Psalms 120
Psalm 120 opens the Songs of Ascents - the fifteen psalms (120-134) traditionally sung by pilgrims as they made their way up to Jerusalem and the house of the LORD. It is striking, then, that the series should begin so far from its destination. This is not a song of arrival but of distance: a cry from someone living among the hostile, a long way from home, with the journey not yet begun. The whole collection is a climb, and Psalm 120 is the place the climb starts - down in the trouble, in the far country, where the longing for the city of God is born.
The trouble is named at once, and it is not the kind we might expect. The psalmist does not cry for rescue from sickness or sword but from speech: Deliver my soul, O LORD, from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue (v. 2). What surrounds and wounds him is language bent into a weapon - slander, falsehood, words spoken to harm. And the psalm asks the false tongue a question, then answers it: What shall be given unto thee? or what shall be done unto thee, thou false tongue? Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper (vv. 3-4).
The very arrows the lying tongue shoots come back upon it; the fire it kindles will be its own. Deceit does not get the last word.
The closing verses turn from the lie to the loneliness underneath it: Woe is me, that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar! My soul hath long dwelt with him that hateth peace (vv. 5-6). Mesech and Kedar are far-flung peoples at opposite edges of the known world - not a literal address but a picture of being stranded among those utterly unlike oneself, a stranger surrounded by hostility.
And the psalm ends on its sharpest, saddest line: I am for peace: but when I speak, they are for war (v. 7). He has set himself for reconciliation and been answered with conflict, again and again. It is the cry of every soul that is for peace in a world that is for war - and the New Testament will show that the One who is Himself our peace stood exactly there, slandered by lying lips, reviled and reviling not again, come unto His own and not received.
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Psalm 120:1-4 · A Song of degreesDeliver My Soul from Lying Lips
1In my distress I cried unto the LORD, and he heard me. 2Deliver my soul, O LORD, from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue. 3What shall be given unto thee? or what shall be done unto thee, thou false tongue? 4Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper.
The first of the pilgrim songs opens not in the temple but in trouble: In my distress I cried unto the LORD, and he heard me. Before a single word about the road to Jerusalem, before any mention of the city or the climb, the psalm sets down its foundation - a cry, and a God who heard. Notice the order of the verbs. He cried; the LORD heard. The crying came first, raw and unpolished, the way distress always comes; and the hearing answered it.
The word translated distress carries the sense of being hemmed in, pressed into a tight place with no room to move - the experience of being cornered. Out of exactly that place the psalmist calls, and his first testimony, before he has told us a thing about what is wrong, is that the call was not wasted: he heard me. This is how the whole journey up to the house of God begins - with the discovery that the God of that house can be reached from the far country, that the cry of a cornered soul carries all the way up.
Everything else in the psalm rests on this opening certainty. The trouble is real, and it will be named; but the hearing came first.
Verses 3 and 4 put a question to the lying tongue and then answer it. What shall be given unto thee? or what shall be done unto thee, thou false tongue? - what, in other words, is the fitting recompense for a tongue that deals in deceit? The answer is swift and double: Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper (v. 4). Both images turn the tongue's own weapons back on itself. A slandering tongue shoots its words like arrows - elsewhere the psalms call bitter speech exactly that, arrows shot in secret (Ps. 64:3-4) - and so the recompense is sharp arrows. A false tongue kindles destruction like a fire - and so the recompense is burning coals of juniper, the wood of the broom tree, which the ancients prized because its coals hold their heat long after other embers have died.
The point is not a wish for cruelty; it is the moral order of God's world stated plainly. The harm the deceitful tongue intends does not finally escape; it returns. The lie that flies out as an arrow comes back as an arrow; the fire it lights becomes its own slow-burning coals. The psalmist does not have to take the false tongue's recompense into his own hands. He can leave it, because the arrows and the coals are not his to send.
Here is Psalm 120 made flesh - the deceitful tongue raised up to destroy, and raised against the one of whom the apostle Peter could write, Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth (1 Pet. 2:22). And His response to the lying lips was not to answer in kind. Peter, who watched it, sets it down as the pattern for everyone who follows Him: Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously (1 Pet. 2:23).
That last phrase is exactly the move of Psalm 120. The psalmist does not return the slander or seize the recompense; he commits the false tongue to God, who alone sends the arrows and the coals. Jesus did the same, in full - reviled, lied about, condemned on false witness, and answering it all by entrusting Himself to the One who judges rightly. The cry of verse 1 - I cried unto the LORD, and he heard me - is the cry of a soul surrounded by lies that found its way, at last, into the mouth of the Lamb who opened not His mouth.
