The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Does it ever seem like lies are overlooked or even tolerated by God? Today on The Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, we'll study Psalm 52, where David is surrounded by lies and deception. Despite this, he's confident that ultimately, God will judge both the wicked and the righteous. David knows that those who love God and follow his ways will prevail.

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Words have meaning. They can build up or tear down. Words can announce truth or propagate lies. The Bible has much to say about words, the power of the tongue, and why we should carefully watch what we say. If you have your Bible handy, turn to Psalm 52.

Dr. James Boice: I wonder if you've noticed as you've studied the Psalms that relatively few of them are given an historical setting. When you think about it, they must all have had an historical setting and some of them obviously a very moving one because when you have a Psalm that is written with a great deal of passion and feeling, it indicates that something lies behind that.

Generally speaking, however, those historical settings are not spelled out for us, and with good reason, I'm sure, because if they were, well then we would tend to limit them to that. And since they don't spell that out in detail but rather express the feelings and convictions of the psalmist in general terms, we can easily enter in and they've been a great blessing to the people of God down through the centuries because of that.

There are, however, a number of Psalms for which we are given an historical setting. Altogether, there are about 12 of them. If you make notes on that, I'll tell you what they are: Psalm 51 that we were studying the last time, and this one, and then in addition to those, Psalms 2, 18, 34, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 63, and 142. There's going to be a slight quiz at the end of the sermon; you can give those all back.

The reason I mention those numbers is to make a point. If you made a note of them or wrote them down, you'll notice that they don't spread out evenly throughout the psalter. All of the historical settings we're given have to do with the life of David. The first book of the psalter has Psalms almost exclusively by David, 41 Psalms there, most others are by David, and yet that's not where the historical settings are given.

The great block of the historical settings are found here in the second book in the section that we're into now. Beginning in Psalm 51, we know what that one is. That's the most famous of all. It has to do with David's adultery with Bathsheba, and it's when Nathan came to him and he'd committed adultery and Nathan caught him on that and he began to confess it. That's what that great Psalm is about, so that Psalm has a setting.

Now this one does as well, Psalm 52. Psalm 53 does not, but then we have one in Psalm 54 and the others I mentioned. Eight of the 12 are found here in this little block that we're beginning to study. Now the title for Psalm 52 gives us this setting. It's a kind of an interesting story there from the Old Testament. What we read as a title of this Psalm is this: When Doeg the Edomite had gone to Saul and told him, "David has gone to the house of Ahimelech."

Now if you don't know David's story in great detail, that might not mean a whole lot to you, but if you do, you'll know that as a result of that report by this man Doeg, a great massacre took place. Saul turned on Ahimelech the priest, and he and his family and all of the families of the priestly city of Nob, where Ahimelech and the other Levites lived, were massacred. They were all killed. It was a dismal, dark moment in the life of David because, of course, these people were his friends and he was indebted to them.

David has two responses to that. One of them is in the story itself. You find it in 1 Samuel 22, verses 22 and 23 of that chapter record David's personal response. And what he says, we're going to come to it in a moment and understand why, is that he is partially to blame for that and so he confesses his unwitting part in the massacre. He would, of course, never have had anything to do with something like that, but unwittingly he had been the agent by which it happened, and he confesses that. He's in great grief. That's one response.

The second response is this Psalm. Now there's a man who's responsible for it, and Doeg is that man, and this Psalm is David's reflection, probably after a period of some years, upon the evil of this man and the tragedy that he caused and his end. There's a very simple outline to this Psalm; it's easy to find. In the first section, the first little part there, we find David describing this man, his character.

In the second part of it, we find him prophesying the end of this man, and then finally at the end beginning with verse eight, you have a contrasting portrait of David and those who are righteous and who try to be like him. Now let me just tell the story because we have to understand that background. David had been forced to flee from Jerusalem because Saul was jealous of him and was increasingly irrational in his desire to have David killed.

You recall that there was a feast. David was uncertain whether he should go to the feast or not because Saul had thrown his spear at him on an earlier occasion trying to kill him. And so David met out in the field with Jonathan, Saul's son. David said to Jonathan, "I'll hide in the field and when you come out, you shoot your arrow in a certain way. I'll take that as a sign that your father has not cooled in his anger toward me and so I'll go away. And if you do something else, do it in a different way, then I'll assume that the danger is passed and I'll come."

Jonathan shot the arrow in a way that indicated that his father was still intent on killing David, and they had a final parting there in the field, and David went off eventually to hide in the cave of Adullam. Now when David left on that occasion, he was unarmed and he didn't have his soldiers with him. He was a commander, and so everywhere he went, he had a battalion of soldiers. And on this occasion, he didn't have any of them.

