Psalm 34:9-14 Commentary

When I wrote my sermon commentary for August 11, 2024, on the first 8 verses of Psalm 34, I confess I did not notice that the Lectionary continues in this same psalm for this week and, wonder of wonders, finishes it the following week.  Three weeks in a row in the same psalm!  Not sure what the logic is of carving up a 22-verse poem into three chunks.  Since Psalm 34 was surely written to be considered as a unit of thought unto itself, it gets a little hard to know how any preacher could preach on this three weeks straight, and maybe most of us would elect not to do that.

In any event, we noted in the previous sermon commentary on Proper 14B that this is definitely a sunny-side-up psalm that brims with confidence in God’s generous—even lavish—blessing on all those who call upon God.  This poem is about as far from a Psalm of Lament as you could get!  And as the previous commentary also noted, when we ponder or preach on such an upbeat psalm, we need to let it be in conversation with all those other darker and more plaintive psalms in the Hebrew Psalter as a reminder that as a matter of fact, life does not always skate along as smoothly as Psalm 34 depicts the person of faith nor will some who listen to a sermon on Psalm 34 be able to identify with it at the moment since they are themselves in a bit of a spiritual trough.

All of that pertains to also this lection and the next one but I won’t further repeat what was in my Psalm 34:1-8 commentary this week or next.  So let’s just take this week’s half-dozen verses from the middle of Psalm 34 and see what they say.  Basically they say that if you trust in God, you will never lack for a thing.  But what may be a bit unique about this swath of the psalm are the words that counsel us to not use our tongues for evil purposes chiefly through the telling of lies.  It may be that serving God in general is a good thing that can lead to all the blessings Psalm 34 promises but this has implications for how we live, too, and the accent here is on how we use our power of communication and speech.  As the Epistle of James reminds us, the human tongue is an incredibly powerful feature to every person but that power can be wielded for great good or to set the world on fire through false speech.

Verses 13 and 14 here tie in with what constitutes a kind of refrain in all of Scripture and that is that the people of God are supposed to love the truth and speak it openly even as they are to detest all falsehood and the spreading of lies.  Over and over evil people, especially in the Psalms, are characterized by their deceitfulness, by their lying tongues, by their dissemination of false information that usually is in the service of destroying someone else’s reputation.  The Bible is surely against any form of lying but it is character assassination that seems close to the primary concern.

When we lie about another person, we create a false reality and for those who hear the lie and believe it, the person telling the lie seizes control of the situation and sweeps others into an alternative world.  Yes, we can tell lots of lies about lots of things.  We might claim we enjoyed the food served to us when having dinner at someone’s house when actually we hated it.  We might lie about how much money we have or about an alleged accomplishment that we in truth never did accomplish or complete.  We can tell sly lies to protect our reputation by not admitting to a foolish error we made.  All of that is an attempt to shape the world around us to something more convenient for ourselves and that is surely not admirable or right.

But it is the lie that is aimed at diminishing if not destroying another human being made in the image of God that seems biblically to be the most alarming type of deceitful speech.  I have not checked it out but I would guess that a majority of the Psalms of Lament include among their lamentations that their enemies are lying about the psalmist, their reputation is being trashed.  Lies told about us by other people mean we lose control of the narrative of our own lives as we feel like we are helpless to prevent others from thinking ill of us.  And insofar as we have perhaps all found ourselves in a situation like that at one time or another, we know how deeply upsetting this can be.

Unfortunately we live at a time when slander and false innuendo are rampant.  Social media in recent years seem to have accelerated people’s ability to tear other people down.  It happens in multiple ways.  Something a given person said is willfully taken out of context, quoted, and then used to characterize this person as a horrible person or as a racist or as being really stupid.  Or someone posts something on Facebook or X that has no basis in reality whatsoever but next thing you know others glom onto the lie and a comment chain is created where the target of the lie comes in for ever-increasing critique and accusations.  This can be driven by envy, possibly it can be done by accident as we were ourselves duped and then pass along the false information.  And probably now and then it is rooted in a basic mean-spiritedness from an angry person bent on revenge or who just wants to feel the power that comes by manipulating the worlds of other people.

But for all those reasons and more besides, people who follow Jesus must not be a party to all this mayhem.  Now is surely a moment for preachers to warn their congregations to be very careful, especially on social media, to be people of the truth and not people of the lie.  This can be tricky, of course.  Since certain false narratives propped up on social media can have a political component to them, in the ears of some people in churches, a pastor’s call for truth could be perceived as partisan.  We all know how social media and the consumption of news websites that confirm one and only one point of view create such strong echo chambers that it can be hard to reach certain individuals with the truth.  A preacher on a Sunday is hard pressed in 25 minutes to overcome what people are exposed to the other 10,055 minutes in a week!

Still, the middle part of Psalm 34 and its many other parallel passages throughout Scripture confirm that the people of God must be reminded regularly that participation in falsehood is very simply inimical to discipleship for those who dwell in Christ.  Or as the Reformed confession of The Heidelberg Catechism puts it in Q&A 112:

Q. What is the aim of the ninth commandment?

A. That I never give false testimony against anyone,
twist no one’s words,
not gossip or slander,
nor join in condemning anyone
rashly or without a hearing.

Rather, in court and everywhere else,
I should avoid lying and deceit of every kind;

these are the very devices the devil uses,
and they would call down on me God’s intense wrath.

I should love the truth,

speak it candidly,
and openly acknowledge it.

And I should do what I can

to guard and advance my neighbor’s good name.

Illustration Idea

In his series of books on The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson, author Robert Caro notes repeatedly that Johnson was an inveterate liar.  Johnson lied constantly about matters trivial and serious, small and large and everything in between.  He lied about his war record in World War II, inflating his one brief combat moment into a richly embroidered tale of harrowing heroism that bore no resemblance whatsoever to what actually took place.  And Johnson told that lie so often that eventually he clearly totally believed it himself.  Look at most any photo of Johnson as Senator, Vice-President, and President and you will see on his suitcoat lapel the Silver Star military award he manipulated to get for himself through his whopper of a false story.

In Caro’s second volume, Means of Ascent, he zeroes in on Johnson’s 1948 campaign for the Senate.  Johnson’s opponent was a popular former governor of Texas named Coke Stevenson.  During the campaign Johnson told a boldfaced lie about Stevenson’s position on certain tariffs.  It was an obvious falsehood but Johnson wagered that Stevenson would believe that the good people of Texas were too smart to believe it and so he would make no effort to rebut the claim.  And indeed, Stevenson refused to refute what he was sure everyone knew was something not true of his actual position.  But as is often true of a lie that gets repeated often enough, people did come to believe and by the time Stevenson realized he did need overtly to set the record straight it was too late and by then Johnson and his team were able to say in essence, “Oh sure, now he is changing his story!”

It is a grimly compelling example of the power of falsehood and thus a reminder of why people who follow Christ Jesus simply cannot participate in such malicious speech.