Psalms Lesson 4

Psalms 12

We’ll be doing Psalm 12 and I hope that now you know what an individual lament Psalm is; we’ll review briefly, and we’ll be able, except for the longer Psalms, for the rest of the time that we’re in the individual lament Psalms, to do it at the rate of one a night. So we’re going to all of Psalm 12 tonight and just to review, recall these categories, remember that an individual lament Psalm has five parts; it has an address in which the Psalmist in the middle of a personal problem turns to God, and the address therefore will have in part a petition, in part a praise, in part a lament, it has various things but it’s usually short and obviously it’s found at the beginning of the Psalm. But the point of the address is that it shows the believer’s reaction under trouble; he doesn’t whine and go into operation crybaby, self-pity and all the other things that believers are so fond of doing. He turns to the Lord with his problem.

Then we have the next section which is the lament, and the lament describes his problem; it’s an analysis of his problem, and as we said, it usually has three parts, the third, second and first person. The first person, what I do; the second person, what you have done, O God; and the third person, what the enemy is doing. Then we’ll leave part three out, that’s a trust section. The fourth part is the petition section, this is when he actually makes his petition based on grace applied to his lament. And then finally the praise section, and the praise can be of two types, it can be a vow of praise, if his petition has not yet been answered, so that what he is doing is vowing to praise God, give God the credit in other words, or be publicly enthusiastic about God for answering the petition. Obviously he has confidence God will answer it, though God has not yet actually answered it. But if God has not only given him confidence that He will answer it, and has also gone the next step of actually providing the answer, then we have what is called declarative praise. And declarative praise is when he describes God’s answer to prayer. Our prayer list is divided into two groups, praise and petition, and the praise is just as important as the petition because it’s the praise section that provides us with the evidence daily that God is working, and therefore by praising Him we are drawing attention to the evidence.

Now in the individual lament Psalm there’s always a trust section but this is a floating section, and it can appear in the lament, it can appear in the petition, it can appear at different parts, sometimes it’s split up, one piece in one spot, another piece in another spot or something like that. But in the individual lament Psalm, the ideal model of it is this. Any given individual lament Psalm may depart from this model. Don’t use this model as a kind of rigid mold into which every single Psalm has to be rammed, crammed and jammed. It doesn’t work that way, but this will provide you with a basic outline and when you study a Psalm, if you will notice how the Psalm departs from this outline, then you can see the emphasis of the Psalm. We saw in Psalm 6 how the lament section had been displaced and that was the key to the whole atmosphere of the Psalm.

Tonight we come to Psalm 12 and let’s read it and after that we’ll conduct a form analysis on it and see what the parts are. “To the chief Musician upon Sheminith, A Psalm oaf David. [1]Help, LORD; for the godly man ceases; for the faithful fail from among the children of men. [2] They speak vanity every one with his neighbor; with flattering lips and with a double heart do they speak. [3] The LORD shall cut off all flattering lips, and the tongue that speaks proud things, [4] Who have said, With our tongue will we prevail; our lips are our own; who is lord over us? [5] For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise, saith the LORD; I will set him in safety from him who puffeth at him. [6] The words of the LORD are pure words, like silver tested in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. [7] Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation forever. [8] The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted.”

Now just looking at this Psalm let’s look for the parts and see where they are. Let’s look first for the address; where would you find the address, how many verses are involved, obviously the first one but is that the only one, and if so why? [someone says something] All right, the “help LORD” is a turning to God, and that identifies verse 1. Where would you end the address, that’s the beginning of the address section; where would you terminate the address section? [no answers] All right, let’s just skip, let’s not worry about founding a boundary, let’s just drop down and look at the Psalm and see if you can pick out any other sections, then we’ll come back and see about the boundary. We’ve got verse 1 on the address anyway; that’s a real profound start.

