A SONG OF ASCENTS.

In my distress I called to the LORD,

and he answered me.

Deliver me, O LORD,

from lying lips,

from a deceitful tongue.

What shall be given to you,

and what more shall be done to you,

you deceitful tongue?

A warrior’s sharp arrows,

with glowing coals of the broom tree!

Woe to me, that I sojourn in Meshech,

that I dwell among the tents of Kedar!

Too long have I had my dwelling

among those who hate peace.

I am for peace,

but when I speak, they are for war!

—Psalm 120

1

PEACE

If someone has lied about you, perhaps someone you trusted, you know how much it hurts. Of course people say nasty things all the time. Children can be especially cruel with their words. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether many of the apparently sophisticated criticisms of films or books are little more than adult versions of the name calling that happens in childhood. When someone writes, “I found his piece of poetry impermissibly obtuse,” he may simply be using an adult way of saying, “I don’t like you,” or even, “You look kind of funny to me”—the sort of nastiness that is heard regularly on school playgrounds when the teacher is not looking. But the people in Psalm 120 are not only being nasty; they are being deceitful. They are saying things that are unkind, certainly, but more than simply being unpleasant, they are untrue. We do not know exactly who these people were who were speaking “lying deceit,” but we do know it hurt the person who wrote the psalm.

It Feels Like You Are in a Trap

The psalmist tells us that he is in “distress” (v. 1), a word that has the idea of a narrow or confined place. He is saying here that he was feeling trapped by others’ words. That is exactly the feeling you get when someone lies about you or spreads deceit about you. This distress that he is talking about is no minor emotional bumped toe or scratched knee. The distress is the experience of being locked away. When someone launches a gossip campaign against you, the result of that can be to leave you feeling stuck or imprisoned. You feel that whatever you do from this point on will be interpreted in the light of what that person said about you.

If someone said that you were jealous, then told a story with just enough truth to make the charge of jealousy seem credible to those who were listening, from then on you would fear that saying anything even vaguely critical of any program or event will be taken in light of that comment. People might say to themselves as they listen to you, “Oh, he’s just saying that because he’s the jealous type.” Or if someone noticed that you like to read Shakespeare rather than watch Oprah’s latest TV channel, he might create a story about you that gives an impression that, frankly, you are a bit of a snob. So the next time you turn up at a meeting wearing a perfectly normal outfit, pleasant-looking though not particularly expensive, you might fear that everyone will be saying in their heads, “Look at that snob. Isn’t she vain!”

Slander makes you feel like you are in a trap.

It Feels Like You Have Been Shot

The psalmist tells us that they have a “deceitful tongue” (vv. 2–3). The word used for “deceit” here has the sense of shooting. He feels as if he is in the firing line. The psalm is not just describing someone saying something petty, an occasional sarcastic sneer perhaps. No, this is a little more clever than that, perhaps a bit more sinister. It is deliberate deceit, words aimed as carefully as a sniper aims. They are well-constructed lies. Someone or some group of people is picking up on things that the author of this psalm had said or done and then turning those things around to make him look bad. They are using his words as ammunition against him—shooting words.

This may not be slander in our modern legal sense of libel, but it is slander in the sense of lies spread around the community with the deliberate intention of causing harm, like a water-cooler conversation that you were not a part of but affects your reputation, or a few words shared about you for prayer in every prayer meeting in town, or a whisper in the ear of those who have the power to influence your career to make them look at you with disdain. If you have experienced anything like this, you know how damaging such deceit can be. You may have the wounds to show for it, wounds every bit as real as a bullet hole.

What can you do about it? After all, you probably do not know exactly what was said because you were unlikely to have been there when it was said. All you know is that you pick up a change in atmosphere when you walk into the room or a feeling that influences the tone when you are present. If you try to say anything about it, you will be guessing, and then it will be easy to characterize you as being paranoid as well. And if you happen by chance to hit the nail on the head about what is being said about you behind your back, then you can be characterized as nasty as well as vain. It feels like you are trapped in a box and cannot get out. It feels like you have taken a bullet and cannot stop the bleeding. What is the answer? As surprising as it may sound, the answer is to read this Psalm.

A Strange Place to Start

At first glance it is strange that the Psalms of Ascent start with lies and deceit, but when you think about it, that actually is the most important and natural starting point. It dispenses once and for all with the rather unhelpful limerick I heard growing up as a child: “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me.” If only that were true; unfortunately, if someone calls you fat or ugly or stupid or lazy, it tends to hang over you for many, many years. Unaddressed, it can influence your entire life. So it is very important that we do good soul work to get rid of those lies and journey to the truth about ourselves in relation to God.

You may think talking about ourselves is hopelessly compromised in terms of pop psychotherapy, but it is interesting to me that in this psalm, one of the repeated refrains is directly related to the self. Deliver “me” he says (v. 2); even, perhaps rather self-indulgently, “woe to me” (v. 5). Both instances are talking about the self, and then the self in relation to this particular situation is brought by this distressed individual into the realm of God. He uses the first-person pronoun “I” a lot—this is not something about them or us, but about “me.” He is making this personal, for it is personal, and he needs personal help.

1) Pray

How does he deal with this distress? First, he prays about it. “In my distress I called to the LORD” (v. 1). He does not first tell one of his friends about it (“Did you hear what so-and-so said about me?”). He does not first tell the local authority figure, whether boss or principal or lawyer. He needs help from God first of all. “In my distress I called to the LORD, and he answered me.”

The right approach is first to pray. It is no good trying to deal with lies about you before you have gone first to God. You are too raw, too likely to lash out with a hurtful word yourself and then make everything even worse. Somehow you have to go to God first and deal with it with him. I will admit that this is far easier written on the page than done at home or in a small group or at work. You see, the psalm is not merely “praying about it” in some rote or traditional fashion. The author of the psalm is actually honest with God in his heart about the distress, about the lying lips and the deceitful tongue. That is difficult, because part of what makes deceitful lies such a trap is that you never want them repeated again, not to anyone, perhaps not even to God. If someone says to you that your work is no good, the last thing you want to do is tell someone else that someone said your work is no good. You want to keep it to yourself in your little box, in your “distress,” in your narrow confine.

Understandable, though, as the desire is to keep the deceit as secret as you can, often that just makes it all worse. As William Blake wrote, “I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.”1 The poison eats away at you. Somehow you have to be honest enough—shall we say, brave enough—to start by telling God about it. I am not saying that is easy, but I am saying it is where you are going to find healing. That, at least, is the testimony of the person who wrote this psalm. “In my distress I called to the LORD, and he answered me” (v. 1), which allows him to become confident that God will “deliver” him (v. 2). He has gained the certainty that in God’s sovereignty even lying lips will be turned to his deliverance.

Would you like that deliverance? First pray. Go to God in prayer, and you will find that he has a deliverance plan even for slander. Perhaps not straight away from the malicious consequences of the lies that have been spread about you, but straight away from adding to the malignancy by spreading lies back. It takes strength to be someone who stops gossip rather than keeps on spreading it around, especially when the wounds are yours, not someone else’s. And that sort of strength (deliverance) can be found only in God: “Deliver...