He didn't have any food. He didn't have any weapons, no armor. And he went to the town of Nob, which, as I said a moment ago, was the priestly town. Ahimelech was the priest who was in charge there, and David went to him and he asked for help. I suppose Ahimelech suspected that something was wrong because we're told in the story that Ahimelech trembled when David came. He didn't have his soldiers with him. Seemed to be something wrong.

And David lied to him. He said, "No, there's nothing wrong. I'm just on a secret mission for the king. I had to leave in a hurry. My soldiers are going to join me afterwards, but I don't have anything to eat. Is there anything you could give me?" And he said, "Well, all we have here are the loaves of the consecrated bread that had been laid up before the Lord." And David said, "Well, give me those." And so he took them.

Jesus referred to that later, showing that care of a human being is more important than sacramental things. He was right to do that; he ate of the consecrated bread. It wasn't legal for him to do it, but he did it. And then David said, "Do you have any weapons here? I don't have any weapons." Well, they had the sword of Goliath whom David had killed years before. And it was a great big sword, but it was a good one, and so David said, "I'll take that." So he took the sword and went off.

Now in the middle of that story in verse seven of 1 Samuel 21, there is a solemn notation and it says this: Now one of Saul's servants was there that day, detained before the Lord; he was Doeg the Edomite, Saul's head shepherd. Now nothing else is said at that point. In the next chapter, the scene shifts, and it shifts to a hillside at Gibeah, and there Saul is assembled with all his officials and the head of the army, and he is in a depressed state.

We would say he was in a blue funk; he's feeling sorry for himself. He says, "Everybody is against me. David, my own son has made a covenant with David, and David's out and seeks me for my throne, and all of this is going bad, and none of you tell me about it." And we're told at that point that Doeg stepped forward. He was there that day and he saw this as an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the king. And so he said, "Well, I'll tell you something. I was in Nob. And when I was in Nob with Ahimelech the priest, David came. And Ahimelech received him and he gave him food to eat and gave him the sword of Goliath."

Well, Saul was furious. When he heard that, he assumed that there was a conspiracy in the kingdom. He summoned Ahimelech to come before him, and Ahimelech, of course, gave a perfectly reasonable defense and a true one. He said, "Look, David came to me, he came asking for help. David is a servant of the king. There's no more loyal servant in all the kingdom than David. And so I helped him. What else would you expect me to do? He's your servant; I did everything I could to help him out. And I didn't know that there was any problem."

That, of course, was absolutely true, but the king wouldn't believe it. And so Saul turned to his soldiers and he said to Ahimelech, "You are lying and you're going to pay for that treason by your life." He said to the soldiers, "Fall upon him and kill him." And the soldiers wouldn't do it, you see? The soldiers had great respect for those who were anointed of the Lord. They wouldn't commit that kind of sacrilege.

And at that point, Saul turned to Doeg, and he said, "You brought me the information; you kill them." And Doeg did. It's really a very terrible thing to read that. It tells us that he fell upon Ahimelech and killed him. The text says that day he killed 85 men who wore the linen ephod, that is the priests. He also put to the sword Nob, the town of the priests, with its men and women, its children and infants, and its cattle, donkeys, and sheep.

Only one man, Abiathar the son of Ahimelech, escaped by fleeing to David, and David protected him. And it is to that man that David gave the response in which he acknowledged his own unwitting part in the massacre. David said to Abiathar, "That day when Doeg the Edomite was there, I knew he would surely tell Saul. I'm responsible for the death of your father's entire family."

Well, that's the story. It's told there in 1 Samuel in those two chapters and it's never mentioned again anywhere else in the Bible except in this Psalm. Because this Psalm, as I said, is David's response to that very black moment and that dark enough period of his career in which the priests were killed. Now, as I said, in the first part of this, the first stanza, he analyzes Doeg's character. In the second stanza, he prophesies his end, and in the third stanza, he makes a contrast. Now that's the context in which we need to see it.

So let's look at what's wrong with Doeg. First of all, David says several things. The first thing he says about him is that he was proud. Now that's not the word he uses. He uses the word "boasting," but he repeats it twice, so it's very clear that that's one of the problems. "Why do you boast, you evil man, you mighty man? Why do you boast all day long?" Now that's a certain kind of boasting. Those who know Hebrew very well say that there's an overtone to that word and it's not the kind of boasting we normally think of when we say somebody's boasting.