[someone says something] Okay, it looks like part of the lament is in verse 8; this a return back to a lament type condition but unfortunately for those of you with the King James there’s a translation difficulty in verse 8 that makes it look more like that than it is. So if you have a more modern translation it should probably be changed in a more modern translation. That would be true and there is a problem on this; this Psalm ends on a very melancholy note, it appears at first glance. Since we started with the lament, where else in this Psalm do you see the lament, think of how to spot the lament section. [someone says verse 1] Yes, but remember you’re address will usually have within it sections of a lament and sections of a petition, so that by itself doesn’t say that the lament is there. [someone says something] Right, if verse 1 doesn’t solve it just go to verse 2. Verse 2 has lament, obviously is a lament section in it, “They speak vanity every one” it’s an amplification of the preliminary thing. Again, some of you still seem mystified about this, don’t worry about it, it’s just when you handle more and more of these Psalms it comes to you, this address, lament, there’s just these broad categories.

Verse 1 we’ll say is the address, verse 2 is the lament. Now we might as well just go down through it verse by verse. What is verse 3? Now here again is where we’re up against a translation problem and you can solve it if you’re aware of one simple rule and you don’t have to know Hebrew to know this rule. Let me give you this particular rule, and it holds every time you’re working, particular with Hebrew poetry, and that is that Hebrew in the verb stems have an imperfect, and that usually is translated in the King James as “I will do” something, in other words, a future tense. Usually in your English section of the Psalm where you see the future tense, that is a Hebrew imperfect but, and here’s the important point, if it is a Hebrew imperfect it can also mean “may” or it can have a lot of nuances. In other words, if you see that future you’re not pinned down, that’s a translator’s choice, you’re not pinned to a future tense. It could also be “may” God do something.

[someone says something] Okay, verse 3 has to be the petition, and verse 4; verse 4 continues verse 3. Now you wouldn’t spot it from the King James because it looks like it’s an announcement of what God’s going to do, until you catch on to the game here, and that is what it’s really… “may the LORD cut off all flattering lips.” See, if verse 3, grammatically speaking verse 3 can be future or it can be this permissive thing, this petition. But suppose we did not make it a petition, suppose we made verse 3, just the way the King James has it, now where are you going to find the petition section in the Psalm. See, the Psalm is incomplete if you translate it the way the King James has done it. You look through this thing and there’s no petition in here. So this should really ring a bell, now that doesn’t prove… there doesn’t have to be, but it should ring a bell, wait a minute, where’s the petition, there’s something wrong with this translation. Now does anybody have any modern translation that takes this in verse 3 as a “may.” [people answer] The Revised Standard does, and yours does too; that shows you they’re handling it much better than the King James. So verses 3-4 are the petition section.

Now what do you notice peculiar about verse 5; this is a very rare verse, this only occurs once or twice in the entire book of Psalms, this particular kind of thing. This is a complete break, look at verse 5; verse 5 is a complete break, it shatters the whole section of this Psalm. The Psalm is going along, verse 1, verse 2, verse 3, verse 4, and then wham, the bomb explodes in verse 5; verse 5 is God Himself speaking, and He breaks right into the flow of the Psalmist right here, “For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise, saith the LORD; I will set him in safety,” and then there’s a translation problem, etc. So what are we going to label verse 5 in our categories. Let’s go back to these five categories; which one would fit verse 5. It’s a hard one because you’re kind of squeezing them to get into one of these categories because it’s a rare one. Anyone have a guess. [someone says something] All right, that’s a possibility, praise, except the problem is going to be, if we make that praise we’ve got the praise… we’ve got the lament, we’ve got the petition, we could make that praise but one of the keys I said, when you can spot a trust section is you’ll see “but now,” or “now,” and you see in the middle of verse 5 that “now.”

The reason why I say that, and that’s not being arbitrary, n-o-w is usually the way you’re translators handle a particular Hebrew construction, and this particular Hebrew construction denotes a sudden change of attitude, an attitude of despair or worry or concern about a problem in the personal life over to one of confidence, a shift. So verse 5 would probably answer to trust.

