Meditation on Psalm 17
Resuming our midweek series on the Psalms at Evening Prayer:
“Set a watch before my mouth, O Lord, and guard the door of my lips.” I cannot pray this prayer enough, because I know how my mouth is inclined to wickedness, and my lips to deceit. So it is surprising that tonight’s Psalm, 17, can begin, “Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit!” Free of deceit? Hardly. I am an expert at deceiving others, deceiving myself, and imagining I can deceive God. I would be astonished if the same is not true for you.
So what do we make of these words, “Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit”? I am sorry to be so self-reflective this evening, but I am astonished, in the time of silence on Sunday mornings before we say the prayer of confession, at how I manage to confess the same sins over and over again, desperate to be free of my sins, yet knowing that I rarely do what it takes to effect real, lasting change. I want to be holy, but I don’t have the strength. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. And so I must convict myself: I have those lips free from deceit. And along comes this impossible Psalm: “Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit!”
And it gets worse: “You [O LORD] have tried my heart, you have visited me by night, you have tested me, and you will find nothing,” i.e., nothing against me, no sin to charge me with. “My steps have held fast to your paths”? No – my steps have wandered again and again on the world’s paths. “My feet have not slipped”? Not so; my feet have continually slipped.
The only thing I can say, in reading this Psalm, are the words of Isaiah, when He saw the LORD, and heard the thundering chants of the cherubim: “Woe is me, for I am undone; I am a man of unclean lips.” I too am a man of unclean lips, not a man whose lips are free from deceit.
So, to ask the Luther question, “What does this mean?” And what it means is, once again, Jesus is the speaker of the Psalm. Jesus is the one Man whose lips were free from deceit. Jesus in His passion had His heart tried and tested. He was visited by day by Satan, when He was weak, and yet He did not falter. He was visited by night by traitors and thugs, but they found nothing against Him. He alone purposed that His mouth would not transgress, and it did not. From His mouth dripped words sweet as honey, Gospel words of love and forgiveness; quite unlike even our nicest words, always tainted with self-love and self-interest.
And so our only hope, our only refuge, is to be in Christ. To be baptized, and to keep on drowning ourselves in that baptismal water. To be confirmed, and to keep on being nourished by the Lord at His table. For when we are in Him, then our lips are cleansed and our sin purged. When we are in Jesus, our hearts are tried, tested, but the Father only sees the righteousness of His Son so graciously imputed to us. And besides all this, when we are in Jesus, mystically united to Him, we begin to be guided by the Holy Spirit, who guides our steps, and recalls us to right path when our feet slip.
So we pray this Psalm in Jesus, and beg the Father to do for us the things written in the Psalm for Jesus’ sake. “Keep me as the apple of your eye,” we ask, and we can say with this evening’s hymn, “When God takes me home to heaven, Should this be the day I die, God will keep my spouse and children As the apple of His eye.”
And when the day we die comes, when we fall asleep in Jesus, let us fall asleep with this confidence: “As for me, I shall behold Your face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with Your likeness.” These things were brought to pass in Jesus, when He rose from the dead. And these things shall be brought to pass for you; for when your body awakes from the sleep of death, “we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” +INJ+
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