Boasting to us means a braggart, that's somebody who's strutting around saying, "Look how wonderful I am. I did this, I did that. Have you noticed all that I've accomplished?" It's not that kind of boasting. A person who boasts along those lines may very well be insecure and he's boasting to try to cover up his insecurity. Doeg was not insecure. Doeg was cunning and evil. And his boasting was the kind of attitude of a person who is self-complacent and self-satisfied because deep down in his heart he thinks he's smarter and better than everybody else.

Derek Kidner, one of the scholars who does know that, says the real point of the man's sin was his self-satisfaction. He thinks himself clever; he is absorbed by his intrigue. Now there's some evidence for that in the story itself. I said that the first part of the story is in 1 Samuel chapter 19, the second continues later in chapter 21. But in between those chapters, we're told something of what David was doing, and there seems to have been a time lapse.

What we're told is that David went down to Achish, one of the rulers of the Philistines, and he was there for a while. That's what comes at the end of the one chapter. And then at the beginning of the other, it tells about him going to his stronghold at Adullam, and there he gathered together his 400 mighty men and the members of his family. So between Doeg actually being in Nob and hearing and seeing what David did and what the high priest did to help him, and this man's reporting of the incident to Saul, there must have been a considerable lapse of time.

Now that's important for this reason. It means that Doeg didn't just go back to Saul and blurt out sort of indiscriminately what he knew. Here's a man who realized he had a valuable piece of information, as we would put it. And he must have said to himself, "This is going to work to my good one of these days." And so he kept it in and he waited for the opportune moment. And the moment came when Saul was complaining that nobody ever told him anything. "All these terrible things are happening" to him "and nobody's filling him in on all these disasters." And Doeg said, "Now this is my opportunity. I've been waiting for this. I've been saving it up and here it goes."

You see, it's that kind of pride. That's a horrible thing. There are people like that. People in the business world come up against them very often. People who conspire and do evil and know that they do evil because, well basically, they think they're smarter than other people and they can get away with it and after all, it's a dog-eat-dog world and the object of it all is to advance yourself. Doeg was like that.

The second thing David tells us about him is that he loved evil. That's no surprise, of course. But that's what David says, verse three, "You love evil rather than good." Now again, you see that in the story. You see, it's not just that Doeg was trying to advance himself; a lot of people try to do that and perhaps do it in underhanded ways, but here was a man when the opportunity was presented to him, didn't hesitate to kill the priests, and a lot of the priests and all their families.

See, he's a man who if we say to ourselves, "Why in the world would anybody ever do that? That was so unnecessary. Why did he do that? It wasn't just to get ahead." You have to say, "Well, the priests stood for righteousness." You see? And Doeg was a man who hated that. He hated people who stood for righteousness. So he wasn't doing evil only to get ahead; certainly he wanted to get ahead, but he wanted to do in the people who stood for good while he was at it. That's why David says he loves evil.

And then there's the third thing and it has to do with his lying or his use of words as a weapon. Now at first glance that doesn't seem so bad to us because we say, "Well, pride, we understand that's one of the deadly sins, and certainly anybody who loves evil, that's a terrible thing." But we don't think of words as being particularly bad. But this is what David emphasizes.

Look, if you just read it, you'll find that emphasis throughout that opening stanza: "Your tongue plots destruction; it's like a sharpened razor, you practice deceit." He says, "You love evil rather than good, falsehood rather than speaking the truth. You love every harmful word, oh you deceitful tongue." Now that tells us a couple of things. First of all, it tells us how damaging words can be. Words really are very harmful. People have done terrible things in the world by the use of words.

Think of a man like Hitler who had splendid oratory but used it to plunge the world into war. That's one thing. The second thing this tells us is that all of this is something of which we are capable of doing. Because you see, when we take those first two things, true Christians really shouldn't be described by that. Any anybody of whom you can say he is so proud in this cunning deceitful way really is not a Christian. And you can't say of a Christian he loves evil rather than good; a person who loves evil rather than good is no Christian.

See, there has to be a change in your life if you're a Christian. So those things don't apply to us too well. But when you get around to talking about words and the use of words, there we've got something that really does describe many of us and probably all of us at one time or another. If it didn't, why would the Apostle James have taken so much trouble to warn against the use of the tongue in the New Testament?

Almost the whole third chapter of the book of James is about the wrong use of the tongue and he is certainly speaking to Christians when he writes this; he's writing to brothers and sisters in the faith. Here's what he says: "The tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire and is itself set on fire by hell."

That's pretty strong language. But you see, James is writing to Christians and he knows what damage we can do. In England during the Second World War, there was a poster that people often saw. It was illustrated in different ways, but it had a little slogan with it that was warning against any unwitting disclosure of troop movements or any other military secrets and the little slogan said this: "Loose talk costs lives." You used to see that all over in England during the war: "Loose talk costs lives."