Now we’ve got a problem though, because if verse 5 is a trust section, we’ve got the petition in verses 3-4, now we should be looking for praise, and like he pointed out in verse 8, it doesn’t sound like it’s very praisey, so let’s look at verses 6-7 first. This certainly, I think you’d agree, is praise. Verse 6, “The words of the LORD are pure words, like silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. [7] Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation forever.” And then verse 8 seems to walk back into the problem.

Now this particular Psalm, then, has an interesting structure to it. Remember we said if you look for the changes from this model, here’s your rigid model, these five sections; when you go through a Psalm, if you look at the Psalm and see where it shifts from this model, you’ll get the point of the author. Remember when we went through Psalm 6, he had jockeyed the lament section, he dropped it down and he put the petition section up earlier, to convey urgency. Now in this particular Psalm he has done something like this, if you can picture it. He’s come out of a situation in life verse 1, there he is, “the godly man ceasing… the faithful fail,” verse 2, he’s still there in the problem, he comes up to a peak, and if you’ll notice the way the Psalm is structured, verse 5 is exactly the halfway point through the Psalm and at that critical halfway point through the Psalm you have God breaking in, and then you have him reacting, and then finally the last verse he’s going back into the situation. But as I’ll show you when he gets to verse 8 he’s not going back into that situation in despair; he’s not going back into the situation in despair! Verse 8 must be read with verse 7. So although he goes back into the problem out of which he originally came, he goes back into the problem with a changed attitude.

So this would emphasize going back into life, and we’ll see theologically why, there’s a theological reason in this Psalm that tells you something else that’s going on, but since we’re not interested right now in the theology or the doctrine yet, we’re just simply interested in the form, just make this observation. The Psalm seems to have this heightened crescendo and then it’s diminishing, trailing off at the end. It’s an observation at this point, we’ll pick that observation up and use it to help us interpret the Psalm later, but just watch what’s happening here, because theologically something is going to happen also in this Psalm.

[someone says something] Yes, trust and praise sections are hard to distinguish because what is praise but an expression of confidence in the character of God. The way I usually determine the trust from the praise section is that the trust indicates more… it’s right at the boundary of the turning, in other words, I’ve [can’t understand word] my problem and now flop; I come over here and I trust the Lord. And I always try to look for the trust section where that flop occurs, and then after God has answered the petition, then the rest of it comes into play. That’s the analysis, does anybody have questions about the way we divide it up. This is not something mechanical, you can argue about some of the divisions of these sections. My point is, at least bring some order out of chaos.

Let’s try to outline the Psalm; we’ve got these five sections, we’ll say the praise section is verses 6-8; and with a question mark under 8 because it sounds very much like a lament, just keep that as an observation and move. Now looking at this, how do you think you’d break this up if you were to outline the Psalm; just like we outlined Psalm 6 here we’re outlining Psalm 12, and remember if you’re outlining this you’re going to teach it to somebody or just outline it to remember the content of it in your own life, the best way to do it is to use a whole sentence, subject and predicate, use a complete sentence to describe the thought. Okay, does this Psalm fall into certain large sections. Does anybody see, as you read Psalm 12 where there’d be some logical breaks that you could make. We’ve already broken up the fine points into these sections but can you see how these sections might fit together in kind of a bigger pattern in this particular Psalm.

What would be an obvious break in the Psalm? [people answer different things] Okay, now if we were to use the modern system of determining truth, by majority vote I think 4 and 5 would have it; in this case it works out. Between 4 and 5 is an obvious break, and between 5 and 6 is an obvious break because verse 5 is a central verse in this Psalm. That verse is, as it were, ripped out of the whole form and dropped back into it. There’s a tremendous break, at the beginning of verse 5 and at the end of verse 5. So if you’re outlining the thing, here’s one section you can outline. How would you describe the thought of verse 5? [someone says something] The Lord will help the needy, all right; we’ll use that as a tentative description of verse 5. I say tentative because we’re going to find out a little bit more who the needy are as we work through it. But this is how you actually study the Bible; this is one thing I want in this Wednesday night thing, I don’t want people just to sit here and listen to me yak, I want you to go with me on these logical processes of thought and you’re going to learn how to study the Bible. And one of the ways you study the Bible is like anything else, you have a first approximation, then a second approximation, then a third approximation. This is how your mind works. You come into the text and you make a tentative decision, this is it; you hold it tentatively, not dogmatically, tentatively, and then you start to work it some more and check to see whether those tentative distinctions you’ve made hold up. All right, we’ve made one tentative distinction here, verse 5, we’ve said: God helps the needy.

