In my distress I cried to the Lord,
And He heard me.
Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips
And from a deceitful tongue.
What shall be given to you,
Or what shall be done to you,
You false tongue?
Sharp arrows of the warrior,
With coals of the broom tree!
Woe is me, that I dwell in Meshech,
That I dwell among the tents of Kedar!
My soul has dwelt too long
With one who hates peace.
I am for peace;
But when I speak, they are for war.
I learned this on day one. It was the only one I learned while walking - but I think it has stuck! I love the alliterative "L"s in "Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips", and I love how "my soul" has so much more depth then "me".
In my distress I cried to the Lord,
And He heard me.
Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips
And from a deceitful tongue.
I learned these opening couplets over several miles. At times I was in distress myself - climbing steeply up Kinder Scout! I love how the psalmist just bangs in straight to the point... "IN MY DISTRESS!!!" I don't think we can get enough of this. More than once I have spoken to people who have told me their lives are in too much of a mess just now to get involved with the church - "Maybe I'll come along when I have my life sorted..." The psalmist isn't having any of that... NOW - while I'm in my distress, not having thought about it later, but in the middle of it - while I am actually distressed...
What is he going to do? He's going to cry out to the Lord. "Pray" seems like too tame a word for this.
As I said, I learned these first two couplets over several miles and I was quite pleased to have finally grasped the first one. I had a look at my cribsheet to start the second couplet when I noticed I had learned the first one wrong.
I had learned: "In my distress I cried to the Lord, And He answered me." when actually it says "In my distress I cried to the Lord, And He heard me.
I was really pleased to see this and spent some time wondering about the difference between being answered and being heard. I've spoken to many people in distress over the years, sometimes in extreme distress, and in almost all cases their need has been to be HEARD rather than for me to give them answers.
It was a bit of a sadness to discover that the NKJV probably isn't the best translation, that nearly all the others have "answered" and that "answered" reflects the Hebrew better. BUT... I'm sticking with "heard". I cried out to the Lord, and He heard me"
Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips
And from a deceitful tongue.
Here's the meat of his distress. The "lying lips" could mean general untruthfulness, but when coupled with the single "deceitful tongue" this very much sounds to me like the distress caused by a particular person - with two lying lips and a decietful tongue - spreading malicious untruths about our psalmist. The psalmist has been unfairly slandered and/or libelled and his reputation is damaged. Maybe the whole village is now magnifying the slander with whispered gossip. But this doesn't sound like it is petty gossip, this feels big...
One night in October 2019, Kira was asleep with her husband Lee, 38, and their children Keanu, 11 months, Harrison, 22 months, Tori-Leigh, three, Riley, seven, Lexi, eight, and Zak, aged 15.
She said: "My neighbour rang me up on Saturday morning and asked if I'd been outside. As soon as I'd seen what they'd done, I broke down in tears. I was horrified." The word 'pedo' was daubed all over the front of her house in black spray paint. ""The number five bus goes straight past our house every 20 minutes, so loads of people would have seen it," she said. "If they don't know you personally, they could think it's true."
This sounds kinda like that - some serious, reputation-damaging malicious deceit. I think the psalmist knows who it is, but is has spread well beyond the perpetrator (via the equivalent of the number 5 bus). How I wish so many generations had NOT been brought up with the monumentally stupid rhyme: "sticks and stones my hurt my bones, but words can never harm me." Oh, they can. And this psalmist is hurt and wounded.
Maybe then you can forgive the next stanza:
What shall be given to you,
Or what shall be done to you,
You false tongue?
Sharp arrows of the warrior,
With coals of the broom tree!
You see, the psalmist takes this to God "in his distress". He doesn't take this to God weeks after he has processed it and thought it through and started to deal with it and learned how to talk about it calmly. This is NOW! This is what he feels - and he takes those feels (as the young people might say!) and delivers them straight into God's lap - uncensored, warts and all.
Some have said that this is confessional... but I'm not sure - I think it's just the ugly truth that he wants revenge - he wants the perpetrator to suffer as he has.