Watch what the psalmist does with it. First, before he names the lie, he names the hearing: I cried unto the LORD, and he heard me. He takes the slander to God before he takes it anywhere else. Second, he does not appoint himself to repay the false tongue. He asks God for deliverance, and he leaves the recompense - the sharp arrows, the coals - in God's hands, not his own. That is the freedom on offer here.
When someone's words are working against you, you do not have to win the war of tongues, and you do not have to carry the case yourself. You can do what the psalmist did, and what the Lord Himself did under far worse lies - commit it to him that judgeth righteously, and let the One who hears the cornered cry be the one who sets it right.
Psalm 120:5-7I Am for Peace
5Woe is me, that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar! 6My soul hath long dwelt with him that hateth peace. 7I am for peace: but when I speak, they are for war.
The psalm turns now from the lie to the loneliness underneath it: Woe is me, that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar! (v. 5). Mesech and Kedar are real peoples, but they could not be a literal home address - Mesech lay far to the north, near the Black Sea, and Kedar was a nomadic Arab people of the southern deserts. No one lived in both at once. The psalmist names them together precisely because they sit at opposite ends of the known world: he is saying he feels as though he lives at the very edges of the earth, among foreigners, a stranger everywhere, with no people of his own around him.
The key word is sojourn - to dwell as an alien, a resident without roots, someone passing through a land that is not his home. That is the deeper trouble beneath the lying tongues. It is not only that he is slandered; it is that he is a stranger among those who slander, far from anyone who shares his heart. And this is exactly the ache that makes the Songs of Ascents begin here. The pilgrim psalms are the songs of people on their way home - up to the house of the LORD - and the longing for that home is born in places like Mesech and Kedar, in the felt distance of the soul that does not yet belong where it is.
The psalm ends on a single, aching line: I am for peace: but when I speak, they are for war (v. 7). The Hebrew is even barer than the English - something close to “I peace; and when I speak, they war.” The psalmist has so given himself to peace that he can almost say he is peace; it is his settled posture, the thing he reaches for. And every time he opens his mouth toward reconciliation, the answer comes back the same: war.
He speaks peace; they want a fight. This is the particular exhaustion of being a peacemaker among those who are not interested in peace - the weariness of reaching out a hand again and again only to have it struck away. The psalm does not pretend this is a small thing, and it does not offer a tidy resolution. It simply lays the contrast bare and leaves it standing: I am for peace; they are for war.
But laid against the opening verse, the line is not despair. The same soul that is for peace in a hostile world is the soul that cried to the LORD and was heard. He keeps being for peace not because it is working, but because he has entrusted himself to a God who hears - and the next fourteen psalms will carry him, step by step, up out of Mesech and Kedar and home to the city where peace finally dwells.
The Gospel opens with that very ache spoken of the Word made flesh: He came unto his own, and his own received him not (John 1:11). He came as no stranger - He came to His own - and yet was received as one, sojourning among those who would not have Him. He knew the long dwelling with those who hated the peace He brought. The second note is the line the whole psalm builds to: I am for peace: but when I speak, they are for war (v. 7).
This is the lot of the peacemaker in a hostile world, and it is the lot Jesus took as His own. He pronounced the blessing on people exactly like the psalmist: Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God (Matt. 5:9). He left peace as His parting gift: Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you (John 14:27).
And the apostle Paul could finally say of Him not merely that He makes peace but that he is our peace (Eph. 2:14). The psalmist was for peace and was answered with war - and so was the Lord, all the way to a cross. But the One who was for peace among those who were for war did not merely endure the contradiction; He broke it, making peace where there had been only war, and opening the road home to every soul still sojourning in Mesech and Kedar.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Deliver My Soul from Lying Lips
- Matthew 26:59-60sought false witness against Jesus, to put him to death; but found none.The lying lips of verse 2 raised against the one in whom no false thing could be found.
- 1 Peter 2:22-23neither was guile found in his mouth... when he was reviled, reviled not again.The deceitful tongue answered without answering in kind - the soul committed to him that judgeth righteously.
- Psalm 64:3-4Who whet their tongue like a sword, and bend their bows to shoot their arrows, even bitter words.The tongue as an arrow - the image verse 4 turns back on the false tongue itself.
- James 3:5-6the tongue is a little member... behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth!The tongue as a kindled fire - the “coals of juniper” of verse 4 read from the other side.
I Am for Peace
- John 1:11He came unto his own, and his own received him not.The sojourner of verses 5-6 - the One who came home and was received as a stranger.
- Matthew 5:9Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.The blessing on the one who is “for peace” (v. 7) in a world that is for war.
- Ephesians 2:14For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition.The peace the psalmist longs for, embodied - the One who is Himself our peace.
- Romans 12:18If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.The posture of verse 7 commended to all - to be for peace, even where peace is not returned.
- Hebrews 11:13confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.The sojourning of verse 5 named as the faith of all who look for a better, heavenly home.