Now, how would you break the rest of the Psalm up. Remember you’ve got a small Psalm here to work with so you don’t have to get infinitesimal about it. [someone says something] When we get to verse 5 we’re going to open up that whole end, but that’s right, there’s a whole thing that comes out in verse 5, a very important principle. I think the best way of handling it, my own judgment, is to just take verses 1-4 as a section, a small Psalm, and then verses 6-8 as another section, so we’ll just have three sections to this particular Psalm. The first four verses which could be summarized, how would you summarize the thought of the first four verses? We could summarize it and say something like: David’s praise to the Lord to save the godly from the oppression of the ungodly. You could get more specific if you wanted to because of the kind of oppression of the ungodly. But David is praying, not even to save the godly really, but to save himself; he’s associated with the godly here. You see, here’s where this individual lament thing, David so identifies himself that he has a problem in that he visualizes himself plus others with him. And he prays that these people, this group, would be saved from the oppression of their generation.

Then verses 6-8, I think you could summarize verses 6-8 by simply saying that David is reflecting upon God’s promise. You see, the first four… look at the schema of the Psalm now; verse 4, the first four verses is that David turns to the Lord to save him and his people from the oppression of the ungodly. Verse 5, God answers the petition. Verses 6-8 David responds, he meditates on it. Okay, those are the large sections, let’s go into the details of the Psalm and see if we can sharpen up why some of these things are made here, why we’re making some of these distinctions.

Verse 1 in the Hebrew is your heading, the Psalm heading, the one that you actually see in fine print. I hope all the modern translations are carrying that heading. In the Living Psalms you don’t have the Psalm heading; that’s too bad because Ken Taylor that did that has made a decision to remove part of the text of the Word of God, because that text was part of all the manuscripts. So this shows you, I’m just illustrating this, not to pick on Ken Taylor, but my point is to show you what tremendous decisions lie in the hands of the translators. And why when you pray for Wycliffe Bible Translators, you’re praying that translators, when they translate the Word of God into the native tongue, they don’t do stuff like this.

All right, “Help, LORD; for the godly man ceases; for the faithful fail from among the children of men.” If you had your concordance, could you see a word in verse one that you would like to study a little bit? There’s lots of words in there but can any of you think of a word that you’d be interested in if you looked at verse 1, you’d kind of like to run it down in a concordance and find out how it’s used. [someone answers] Vanish, or fail, or cease, all right. This word “cease” actually is a word that means to get weak until it peters out to nothing. And if you fill that meaning into the context, what does that suggest how David views his generation. This is a social Psalm, although it’s an individual lament Psalm, it’s the lament of a man who’s in a society that has problems.

Another word that I would be interested in would be “the godly man” or the faithful. What does that mean? “Godly” is a Hebrew word which means chesed, and this is a word for love. Remember we had two words in the Hebrew for love, ahav, this is someone loving someone by choice, and chesed would be somebody loving somebody because of an agreement. Illustration: boy meets girl, boy loves girl, that’s ahav. Boy marries girl, boy loves his wife, that’s chesed, because that is in the structure or the framework of an agreement.

Now, “the godly man” used in verse 1 is a chesed man, that is a man who is operating within God’s covenant. This would also be… well, this would be [can’t understand word/s] the kingdom of God, the Old Testament Law, etc. Where would you think David would see this in his society, verse 1. Let’s get a little concrete so it’ll be practical. Where do you suppose he’d see this; he just doesn’t look out and see somebody chewing bubble gum and he says “O help, for the godly man ceases.” He sees some real problems, and what do you suppose he looks at? Can you guess by the way he acts in verses 2-3. Remember who David is also, think of the historical background of King David. Now putting the historical background into the man and looking at verses 2, 3 and 4, what do you think was going through his mind? Where in society does he see this ungodliness? He sees the human viewpoint but where in the society?

