps, and that with a spoonful of sugar, no problem is too big. Of course, for Christians there is victory to come, and there will be a time when there is no more crying, because Christ has won the victory. But we live in the here and now without that victory finally and fully applied, and it can be rather demoralizing to be asked to try to live in a preachy world where everything is as easy as a perfectly constructed three-point sermon. That's not life. All we hear are the perfect victories, and how this person came out of sin into light, and how the other person got victory over this problem or that, or how that person's children were struggling but now they are thriving. Wonderful as those stories are, if that is all we hear, then there is a danger that we are not really braced for the reality of the next step in the ongoing journey. The Christian life is a pilgrimage, meaning it is a journey back to home, so however great the victories are here, however thrilling the adventures, we are still going there, and it is only there that we will find full satisfaction.
So as the psalm concludes, it ends in a way that no modern writer of a devotional book would conclude, nor any hymn writer, nor any therapist, or at least too few of all of the above. He concludes with a reality check:
Woe to me, that I sojourn in Meshech,
that I dwell among the tents of Kedar!
Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace.
I am for peace,
but when I speak, they are for war! (vv. 5 — 7)
Hardly a good finale to a popular Christian devotional book! The "woe to me" suggests that the psalmist is not yet completely over his personal hurt. He has made progress, but he still seems to me to be taking too much pity on himself. "Woe to me"? "Come on!" I want to say to him. "God has delivered you. He has answered you. You are moving toward Jerusalem. You are on the great journey with God's people to the city of God!" And yet, if we are honest, "woe to me" is sometimes how we feel. It is not right. It is not best. But it is real.
Meshech and Kedar are places far distant from Israel, one along the Black Sea and the other in the Arabian tribal areas. Together they seem to function as the psalmist's feelings toward the sort of people who are lying about him. They were from Meshech and Kedar; they were Philistines and Barbarians! It is not exactly politically correct to call some of those with whom he was dwelling crass and Philistine barbarian hordes — not much better than Mongol invaders! But again this psalmist has not yet arrived. He is still on the journey.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Journey to Joy"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Josh Moody.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 11
Preface 13
1 Peace (Psalm 120) 19
2 Help (Psalm 121) 29
3 Church (Psalm 122) 39
4 Injustice (Psalm 123) 49
5 Danger (Psalm 124) 61
6 Security (Psalm 125) 69
7 Laughter (Psalm 126) 77
8 Beating the Daily Grind (Psalm 127) 87
9 The Blessing of Family (Psalm 128) 99
10 Finding Freedom from the Past (Psalm 129) 109
11 Living Guilt Free (Psalm 130) 123
12 The Humility of Greatness (Psalm 131) 135
13 When You Think God's Plans Might Fail (Psalm 132) 145
14 The Secret of Teamwork (Psalm 133) 157
15 The End of the Journey (Psalm 134) 167
General Index 175
Scripture Index 179
What People are Saying About This
“John Calvin called the book of Psalms a ‘mirror of the soul.’ The psalmists want us to pray these poems as our own prayer to God. They thus help us articulate our heart to God and they minister to us by drawing us close to him. Josh Moody does a masterful job of leading us through the psalms of ascent in a way that touches and transforms our life.”—Tremper Longman III, Distinguished Scholar and Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies, Westmont College