Psalm 120 — Cry from Distress

FRANK: "Woe." That is the word the pilgrim leads with once he starts describing his life. Not sorrow, not frustration. Woe. It is a funeral word, Linda, it is the word you say standing over something that has died, and he uses it about where he is living.

LINDA: A funeral word for his address. That is a strange place to begin a hymnbook, isn't it? You'd think a collection of worship songs opens on something a little more, I don't know, uplifting.

FRANK: You would think that, and that is exactly the surprise. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody. We are in Psalm 120 today, the very first of what the Bible calls the Songs of Ascent, and it opens not in the temple but in exile, with a man groaning over the lies pressing in on him from every side.

LINDA: Songs of Ascent. Assume I've never heard that phrase in my life. What is it?

FRANK: Fair. So picture ancient Israel. Three times a year Yahweh appointed feasts, and the people would travel from wherever they lived up to Jerusalem to worship, because Jerusalem sits high, up on the hills, so you are always going up to it. And someone, most likely after the exile, gathered fifteen psalms into one little songbook for that climb. Psalms 120 through 134. You sang them on the road, walking, dusty, tired, going up. And this is track one.

LINDA: So it's a road-trip playlist for pilgrims. And the very first song on the playlist is a guy having the worst day of his life.

FRANK: A guy surrounded by liars, yes. And that placement is the whole argument of the psalm, but let me not run ahead of the reading. Let me set it in front of us first.

FRANK: In my distress, I cried to Yahweh. He answered me. Deliver my soul, Yahweh, from lying lips, from a deceitful tongue. What will be given to you, and what will be done more to you, you deceitful tongue? Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper. Woe is me, that I live in Meshech, that I dwell among the tents of Kedar. My soul has had her dwelling too long with him who hates peace. I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war.

LINDA: Meshech and Kedar. You just read those like I'm supposed to know where they are. I have no idea where they are.

FRANK: Nobody could live in both, that is the thing you have to hear. Meshech was far to the north, up near the Black Sea. Kedar was a nomadic Arab people ranging the deserts down to the southeast. They are on opposite ends of the known world. No traveler ever pitched a tent in Meshech and Kedar. So when he says "I live in Meshech, I dwell among the tents of Kedar," he is not filling out a mailing address. He is reaching for the two most distant, most hostile, most uncivilized peoples his imagination can grab, and he is saying: that is what my life feels like. Liars to the north, warmongers to the south, and me in the middle of all of it.

LINDA: So it's not geography, it's a feeling. He feels like a stranger everywhere he turns.

FRANK: A stranger everywhere. Hemmed in. And here is the part I want to slow down on, because the English can flatten it. When he says "lying lips" and "a deceitful tongue," we hear that and we think, okay, somebody gossiped about him, that stings. But in that world a tongue could kill a man.

LINDA: Kill him how? Words are words.

FRANK: Think about how that society ran. No courts like ours. No signed contracts, no recording, no way to prove what a man did or did not say. A person's entire standing rested on his reputation, and his reputation lived in the mouths of his neighbors. One well-placed lie could strip him of his livelihood, his marriage prospects, his seat at the city gate where the elders judged disputes. And in a village you could not just pack up and start fresh three towns over. The rumor got there before you did.

LINDA: The rumor traveling faster than the man. Okay. So this isn't him being thin-skinned about somebody talking behind his back. This is somebody actually coming for his life, just with their mouth instead of a knife.

FRANK: That is precisely it. Which is why his prayer is "Deliver my soul, Yahweh." Deliver me. As if from a weapon. And then look at what he says the deceitful tongue deserves. "Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper." Read that slowly, because both of those are exact. A lie is like an arrow. It is launched from a distance, it strikes where you cannot see it coming, you never get to face the person who fired it. And the coals.

FRANK: The coals are even better. "Coals of juniper" is broom-tree charcoal, and broom-tree charcoal was famous in the ancient world for one thing. It burns hotter and it burns longer than any other wood. You think the fire is out. You walk away. And it flares right back up hours later. That is what a slander does. You answer it, you think it is dead, and a week later it is smoldering again in someone else's kitchen. He picked the one image that keeps re-igniting.

LINDA: I know that fire. I have absolutely watched a thing I thought I'd put out come back weeks later. So the punishment isn't random cruelty, it's, what, it's the tongue getting handed back its own nature?

FRANK: The judgment simply gives the tongue what it is. Arrows for the thing that shoots from cover, fire that will not go out for the thing that never really goes out. And this is the seed of something the New Testament picks up and spells out. James, centuries later, takes this exact register and says the tongue "is a fire," that it "sets on fire the course of nature," that it is a restless evil no human being can tame. The psalmist felt the arrows landing on him. James walks over to the quiver and finds it's burning from the inside.