[someone answers] Okay, in the priesthood and the ruling classes. Why do you say that? [answer given] Okay, and how would David’s intimate contact with the priests and the leaders of society connect up with the kind of things that are going on in verses 2-4. [answer given] Can someone take this farther out; this is right, this is directed apparently toward the ruling classes that David’s surrounded with, all of his advisors, etc. What about these advisors, can we get a little bit more specific? [someone else answers] Okay, they’re saying what the people want; what leads you to believe that. [answer given] Particularly notice in verse 2, this is a very, very important expression, and this tells you a little bit about the psychology of the soul, in verse 2, “with flattering lips and with a double heart do they speak.”

Now let’s look at a double heart a minute and see what this is. This is an expression for a condition of the soul. Now “heart” in the Bible means usually the complex of the conscience, plus the mind, and the ego, and so forth, that whole thing which we say is the person, the heart. Now if you have two hearts [tape turns] what do you suppose that Hebrew idiom, remember, also keep in mind they didn’t think abstractly, when the Jew thought of the heart he thought of the fact that the person’s overall orientation and motivation would be reflected in his heartbeat, I mean physically, in his physical body, his personality, the things that the person would get excited about, the thing that would turn him on would be something that would change his actual heartbeat, so they came up with the physiological designation, “heart.” Now if a man had two hearts, thinking how the Old Testament Jew must have thought, what do you think they’re trying to say when they say he is a two-hearted man? [someone answers] That’s true but can you be a little more specific, two hearts, a heart basically is an orientation. Doesn’t two hearts speak of the fact that the man has two poles in his life that are in conflict here. We wouldn’t call it schizophrenia here, but the point is that he does have two hearts, or two poles, two centers in his life.

Now if we look on this and remember what we’ve learned about the conscience and the mind it becomes easy to explain how they thought this, because if the person is operating on positive volition, his mind and his conscience operate together as a team, but if he goes on negative volition and he has had a habit of doing this in the past, and developing some real ingrained –R learned behavior patterns, when he goes on negative volition, his mind breaks with his conscience and his mind begins to be conditioned along these lines, possibly also conditioned by evil spirits, so he has two personalities. He has one when he’s on negative volition, the mind functioning along with this, and he also has his other personality that shows when he’s in fellowship. And if this person has been out of fellowship for a long time, this personality becomes very highly developed, it’s almost like he has two different personalities here going on.

[someone says something] James 1:8 I believe is actually taken from this Psalm; I think James got the thought, humanly speaking, James got the thought from Psalm 12. Let me show you another passage in God’s Word where this same double heart expression occurs. 1 Chronicles 12:33, and this is a most interesting context, and I’ll show you a little bit more about this phrase, the double heart. Now this is how to study the Bible for those of you who are really interested in doing this. When you come to something like “double heart” stop and look at a concordance and run that term down. Usually if it’s an odd term like this you’ll only have four or five places that it’s used, but if you look at those four or five places you’ll have under your belt a firm grasp of the term.

If you look at 1 Chronicles 12:33 they’re talking about bringing soldiers into battle, and in verse 33 it says, “Of Zebulun, such as went forth to battle, expert in war, with all instruments of war, fifty thousand who could keep rank, they were not of double heart.” Do you see how it’s used there, the idea is that they have one heart which is kind of a baby heart, which is their orientation which identifies them as believers, but when the going gets rough and the pressure is on, what happens? They revert over to this other personality; they’re unstable in other words, they are unstable people and they’ll perform, they appear to perform all right under conditions of zero pressure, but when the pressure gets tough and when adversity comes into the life they fall apart and they revert to this second personality.