That is true spiritually as well. Loose talk. Most of us wouldn't say, well, we're using our tongue to try and harm somebody, but we are not altogether righteous in the way we use our tongues. We say things off the cuff. We slander, perhaps, jokingly, but nevertheless in a harmful way. And James says when he's writing to the Christians in his day, "Brothers, such things ought not to be." One of the prayers I frequently offer when I say grace, thanks for the food before meals, is this: I pray that God will guide our conversation. And we ought to be praying that at all times.

Now that's the description of the man. What we have in the second paragraph is David's prediction of his end, that is a prophecy. And what he says is that God is going to tear him down. You see, David realizes that he lives in a moral universe, and in a moral universe, in the final analysis, good will prosper and evil will be judged. Now we mustn't think of that in absolute categories, of course, because evil often in this world flourishes for a long, long time, and the righteous sometimes do suffer; they even suffer death.

That's why we have martyrs. These priests were an example. That's the whole problem. Doeg for a time seemed to triumph and the priests were killed and God didn't intervene. The psalmists know this. That's why you have these outcries in so many of the Psalms. They say, "God, this is a moral universe. How can things like this happen? Have you turned your back? Have you forgotten? Why don't you hear? God, look, do something." Many of the Psalms talk along those lines.

But you see, they also have this current in the Psalms. They recognize the anomaly and the sin of the world in which we live, but the psalmists nevertheless do believe in God and they know His character, He's a righteous God, and therefore they can appeal to it. And in this case, David says of this man, perhaps actually prophesying in the sense that God actually revealed to David the end of the man, he said he's going to be brought down. Now we're not told anywhere in the Bible what happened to Doeg, but we're to presume that this is precisely what happened.

David uses four vigorous verbs to stress the utter totality of his ruin. The first verb is "to bring down." You'll see that there in the first part of verse five, "Surely God will bring you down to everlasting ruin." That's a verb that is a bit more powerful than it appears to us in English. It's not just to bring, but it's actually to topple over and destroy. It's the word you use when you're destroying an altar. You pull it down, you bring it down in order that it might be destroyed. So that's the first thing God says through David that He's going to do.

The second verb is "snatch up." Now that has the additional thought of twisting something up or out. You're trying to get a tree out of the ground, for example. You're digging around, it has a lot of roots, it's hard to get out, you can get behind it and twist it that way in order to wrench it out of the ground, and that's the second verb. The third is "to tear or sweep away." The New International Version says "tear you from your tent," but other scholars translate that in what I think is a better way. It is to tear you up or sweep you away so you will no longer be a tent.

You see, a tent represented a family in Israel and it's a way of saying the whole family's going to be removed so we're not even going to have the family of Doeg the Edomite around anymore. And then the final verb is "to uproot or eradicate." And it reinforces the idea. So that's the first thing David says. He's prophesying, he says this man is going to be overthrown, torn down, rooted up, and thrown away.

Then there's a second thing he says. Interesting, isn't it? He talks about the response of the righteous to what happens. "The righteous will see and fear," and notice this: "they will laugh at him," saying, "Here now is the man who did not make God his stronghold, but trusted in his great wealth and grew strong by destroying others." They're going to laugh. Now you see, what they are doing here is rejoicing in the execution of God's righteous judgment.

It's the righteous judgment of God that keeps this from being a selfish kind of gloating at the misfortune of somebody whom we consider an enemy. This is not what's involved. These are the righteous and they're rejoicing when God does actually overthrow the wicked. I think that's something we need to recapture a bit of in our day. We have to be on guard against it and I'm going to say something about our being on guard against it in a moment.

But in our day among evangelicals in our kind of pluralistic, all-accepting society, that isn't generally our problem. Our problem is that we go with the flow, as we say, and nothing bothers us very much, and so we're not really very disturbed by evil. And here's David saying that the righteous are disturbed by it, and they're disturbed by it to the degree that when God actually overthrows the ungodly, they rejoice at what God has done.

You can hardly say that without thinking ahead to the end of the Bible. You know, in the very last portion of the book of Revelation, you have that prophecy of the overthrow of Babylon. It's called Mystic Babylon and it stands for all of the evil systems in the world. And when Babylon is overthrown, the righteous are there rejoicing. That's the only place in the New Testament where you find the word "hallelujah." You find it a lot in the Psalms. It's the only place in the New Testament you find the righteous singing hallelujah and they do it over and over again in that chapter because God has finally destroyed and judged evil.

