Psalms 101
Psalm 101 stands apart in the collection: it is a ruler's vow. Headed simply A Psalm of David, it is not a prayer for help or a song of thanks but a public charter - a king setting down, in his own words, the kind of reign he intends to keep. And what makes it remarkable is what he does not promise. Not conquest, not wealth, not the expansion of his borders. He promises character. I will sing of mercy and judgment (v. 1) - the two pillars on which any just rule must stand, tenderness toward the weak and accountability toward the wicked, held together and never played off against each other.3
The most striking feature of the psalm is the direction the reform runs. It begins not with the kingdom but with the king, and not even with his public acts but with the private rooms of his own life: I will walk within my house with a perfect heart (v. 2); I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes (v. 3); a froward heart shall depart from me (v. 4). Only after he has named what he will and will not allow in himself does his vow turn outward - to the slanderer he will silence, the proud he will not endure, the faithful he will gather, the deceiver he will shut out (vv. 5-7). The order is deliberate and searching. A ruler who has not first governed his own eyes and heart has no business governing anyone else, and David knows it.
There is a shadow over the psalm that the psalm itself never names, and it is worth feeling. This is a vow of perfect integrity - and David did not keep it. The same king who swore I will walk… with a perfect heart would one day stain his own house with exactly the slander and bloodshed he here promises to cut off. So the psalm reaches past its author. The clean court and the undivided heart it describes are a standard no son of David fully met, and the longing it sets loose - for a king whose integrity goes all the way down, whose city is finally rid of every evil thing - runs forward through the whole of Scripture until it finds the only One who could honestly say every line of it.2 Read that way, Psalm 101 is less a manifesto than a portrait drawn in advance.
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Psalm 101:1-4 · A Psalm of DavidI Will Walk Within My House with a Perfect Heart
1I will sing of mercy and judgment: unto thee, O LORD, will I sing. 2I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. O when wilt thou come unto me? I will walk within my house with a perfect heart. 3I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me. 4A froward heart shall depart from me: I will not know a wicked person.
The vow opens by naming the two things David means to sing of, and they are not the two we might expect from a king: I will sing of mercy and judgment: unto thee, O LORD, will I sing (v. 1). Not power and glory, not victory and wealth - mercy and judgment. These are the twin pillars of any rule that means to imitate God's own, and the genius of the verse is that it refuses to choose between them. A throne that is all mercy and no judgment lets the wicked prey on the weak; a throne that is all judgment and no mercy crushes the very people it exists to protect. David binds the two together and aims them in a single direction: unto thee, O LORD, will I sing. The standard for his reign is not his own preference or his people's applause but the character of the God he serves. He will rule the way he sings - with mercy and judgment held in one hand - because that is how the LORD reigns, and a king is only ever a steward of a throne that finally belongs to Another.
The resolution that follows has been badly misread by readers who hear in it a boast of flawlessness: I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way… I will walk within my house with a perfect heart (v. 2). But the word behind perfect does not mean “without sin.” It means whole, complete, undivided - a life pointed single-mindedly in one direction rather than split between God and something else. David is not claiming he has arrived; he is naming the aim. And notice the tender interruption planted in the middle of the verse: O when wilt thou come unto me? Right as he vows to walk a perfect way, he breaks off to long for God's own presence, as if to confess that the integrity he promises is not something he can manufacture alone. He waits for God to come. Notice, too, where he means to walk it: not in the throne room or the public square, but within my house - the private rooms where no subject watches and no record is kept. The truest test of a ruler's integrity is the person he is at home, and David puts that hardest test first.
From the heart the vow moves to the eyes: I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me (v. 3). David understands something every honest person learns eventually - that what we deliberately put in front of our eyes does not stay in front of our eyes. It works its way in. So he resolves to guard the gate, to refuse to set evil there in the first place, because he knows how it behaves once admitted: it cleaves, it sticks, it attaches itself and will not easily be shaken off. This is not the language of censorship imposed on others; it is the discipline a leader accepts for himself. The phrase them that turn aside pictures people who have left the straight path, and David refuses to let their work become his entertainment or his counsel. A kingdom takes its character, in the end, from what its ruler is willing to look at and live with. David means to set the standard at his own eyes before he sets it anywhere else.
Psalm 101:5-8Cut Off from the City of the LORD
5Whoso privily slandereth his neighbour, him will I cut off: him that hath an high look and a proud heart will not I suffer. 6Mine eyes shall be upon the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with me: he that walketh in a perfect way, he shall serve me. 7He that worketh deceit shall not dwell within my house: he that telleth lies shall not tarry in my sight. 8I will early destroy all the wicked of the land; that I may cut off all wicked doers from the city of the LORD.