Now that’s what David’s talking about in Psalm 12. So let’s go to Psalm 12 and look at a few more details. Verse 2, “They speak vanity every one with his neighbor; with flattering lips and with a double heart do they speak.” Now the “double heart” speaking and flattering means that it’s a phony thing, they put on the front of a believer in fellowship, and maybe they are in fellowship part of the time, but basically they are a person who has been operating on negative volition so long that they almost can’t help it, they just flip right back into this thing. And so it says “they speak vanity,” the word “vanity” is the Hebrew word habel and this always speaks of human viewpoint, it’s just yak, yak, yak, yak, things that don’t count they specialize in. That’s verse 2.

Verse 3 is a petition that David makes; verses 3-4 is the petition, now let’s look at this petition and here’s where we have to be careful because we’re going to get a clue as to why in verse 8 he’s acting so funny. Remember when we did the form analysis we said there’s something funny happening in verse 8, that we weren’t really able to put our hands on. Now we’re going to get a clue as to what’s happening and why verse 8 is kind of screwy there at the end. And why verse 5 is such an interruption. There’s an important theological point that’s going to come out. Watch the kind of petition David’s making in verses 3-4. “May the LORD,” remember we’re saying this as a petition, not future tense, we can do this because the Hebrew imperfect allows this, and this by the way should teach you, we’ve had two translations that caught this, the Revised Standard Version and the New American Standard Version, I think the old ASV caught it too. So when you’re studying poetry in the Old Testament, you are studying the hardest literature there is to translate. It is the hardest part of the whole Bible, Psalms. So you’ve got to have your best, most accurate translation. Therefore, if you’re going to do some work in the Psalms my advice to you is get an RSV or a New American Standard Version to use for the Psalms in this area.

“May the LORD cut off all flattering lips, and the tongue that is speaking proud things.” Notice the word “all” in verse 3. Could someone rephrase David’s petition and bring out the revolutionary nature of his petition, the real thing that he’s asking for here, maybe he himself doesn’t even realize it. [someone says something] All right, he’s praying for the ideal kingdom, isn’t he? If you’re going to eliminate everybody that has flattering lips, the only way this could happen would be for God to break into history and blow the whistle on the game and start the millennium right away, and then go into the eternal state. So the petition has a revolutionary nature and here’s where one of those cases where a godly man makes a petition and the petition is answered but not the way he thought it would be. You see, David wants to solve the problem of verse 2. Verse 3 is his solution. David comes to the Lord and says Lord, would you do this about it, just clobber everybody.

Then verse 4 is an added little description of these people. “Who have said,” and this is a quote, it should be in quotation marks, “Who have said, ‘With out tongue we will prevail.’” Now prevail here, there are various stems in the Hebrew and one is called a hiphil stem, by the way, since we’re going to be in the Psalms let me explain something about the Hebrew verb, you might just take this down as a note. The Hebrew has tense in it; it has two, perfect and imperfect. The perfect tense sees the action as one unit. The Hebrew verb, apparently from the best scholarly works on it, doesn’t have time, the Hebrew did not think in terms of past, present and future, the Hebrew thought in what we call actionsart, and he thought perfect, and that was the total complete action in front of his face. The imperfect was incomplete action, not necessarily continuous action, but action that occurred out of sight. Think of somebody with tunnel vision, he’s got blinders on, he can just see ahead. The action is occurring out here, it may be a point action that comes into his field of vision and extends out of his field of vision. It doesn’t have to continue forever and ever and ever, but it’s just lying outside of his field of vision. That would be an imperfect, and obviously you can see from that why the imperfect would naturally become a future tense, because it’s outside of the vision, the future action would be outside of your visions. But it could also be a “may” so the imperfect can be “may,” it can be “will,” it can be “can,” it can have all these words along with the verb.

The perfect, on the other hand, and this is usually translated future, but can be present, and oddly enough can be past. It can occur in any kind of tense, you have to get that from the context. The perfect tense usually is past but can be future, and it can be future when the action is so certain that the Psalmist sees it as finished in front of his face, even though it hasn’t actually been finished in history. That’s the Hebrew tense.

The Hebrew also has a participle, it has a lot more but this will give you a start. It has a participle and that’s the motion picture tense. When that is used that means the thing is going on and on and on and on and on and on… like that. So the participle, when it’s used as a verb means continuous action; when a participle is used as a noun it means the characteristics that marks the person. Okay, there’s the tense and the participle.

