Psalm 15 Commentary

We could summarize and simultaneously contemporize Psalm 15 this way: Who may dwell with God on God’s holy mountain?  The one who stays off social media.

Or at the very least the one who does not do on social media what altogether too many other people have been doing in the years since Facebook and then later Twitter/X came along: viz., using posts and tweets to spread misinformation, to slander people through telling half truths or willfully taking someone’s words out of context.  And these are people who then use the relatively safe distance of social media as cover for attacking people in comment chains or trolling certain individuals in a desire to cause them harm or get them into trouble.  The name-calling we have all seen in comment chains on something like Facebook is bracing and ugly.  And some of the worst comments I have received came from people who have never even met me.

We have all seen this and perhaps more of us than we would care readily to admit have been guilty of this ourselves.  But if Psalm 15 counsels us to avoid slurs and slander where other people are concerned, then we need soberly to recognize that the avoidance of such speech is a key piece of Christian character and, in our New Testament context, of Christ-likeness.  As we have noted in similar passages before here on the CEP website, the Bible is very clear-eyed about what a powerful thing human speech is.  It is a great gift but as is often the case, the greater the gift, the more perils that exist if the gift is mishandled.

Our speech can on the one hand pronounce wonderful blessings on others.  Our speech is the key instrument we have to encourage one another, to compliment someone, to elevate someone.  Our words can move people to tears or bring them to joyful laughter.  Our speech can reveal tremendous depths of thoughtfulness and care and discernment.  Through our words we write beautiful poetry and songs and sonnets.  Language is downright startling in how powerful it can be to stir within the human heart all that is good and lovely and right.

But then there’s that flipside to speech.  Through our words we can wound, eviscerate, and devastate another person.  We can ruin reputations and, as we have sadly seen too vividly in recent years, younger people who are the victims of withering bullying can be driven to the brink of suicide.  There has seldom been an adage as glaringly false as the one that claims that while sticks and stones may break our bones words will never hurt us.  Not true.  Not true at all.  If human speech can reach great heights of beauty, it can also descend into great depths of depravity and ugliness.  And if human speech can be the avenue of revelation that gives one a glimpse into the kindness of another person’s heart, speech can also reveal hearts that are cruel and callous.

Thus the first part of Psalm 15 focuses on this area of our lives as a way to say that you cannot be on God’s side if you use your speech for harm and not help.  Words are powerful and in the Hebrew language, when the Bible describes the words of God (think of Isaiah 55 for instance), there is no difference between the word of God and the deed of God that the word makes possible.  God’s words are always life-giving and lead to tangible good things.  When God says something, it is tantamount to God’s performing something.  Word and deed for God always go hand in hand.  That may be why Psalm 15 also mentions that the person who qualifies to live with God in his sacred tent and on his holy mountain is not only a truth teller but someone who always follows through on promises.  Even when it hurts, Psalm 15 says, the righteous person will not go back on their word.

There are a few other things listed in this short psalm like reserving our admiration for righteous people but having due disgust for the vile.  No, having disgust over vile people should not be seen as meaning you hate them or harm them because those attitudes or actions would not be consistent with a person of godly character.  But it is only right to feel disgust when we see certain people so willfully distorting the divine image in which they were made often in the service of tearing down other people who were also made in the image of God.  And the person who wants to be a chip off the divine block is generous and most particularly to the poor and to those in need.

Character counts, Psalm 15 says.  This may be a needed reminder in every age and certainly in the present age.  It seems that too often people in society—but alas in also the church—are willing to overlook bad character in the service of something they seem to deem more highly like access to power, being famous, being in the limelight, being able to get what you want out of life no matter what it may cost the people around you.  This cannot be the posture of the people of God in Christ Jesus the Lord.

Psalm 15 concludes that people who fit the bill as described by this poem will never be shaken.  That is not to say, however, that telling the truth and resisting the trends of slander and deceit all around us will be easy.  Nor is this to deny that sometimes when we refuse to lower ourselves to the level of those who pronounce slurs on us that this can be hurtful to us.  It is far better to take the high road or, as Michelle Obama once said, to go high when others go low.  But the character of the person described in Psalm 15 does lead to a level of stability.  Telling the truth puts you on solid ground.  People who lie all the time have to work really hard to keep track of their lies!  Being in first touch with the truth is far better.

Of course a sermon on Psalm 15 could easily morph into a pep talk or a lecture that eclipses the Gospel with a long To-Do list.  So we need to couch all this inside the prior grace of God without which—through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit—we are not able to do any of the things Psalm 15 talks about both in terms of what to do and what to avoid.  In Christ the character we display is not a way to earn God’s favor but is the natural fruit of our having been saved by grace alone in the first place.  Because of course the only person who ever lived who perfectly embodied Psalm 15 is Jesus and so we cannot hope to make even a small beginning on all this without having the very life of Christ Jesus infused into us by the Spirit at our baptisms.

But when we duly keep grace in mind, then we can look at Psalm 15 not as a difficult To-Do list but rather as something we are privileged to live out and participate in because of becoming new creations in Christ.  And that is what really leads us to know that in Christ alone, we will never be shaken.

Illustration Idea

Most everyone knows the fable about the boy who called wolf.  Again and again this young man made false claims, claimed to be in trouble when he really wasn’t.  Soon enough no one trusted this boy’s word or believed anything he said.  And so when a day of true calamity came and he really did need to be delivered from a vicious enemy, no one bothered to listen to him or come to his aid and that, as they say, was that.

In the run of our ordinary lives, we know people who seem incapable of telling the truth for whatever the reason.  Maybe it is in an ongoing effort to make themselves look better or to cover up their shortcomings or deny their actual mistakes and goofs and failures.  But sooner or later when confronted with someone like this, you stop listening, you shrug off everything they say, you shake your head in disgust.  There is just no substance to a person so filled with falseness and lies.

Jesus came, John claimed in John 1, full of grace and truth.  He had both up and running 100% at the same time and all the time.  Maybe that is why when Jesus spoke, people leaned in to listen to what he had to say.  If it is easy eventually just to ignore and walk away from people full of lies and falsehoods, it is almost impossible not to pay very close attention to the words of the one who you know embodies truth.  You want to hear what such a person has to say because inevitably it will mean you may learn something that may be very important for you to know.

Jesus was and is like that.  So should those who bear his Name.

Note: the CEP website has a commentary on Psalm 45 from the 2018 year B cycle:

Leonard Vander Zee: https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2018-08-27/psalm-45/