Psalms 5

The psalm opens by asking God for three kinds of hearing in quick succession - give ear to my words, consider my meditation, hearken to the voice of my cry. It is the heaping-up of someone who badly wants to be heard, and it reaches past the spoken words to what lies under them: consider my meditation - the murmuring of the heart, the part of a prayer that never quite makes it into sentences. Then comes the address that anchors the whole psalm: my King, and my God. Two titles, held together. My King is the language of a subject before a throne - distance, reverence, the right to command. My God is the language of belonging - nearness, covenant, a relationship in which the great King has somehow become mine. To pray like this is to refuse the false choice between a God too high to care and a God too familiar to fear. He is both at once: high enough to be King over all, near enough to be called mine.

After the lifted face of the morning, the psalm turns to look hard at the One it is approaching - and refuses to flatter Him into something safer than He is. Thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness: neither shall evil dwell with thee. The point is not first about the wicked; it is about God. He is so wholly, purely good that evil simply cannot keep His company - it cannot dwell where He is, the way darkness cannot remain in a room once the light is let in. The verbs mount up: the foolish cannot stand in His sight, He hates the practice of iniquity, He abhors the man who lives by bloodshed and lies. To modern ears this sounds severe, even unsettling. But notice what kind of evil is named - leasing (the old word for lying), flattery, deceit, the violence of the “bloody and deceitful man.” These are the weapons used to ruin the innocent. A God who felt nothing toward such things would not be more loving; He would be less. The holiness that cannot abide evil is the same holiness that will not abandon its victims. And it raises the only question that matters next: if evil cannot stand here, how shall I?

The answer arrives on the hinge of a single word. Verse 7 opens: But as for me… Everything before it has been a closing door - the foolish shut out, the worker of iniquity unable to stand, evil with no place to dwell. And then, against all of that, the psalmist sets himself: But as for me, I will come into thy house. What makes the difference is named at once, and it is not his own goodness. He does not say “but I am righteous” or “but I have kept myself clean.” He says in the multitude of thy mercy - borne in not on the strength of his record but on the sheer abundance of God's mercy, mercy in such multitude that there is enough of it to carry even him through a door that holiness had seemed to bar. And so the manner of his coming is settled too: in thy fear will I worship. Not the cringing terror of the guilty, and not a casual familiarity that has forgotten where it stands, but the trembling gladness of one who knows exactly how holy this house is - and has been let in anyway. Mercy at the threshold does not cancel the fear; it transfigures it into worship.

At the center of the psalm stands its one great request, and it is striking how modest it is. Surrounded by enemies, the psalmist does not ask for their downfall first; he asks for a road: Lead me, O LORD, in thy righteousness because of mine enemies; make thy way straight before my face. He wants to be led, and he wants the path level - straight enough that even watched and opposed he will not stumble. Then he tells us what he is up against, and the portrait is chilling precisely because it is all about words. There is no faithfulness in their mouth… they flatter with their tongue. Their inward part is ruin, and their throat - the source of all that smooth talk - is an open sepulchre, a grave standing open with the stench of death rising out of it. Beautiful words on the surface; decay underneath. It is the most dangerous kind of enemy, the one whose weapon is flattery, because flattery does its work by getting inside you. Against an attack aimed at the ear, the psalmist asks not for sharper words of his own but for a straight way - the only sure defense against being talked off the path is to be kept firmly on it.

The psalm could have ended on its enemies, but it does not. After the open grave and the flattering tongue, after the plea that the wicked fall by their own counsels - that their own schemes become the trap that takes them - the psalm lifts its eyes and ends in pure light. But let all those that put their trust in thee rejoice: let them ever shout for joy. There is that hinge-word again, but, swinging the whole prayer from the darkness of verse 9 into joy. And notice the chain of it: those who trust become those who rejoice, who shout for joy, who are joyful in God's very name - because, the reason is given, thou defendest them. The joy is not whistling in the dark; it rests on a fact, that God Himself covers them. The final verse seals it with the image the whole psalm has been moving toward: thou, LORD, wilt bless the righteous; with favour wilt thou compass him as with a shield. Where it began, at dawn, the psalmist was crying out to be heard; where it ends, he is ringed about with God's own favour on every side. The morning that opened in petition closes in protection. That is the journey of the psalm - and of the life that prays it.