Now these stems that I keep talking about. There are several stems but I’ll just give you three, there’s qal, q-a-l it’s called, and the qal stem is the simple verb, just the simple verb by itself, no complications. Then there’s a niphal stem and the niphal stem is the verb in its passive condition, for example, qal, I kill, or let’s say I die; niphal would be passive, but I can’t put die in the passive, I could put I was killed, but that spoils the illustration for something else… Hiphil is a third stem and that’s the one used here, and that is a causative stem. That means I cause it to happen. I was going to use die, I cause to die would be I kill. So these are three, there’s more, but for the sake of this poetry so when I throw these things out if you remember qal, niphal and hiphil. Qal is just the simple, niphal is the passive, and the hiphil is the causative.

Now when you look at verse 4 where it says we, “With our tongue will prevail,” that is not qal stem, that is hiphil stem, the “prevail” is hiphil which means we will cause things to prevail with our lips. It’s not just saying we will prevail, it means we’re so shrewd we can cause things to prevail with out lips. This is the super salesman concept. Apparently these guys must have been in the state department because they thought they could just make a few promises and everybody would fall on their back or something. So this is “I cause to prevail.”

Now, the last expression verse 4 shows you the utter and extreme arrogance of this crowd; “who is lord over us?” Who was Lord over them in real life? David was. Do you see the point, it almost sounds like he’s got problems of intrigue in his own court here, that he’s recognizing what’s going on, within his own royal family, within his own circle of advisors, his own trusted agents in other words. He suspects that something’s going on and so he says, “Lord, come down here and clobber them all, you and I, we’ll start the millennium.” So that’s his petition in verses 3-4.

Now in the middle of this petition, the Psalm is so designed that verse 5 just drops in like a rock. “For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise, saith the LORD.” Do you notice a little bit of a sarcastic jab at David in here, in verse 5? David’s petition had been hey Lord, you and I are going to start the millennium, and the Lord says I’m going to solve the problem and it’s not going to just be for you David, there are a lot of other believers around in the same boat you’re in. And I’m coming in to help them too. And so “for the oppression of the poor, and for the sighing of the needy, now will I arrive, saith Jehovah.” So this is kind of a little slap at David.

Now the last part of verse 5, here’s where there’s a major problem in translation: “I will set him in safety,” and if you notice the King James is heavily italicized; that means those words are not in the original text. “I will set in safety puff at him,” that’s all that’s in there in the original. Now how are we going to bring order out of that mess? This is where methodical Bible study… “I will set,” write it out, “I will set in safety” and then the last part, “puff at him.” Now how are we going to tie all this together. Well, “I will set,” that’s obvious, the word that is not obvious is what does “puff” mean? This word is used in Proverbs 12:17 and 14:5 and it refers to those who anticipated God’s deliverance and spoke about it. In Habakkuk 2:3 it also occurs and it means “he who speaks,” so here’s “puff” and it’s in an imperfect tense, but it’s somebody doing the puffing. “I will set in safety him who puffs,” now we’ve got to explain “at him.” “At him” is just an ending on a verb and can mean “and it,” too, and the idea is that he puffs about it, or that is the deliverance of Jehovah. So, “I will set in safety the one who speaks aloud of it,” what I’m going to do. That is, if a person is speaking about the deliverance of the Lord, he’s believing it, so this last part of verse 5 simply means God will set in safety the person who trusts the Word, “trusts My Word.” Now this is why David reacts like he does in verse 6 and following.

Verse 6 and following makes sense, “The words of the LORD are pure words,” because now David is straightened out. Before he had a little bit of pride and aggression in his petition, the Lord answered his prayer, David’s straightened out, and now he can turn around and praise God with orientation. And he says “The words of the LORD are pure words,” so David’s obsession now isn’t “Lord, clobber them so we can begin the kingdom together,” rather, what it is in verse 6 is Lord, you have promised deliverance by Your Word and therefore the thing that makes the difference in my life from this point on is the Word. I can have this whole pallet surrounded by clods but if I am trusting Your Word and applying Your Word in every area, I can have all the clods in my state department but me and I’ll still come out on top, because I’m trusting the Word.