You see, we need to recapture a little more of that. Here they're laughing at the overthrow of the righteous. What do we laugh at? Well, we watch television and we laugh at the mocking of all values. You know, it's supposed to be funny, the kind of things we see on television, and it's very destructive. Well, we ought to have a complete reversal on that. We ought to find that offensive and we ought to rejoice whenever righteousness prevails.

Well, that has to do with the judgment. In the very last stanza we have a contrasting portion of the righteous and I suppose the reason we have this stanza is to keep us from the error that I was referring to earlier. You see, when we rejoice in the overthrow of the unjust, we have to remember that we ourselves are sinners. David here as he writes about himself, he says he's like an olive tree flourishing in the house of God, was really right before the Lord, but he was a sinner.

And we remember that later on in his life he got into an awful lot of trouble. You and I are very capable of that. And so we have to remember that. But what we have to do just because we remember it is not lessen our view of what righteousness is or be less happy when righteousness prevails and somehow think that evil is good. That's not the answer. But what we have to do, recognizing our own sinful nature, is to draw close to God in order that we might be kept righteous ourselves.

And that, of course, is just what David is saying when he says, "I'm like an olive tree flourishing in the house of God." He trusts in God's unfailing love forever and ever, and he praises God for what He has done. He says, "In your name I will hope, for your name is good, and I will praise you in the presence of your saints." When you read about that olive tree, it makes you think back to Psalm 1. Psalm 1, a great Psalm that begins the psalter, portrays the two ways: the way of the righteous, the way of the ungodly.

The righteous don't sit in the seat of the scornful or stand in the way of mockers, but rather they hope in the law of God. They meditate on it day and night. And as a result of that, they're like a tree planted by the rivers of water. And the ungodly, says the author of that Psalm, are not like that; they're like chaff, light moral stuff, and when the wind blows, they're scattered, they're gone. Therefore, the Psalm ends, "the wicked will not stand in the judgment," or sinners in the congregation of the righteous, "but the Lord knows the way of the righteous and they shall prosper."

Now we believe that. We believe that it is a moral universe and even though in this world we often see evil prosper, at least for a time, and the righteous often do have a hard time, but we believe that God is in charge and that God ultimately does bless the way of righteousness. Then we will draw close to Him because we will want to be righteous. We live in a world that makes it very difficult. It's very hard to stand for righteousness in the kind of age in which we live.

There's very little support in the public school system or in the universities or the business world today. Righteousness has evaporated from the moral climate of our time, but we have to do it. And the only way we're to do it is to stay close to God and draw our strength from Him. You see that tree planted by the rivers of water draws from the rivers of living water. Jesus said, "If you come to me, I'll plant within you a river of living water springing up unto everlasting life." And that's what He'll do. And we need to draw near to Him.

David at the very end says there are three things that he's going to do. First of all, he says, "I'll praise God, I'll praise you forever and ever for what you've done." Secondly, he says, "I will continue to trust you for the future." I may get into hard times again. Remember at this time if that's what he's describing, he was in the cave hiding from Saul. He didn't know what his future would be, but he said, "I'll trust you." And then thirdly, perhaps most important, he says, "I'll praise you in the presence of your saints," and that's a way of saying that he's going to bear witness before other people.

We need a great deal more of that as well. This afternoon we had this memorial service for Venus Ballion, and one of the things that people were saying about her is that she was always so outspoken about her faith in God. You couldn't talk to her without her talking about the Lord and her trust in Him and how good He had been to her over a long, long time. She was born in 1899. Only person I know from the last century. She was 93 years old when she died. That's a long time and her testimony was as that God had been good to her all that time.

Now you may not be 93. I hope you're not. I hope there's many more years of service for you, but however old you are, if you've been a Christian any of that time, can't you look back and say God has been good to me? During those years, God has certainly not treated me as I deserved. What I deserve is hell; He's saved me from that by the work of Jesus Christ. He certainly enriched my life. He's provided me with a place to worship, sound teaching, Christian friends, all of those things. They're wonderful things.

Well, if He has, praise Him for it. And not just in the secret closet where nobody knows him. Praise Him before others in order that others might know that you really do serve a good God. And by His grace, perhaps, they'll also come to know Him. Let's pray. Our Father, we thank you again for these Psalms. They speak so deeply and so warmly about things that also do concern us very much. All of us know evil people. All of us face this kind of wickedness in one way or another in the world and it's hard to stand against it.

But here we have a reminder of the end of wickedness and the sure end of the righteous if they draw their strength from you. Grant that we might do that. And then praise you and continue to trust you and testify about your grace to other people because we know of it in Jesus Christ. We pray in His name. Amen.

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