Psalms 140

The prayer opens with two near-identical pleas wrapped around the same conviction: Deliver me, O LORD, from the evil man: preserve me from the violent man (v. 1), and again Keep me, O LORD, from the hands of the wicked; preserve me from the violent man (v. 4). The repetition is not redundancy; it is the way real fear prays, circling back to the same cry because the same danger has not gone away.

Two verbs carry the weight - preserve and keep - and both ask God for the same thing: a guarding, a watching-over, a hand placed between the psalmist and those who mean him harm. Notice that David does not ask, at least not first, to be made strong enough to win the fight himself. He asks to be kept - the request of someone who knows he is outmatched and turns to a stronger hand than his own.

And he names the enemy honestly: not critics, not rivals, but the wicked and the violent man, people who have purposed to overthrow my goings - who have set their will, deliberately, on tripping him up and bringing him down. The danger is real, and the psalm refuses to pretend otherwise. But the very first move it makes with that danger is to hand it to God.

The enemies' weapon is named with chilling exactness: They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent; adders' poison is under their lips (v. 3). It is the tongue, not the sword, that the psalm fears most here. The image works on two levels. A sharpened tongue is a blade - honed, pointed, made for cutting; words can wound as surely as steel, and these men have whetted theirs for the purpose. And then the picture shifts from blade to venom: adders' poison is under their lips. The harm is not only in the cut but in what the cut delivers - lies, slander, accusation, the slow toxin that spreads through a reputation and a community long after the words are spoken.

The comparison to the serpent reaches back to the oldest deception in Scripture, the creature whose speech first turned a true word of God into a half-truth and a doubt. To liken these men to it is to say their real danger is what they say and how they twist it. Many a sufferer in the Psalms faces swords; this one faces something more insidious, because poison does its work unseen, and a slandered man often cannot even find the wound to bind it.

Alongside the poisoned word runs the hidden trap: The proud have hid a snare for me, and cords; they have spread a net by the wayside; they have set gins for me (v. 5). The vocabulary is borrowed entirely from the hunter. A snare is a concealed loop that springs shut on the foot; cords are the lines that bind; a net is spread flat and unseen along the path; gins are spring-traps set to catch.

Heaped one on another, the words paint a man who feels hunted - not pursued in the open, but stalked by people who have rigged his ordinary path with concealed devices, so that any step might be the one that closes a trap on him. And the architects of it are the proud. The psalm quietly links the two: pride and predation grow from the same root. The proud man, certain of his own right to whatever he wants, comes in time to see other people as prey - obstacles to be trapped, used, removed.

The image of the hidden snare also explains the helplessness in the prayer. You cannot fight what you cannot see. A trap works precisely because it is concealed, and a person who knows traps have been laid for him, but not where, can do little but walk carefully and cry out to the One who sees what is hidden. Which is exactly what David does.

The whole psalm pivots on a single sentence: I said unto the LORD, Thou art my God: hear the voice of my supplications, O LORD (v. 6). Up to this point David has been looking outward, describing the enemy - their tongues, their snares, their war. Now he turns and looks up, and the first thing out of his mouth is not another description of the danger but a claim about his relationship: Thou art my God. That little possessive carries enormous weight.

It is not a statement of theology in the abstract; it is the language of belonging, of covenant, of a man taking hold of the One he is bound to and saying, in effect, “You are mine, and I am yours - so this trouble is yours to hear.” And what he asks for is simply to be heard: hear the voice of my supplications. Before any specific request, he wants the assurance that his cry is not lost - that there is Someone on the other end of the prayer who is listening.

This is the quiet center of the psalm. Everything before it was the problem; everything after it flows from the conviction that the God to whom he belongs is a God who hears. The man surrounded by violent voices steadies himself on one voice that will answer.

Here the psalm turns to face the wicked directly, and the petition needs to be read with care: As for the head of those that compass me about, let the mischief of their own lips cover them (v. 9). Two things steady this verse. First, the shape of the request. David asks that the harm the wicked have aimed at others fall back on themselves - that the mischief of their own lips, the poison they prepared for him in verse 3, cover them instead.

It is the prayer that evil prove self-defeating, that the trap spring on the one who set it. This is not a fresh cruelty invented by the psalmist; it is a plea that justice take its natural course and that violence recoil on the violent. Second, and crucially, the doing of it is left entirely to God. David does not say “let me bring the mischief of their lips back on them.” He hands the whole matter upward and asks God to act.

There is no sword drawn here, no private vengeance plotted - only a longing for justice laid before the only One who can rightly carry it out. The same restraint runs through the verses that follow (vv. 10-11), with their vivid imagery of burning coals and deep pits: these are not threats David makes but judgments he asks God to make, the language of a man who wants the reign of cruelty ended and is willing to leave the ending of it in God's hands rather than seize it in his own.

To pray this way is to refuse both passivity and revenge - to care about justice fiercely, and to entrust it wholly to the God who judges rightly.

The imprecation reaches its summary in verse 11: Let not an evil speaker be established in the earth: evil shall hunt the violent man to overthrow him. The phrase evil speaker renders a Hebrew expression that means, literally, “a man of tongue” - which keeps the whole psalm focused on the same wound it began with: the destructive power of the poisoned word. David's petition is that such a man not be established, not put down roots, not be allowed to set up a lasting place of power from which to do harm.

And then the verse states what David trusts to be a settled law of God's world: evil shall hunt the violent man to overthrow him. Notice the reversal buried in those words. In verse 5 it was the proud who hunted the psalmist, spreading nets and setting gins along his path. Here the hunting turns: the violent man becomes the hunted, and what hunts him is the very evil he committed, circling back to run him down.

It is the same conviction the whole Bible keeps returning to - that wickedness is not finally a stable foundation, that the pit a man digs has a way of becoming his own grave. David is not gloating over this; he is resting on it. The reason he can stop fighting and start praying is that he believes the moral universe is not neutral - that a violence built on lies carries, inside itself, the seeds of its own overthrow, because the God who governs it is just.