Now the vow turns outward, and David names the corruptions he will not let take root in his court - and the first two are sins of the tongue and the heart, not the sword. Whoso privily slandereth his neighbour, him will I cut off: him that hath an high look and a proud heart will not I suffer (v. 5). The word privily means secretly, in the shadows; David singles out the slanderer who destroys a reputation in whispers, where the victim cannot answer and the damage spreads unseen. It is telling that the very first thing a just king resolves to root out is not violence or theft but quiet character-assassination - because a court runs on trust, and the secret slanderer poisons it at the source. Beside him stands the proud: an high look and a proud heart. The high look is the lifted eye that despises others; the proud heart is the inner posture that has made itself the measure of all things. David will not suffer - not tolerate, not give room to - either one. These are the sins that hollow out a household from within long before any external enemy arrives, and the king names them first.
The vow is not only negative. For every evil David resolves to remove, there is a good he resolves to gather, and verse 6 is its bright centre: Mine eyes shall be upon the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with me: he that walketh in a perfect way, he shall serve me. The same eyes that in verse 3 refused to look on wickedness are here turned, watchful and deliberate, toward the faithful - the reliable, the steady, the people of proven loyalty. A leader becomes, over time, the company he keeps; the voices admitted to the inner circle shape the decisions made there. So David does not merely banish the corrupt; he actively seeks out the trustworthy and draws them close, gives them a place to dwell and a share in his service. This is the constructive half of integrity, and the harder half. It is one thing to know what you are against; it is another to deliberately build your life around those who walk the way you mean to walk. The standard David sets for those who will serve him is the very standard he set for himself in verse 2 - a perfect, undivided way.
David returns once more to the household and to the tongue: He that worketh deceit shall not dwell within my house: he that telleth lies shall not tarry in my sight (v. 7). The repetition is not accidental. Twice now the king has fixed on falsehood - the secret slander of verse 5, the worked deceit and told lies of verse 7 - as the thing he is most determined to keep out of his presence. There is a reason. A throne depends on truth: a king who cannot trust the words spoken in his own house cannot govern, cannot judge rightly, cannot tell the loyal servant from the flatterer. So the liar shall not tarry - shall not be allowed to settle, to become established, to gain a foothold - in my sight. Notice how personal it stays: not “in the kingdom” but within my house, in my sight, close to me. The reform that began at the king's own eyes (v. 3) now reaches the threshold of his home, and the rule is the same on the inside as the out: what is false does not get to stay.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Psalm 101 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for tamim (vv. 2, 6, “perfect,” whole or blameless rather than flawless) and for the pairing of chesed and mishpat (v. 1, “mercy and judgment”) that frames the whole vow.
- Psalm 101 ↔ 1 Peter 2 · Hebrews 1 · Revelation 21Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Psalm 101's vow of a “perfect way” to the rest of Scripture - the sinless King in whom no guile was found (1 Pet. 2:22), the throne whose holder “loved righteousness, and hated iniquity” (Heb. 1:9 echoing vv. 3-4), and the city into which nothing defiling enters (Rev. 21:27 answering v. 8).
- Psalm 101 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Psalm 101 - the royal-vow genre, the force of tamim behind “a perfect way” and “a perfect heart,” and the meaning of the difficult clause “I hate the work of them that turn aside” in verse 3.
Where this echoes in Scripture
I Will Walk Within My House with a Perfect Heart
- 1 Peter 2:21-22Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth.The “perfect way” David vowed in verse 2, walked in full at last by the One in whom no guile was found.
- Micah 6:8to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.The “mercy and judgment” of verse 1 named as what the LORD requires of everyone, not kings only.
- Psalm 15:1-2who shall dwell in thy holy hill? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness.The same vision as verses 2-3 - the integrity of walk and heart that belongs in the presence of God.
- Matthew 6:22-23The light of the body is the eye... if therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!The guarded eye of verse 3 - what we set before our eyes governs the whole of us.
Cut Off from the City of the LORD
- Revelation 21:27there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth... or maketh a lie.The cleansing of “the city of the LORD” in verse 8, finished forever in the city the LORD secures.
- Hebrews 1:8-9Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity... a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom.David’s love of mercy and hatred of evil (vv. 3-4) pronounced fulfilled by the Father in the Son’s reign.
- Psalm 15:1-3He that backbiteth not with his tongue... nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour.The same court of the faithful as verses 5-6 - the slanderer barred, the upright welcomed.
- Proverbs 20:8A king that sitteth in the throne of judgment scattereth away all evil with his eyes.The watchful, evil-scattering eyes of the just king David vows to be in verses 6-8.