Sharp arrows - I guess we know what they are - and "coals of the broom tree". Sometimes known as the "Juniper", the Broom Tree was a place of desert shelter (as enjoyed by Elijah) but also it seems to have been well known as source of long-burning hot coals that give out an intense heat over a long time. (Some say that the angel used some of wood from Elijah's broom tree to bake the loaves.) Exactly the kind of think you'd want in your barbeque.
So... it's likely the psalmist is telling God that he wants this person to be shot with arrows and roasted over hot coals for a very long time - or shot with burning arrows that will burn for a very long time. Either way - a fairly graphic and grisly punishment. And he's telling this to God.
If a govt minuster were describing this kind of prayer, she would describe it as "robust"!
Its good to be reminded that this is what God wants - for us to be honest about how we feel and to take those feelings to him. God's not squeamish. There is no point offering God a sanitised version edited down to a PG certificate because we think God shouldn't know what we're really thinking. I think it's fascinating that the kind of words read monotone as psalms in church pass without even the flutter of an eyelid, yet were you to reproduce those sentiments in a prayer of intercession, you'd be thrown out on your ear before the tea had gone luke warm.
God, we are appalled by the thing that happened in our town last night.
May the one who did it get found by the mob and be beaten to a pulp and thrown dead into the river along with his wife and family.
Amen.
Unless we bring to God the true ugliness of our own lives - how can God begin to transform us in the encounter?
Woe is me, that I dwell in Meshech,
That I dwell among the tents of Kedar!
My soul has dwelt too long
With one who hates peace.
I am for peace;
But when I speak, they are for war.
Some Psalms are all solved and wrapped up by the final stanza - and we're ready to praise God and move on. Not this one.
There is a shift in tone. The raw anger has gone - the psalmist seems to have lost the thirst for revenge. Having spelled it out to God (probably not once!!) he has arrived at another place. He's now in a place of lament or woe.
He doesn't dwell in Meschech (Usually identified with a region in Asia Minor, near the Black Sea.) Meshech was a descendant of Japheth and often associated with northern or northeastern tribes. Meschech is often mentioned in connection with warlike or barbaric peoples.
Nor does he dwell among the tents of Kedar (a nomadic people associated with the Arabian desert.) They are descendants of Ishmael (Genesis 25:13) and known for their tents, black goatskins, and trade in sheep, goats, and camels (Isaiah 60:7; Song of Songs 1:5). Sometimes they are associated with hostility toward Israel.
The Psalmist is using these names symbolically to express alienation and distress—like saying, “I feel like I’m living among people who don’t share my values or who are hostile to me. I live among my own people, but it feels like they are an alien people, that I don't know them at all. It's like me, as a Bolton fan, getting frustrated with fellow Bolton fans whining on the internet and accusing them all of being Wiggin fans...
My soul has dwelt too long
With one who hates peace.
I am for peace,
I find this to be such a poignantly aching sentence, particularly with the use of "my soul" rather than just "I". It communates a resigned weariness, but I think it is also the place of change in this psalm - showing us where this journey is going.
I am for peace, he says - "shalom" is the word. He has left behind his thirst for revenge and retribution, his extreme distress seems to be replaced by sadness. He has taken a turning and decided he is going to live in peace - I am for Peace. The psalmist has been changed by this encounter. He has come to terms with what has happened to him and found a new way to respond - to become a man of peace, shalom.
But when I speak, they are for war.
He has changed, but the situattion he is living in has not changed. His new way of living in response has not yet had an impact on his situation - it is an unfinished journey to peace, an unfinished journey to shalom.
I suspect this kind of ending reflects people's actual experience better then that "and then it was all great!" kind of ending, because things are not often suddenly all fixed, are they? I love the idea of a psalm showing us the struggles of a man on an unfinished journey to shalom - because, actually, we are ALL on an infinished journey to shalom, aren't we?
here's me reciting the psalm from memory by a stream somewhere up Bleaklow moor!
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