1 Save, Jehovah, for the godly ceases, For the trusty have vanished from the sons of men. 2 They speak vanity every man with his neighbour; [With] smooth lip and a heart and a heart do they speak.
3 May Jehovah cut off all smooth lips, The tongue that speaks proud things, 4 That says, To our tongues we give strength: our lips are our own (lit. with us); Who is lord to us?
5 For the oppression of the afflicted, for the sighing of the needy, Now I will arise, saith Jehovah; I will set him in the safety he pants for. 6 The words of Jehovah are pure words, Silver tried in a furnace [and flowing down] to the ground, purified seven times.
7 Thou, Jehovah, shalt guard them; Thou shalt preserve him from this generation for ever. 8 All around the wicked swagger, When vileness is set on high among the sons of men.
One penalty of living near God is keen pain from low lives. The ears that hear God's word cannot but be stunned and hurt by the babble of empty speech. This psalm is profoundly melancholy, but without trace of personal affliction. The psalmist is not sad for himself, but sick of the clatter of godless tongues, in which he discerns the outcome of godless lives. His plaint wakes echoes in hearts touched by the love of God and the visions of man's true life. It passes through four clearly marked stages, each consisting of two verses: despondent contemplation of the flood of corrupt talk which seems to submerge all (1, 2); a passionate prayer for Divine intervention, wrung from the psalmist by the miserable spectacle (3, 4); the answer to that cry from the voice of God, with the rapturous response of the psalmist to it (5, 6); and the confidence built on the Divine word, which rectifies the too despondent complaint at the beginning, but is still shaded by the facts which stare him in the face (7, 8).
The cry for help (_Save_, LXX.) abruptly beginning the psalm tells of the sharp pain from which it comes. The psalmist has been brooding over the black outlook till his overcharged heart relieves itself in this single-worded prayer. As he looks round he sees no exceptions to the prevailing evil. Like Elijah, he thinks that he is left alone, and love to God and men and reliableness and truth are vanished with their representatives. No doubt in all such despondent thoughts about the rarity of Christian charity and of transparent truthfulness there is an element of exaggeration, which in the present case is, as we shall see, corrected by the process of God-taught meditation. But the clearer the insight into what society should be, the sadder the estimate of what it is. Roseate pictures of it augur ill for the ideal which their painters have. It is better to be too sensitive to evils than to be contented with them. Unless the passionate conviction of the psalmist has burned itself into us, we shall but languidly work to set things right. Heroes and reformers have all begun with "exaggerated estimates" of corruption. The judgment formed of the moral state of this or of any generation depends on the clearness with which we grasp as a standard the ideal realised in Jesus Christ and on the closeness of our communion with God.
As in Psalm v., sins of speech are singled out, and of these "vanity" and "smooth lips with a heart and a heart" are taken as typical. As in Eph. iv. 25, the guilt of falsehood is deduced from the bond of neighbourliness, which it rends. The sin, to which a "high civilisation" is especially prone, of saying pleasant things without meaning them, seems to this moralist as grave as to most men it seems slight. Is the psalmist right or wrong in taking speech for an even more clear index of corruption than deeds? What would he have said if he had been among us, when the press has augmented the power of the tongue, and floods of "vanity," not only in the form of actual lies, but of inane trivialities and nothings of personal gossip, are poured over the whole nation? Surely, if his canon is right, there is something rotten in the state of this land; and the Babel around may well make good men sad and wise men despondent.