So this is why he says “The words of the LORD are pure words, silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.” In the ancient world they had these furnaces where the silver would be melted and the impurities would be removed, partly, and then the silver would go down for another treatment, and it would be removed. They had seven steps and at each point they’d take off silver and each silver would be a grade; this would be grade one silver, grade two silver, grade three silver grade four silver, and after they went through the purification process, this was real expensive silver, down here at point 7, that was pure silver. But if you took the silver off when it had only passed the second stage of purification it had some impurities in it, it wasn’t as expensive, it wasn’t as pure. So when he says in verse 6, your words are as silver tried in a furnace that means heated up to the point where they have the highest grade silver in terms of the metallurgy of that time. And that’s how pure the Lord’s words are.

Why do you suppose he points to the purity of God’s Word of verse 6. How does that enter into the original problem of the form? [someone answers] Okay, it’s a direct contrast and here in verse 6 you’ve got the answer to David’s petition and you can learn something about this in your own prayer life. We just learned a very interesting principle in Psalm 12, and that is that we can face a situation in our life, carry the situation before the Lord in prayer, and by our own human strength we do come up with a petition but the petition isn’t accurate, so the Lord in His grace answers the petition as we should have prayed it in the first place. And if we’re smart, when He answers it the way we should have prayed it in the first place we’ll give thanks for it, not say oh God, you didn’t answer my prayer. David could say that, God, you didn’t clobber them, I was waiting, I had the best seat in the house, I was waiting for you to clobber them all, how come? And David could have done that, he could have said God, you didn’t answer my prayer. But he didn’t. David recognized verse 5 was the answer to his prayer and recognizing that verse 5 was the answer to his prayer he recognized the principle that he should trust in the Word.

Now we’ve got verses 7-8, “Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation forever.” This obviously is referring to the first part of verse 7, is “Thou shalt keep them,” third person. “Thou shalt keep them, O LORD,” now them would obviously refer to what in context? Forget what the rest of verse 7 says, just the first part of verse 7; there’s an adjustment in the Hebrew text here and I think this adjustment is right, because when it says “thou shalt keep them, O LORD,” what would “them” refer to. It’s got to refer to the nearest thing in the context that’s defined. What’s the nearest thin in the context of the first part of verse 6? The words of God, “Thou will keep them, O LORD,” there’s the loyalty that answers to that problem that “the godly man ceases, in verse 1. Remember the “godly man that ceases?” What is the “godly man?” One who would be loyal and faithful, and the point in verse 7 was that when God makes you a promise He keeps, “and You will preserve them, O LORD,” but then in the Hebrew there’s a shift here, “Thou shall preserve us from this generation forever.” And I believe this takes it back to the generation of believers. The reason I say that is because now we come to verse 8. “The wicked walk on every side,” then the last one is very, very difficult, but apparently it should be translated something like this, “according to the exaltation of worthlessness among men.” In other words, the exaltation is not the men that are being exalted, it is the worthlessness and the vileness of the men that is being exalted.

So verse 8, now we come back to that thing we started with tonight. Why does verse 8 sound so much like a lament and it seems to be stuck in the praise section? If you retranslate verse 8 the answer becomes obvious. Verse 8 is an amplification of the word “generation” of verse 7. Verse 8 is simply an amplification of verse 7 and the reason it can be in a praise section is because David is excited to know that God doesn’t have to terminate history in order to save believers, that through trusting the Word in the middle of a chaotic generation, and an ungodly generation, when everything is breaking loose, believers can still be protected by means of the Word of God. They have an anchor of rest. So verse 8 ends by showing the magnitude of God’s solution. The Psalm began with the magnitude of the problem. Until you have big problems you can’t see God’s big solutions. So I think there’s a lot of principles in Psalm 12 that you can do well to study on.

Are there any questions on what we’ve done tonight?