LINDA: Wait. From the inside. You mean it's not just other people's tongues that are the problem.

FRANK: The deadliest tongue in the world is not far off in Meshech or Kedar. It is the one sitting behind his own teeth. Behind yours. Behind mine. Jesus said "out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks." The arrows fly because the bow is bent inside. The pilgrim is surrounded by lying lips, and it is a genuine assault. But the turn—the hard one—is that the source is not external. It lives inside.

LINDA: That's uncomfortable, because I came into this psalm ready to be the poor slandered guy, and you've just made me one of the liars.

FRANK: We all are, given the right afternoon. And that is why the psalm cannot end with the pilgrim taming his own tongue by sheer effort, because he can't, and neither can we. It points past itself. There is only one man whose mouth held no lie. Isaiah says of the suffering Servant, "there was no deceit in his mouth." And Peter takes that line and points it straight at Christ. He stood at his own trial, surrounded by lying lips, condemned by a deceitful tongue, and he absorbed every arrow of it. And he answered with silence. He let the fire those tongues deserved burn itself out on him.

LINDA: The Man of peace, answered with war.

FRANK: Answered with war. Which is the last line of the psalm, isn't it. "I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war." Jesus lived that line straight to a cross. He came speaking peace and they nailed him up for it. And because he went into the far country, because he endured the exile to its end, he became the road home. The pilgrim cried out in his distress and was answered. So was Christ. Raised on the third day, seated in the very city these pilgrims were climbing toward.

LINDA: Say more about that structure, though, because something's bugging me. He starts "I cried to Yahweh, he answered me." Past tense. The answer already happened. And then he spends the whole rest of the psalm still complaining. If God already answered, why is he still upset?

FRANK: Count where God's name shows up. That is one of the most beautiful design choices in this poem. Yahweh appears twice, both times right at the top. "I cried to Yahweh, he answered me. Deliver my soul, Yahweh." And after that second time, the name never comes back. He turns and speaks to the tongue, he speaks about Meshech and Kedar, he speaks of the people who hate peace. But he stops addressing God directly.

LINDA: The name Yahweh is named twice, both at the very start, and then never again the rest of the poem. That's the design?

FRANK: The design, and here is what it does. Normally you expect a prayer to build toward God, to save him for the big finish at the climax. This does the opposite. He pours those two things—that God hears and that God delivers—in first like a foundation, and then he builds the whole rest of the house on top of them. The arrows, the exile, the war. All of it rests on those two opening lines. He does not need the complaint to circle back to God because it never left God's hearing.

LINDA: So he says the true thing about God once, when he's clearest, and then he just lives in the long stretch where God seems quiet. But the quiet isn't absence.

FRANK: The quiet is not absence. That is the human condition pressed into a shape, honestly. Most of your life with God is not the mountaintop cry. It is the long middle where you already said the true thing and now you are waiting, and he seems silent. This psalm insists he is no less present in the silence than he was in the cry. Because he answered before you even finished speaking, the unanswered middle of your prayer is still held. Spurgeon put it plainly, that "he is the living God, and hence prayer to him is reasonable and profitable." You are not shouting into a machine. You are speaking to someone alive who already answered.

LINDA: I want to bring this down to the floor, though, because it's easy to keep it up in the ancient world. There's a person right now, I won't say who, who said something about me that I have not let go of. And every instinct I have is the cold shoulder. Go stiff, clipped answers, let them feel it. And you're telling me this psalm won't let me keep that.

FRANK: Look at his very last line again. After all of it, after the arrows and the woe and the exile, he says four words. "I am for peace." That is enormously expensive. Being for peace with someone who came for you means you give up the satisfaction of retaliating. You give up nursing the grudge. You give up the private story you tell yourself about how they deserve your silence. The psalm will not let you keep those.

LINDA: The satisfaction of retaliating is exactly what I want, though. I've earned that. They started it.

FRANK: You have earned it, by every human accounting. And notice what he does not claim. He does not say "and so they came around, and we made peace." Paul catches this exact ache in Romans and says, "If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men." As far as it depends on you. Some of the people you are around today are not going to want peace no matter how kindly you speak. That is not your failure. Their response was never yours to control. Your part is smaller and harder than a speech. It is greeting them by name. Passing the food. Asking a real question about their week and meaning it. Refusing the silent punishment you already had planned.

LINDA: That's smaller and worse than winning an argument. I could win an argument. Passing the potatoes to someone who slandered me and asking about their kids, that's the thing I actually can't do.

FRANK: You can't. Not on your own willpower. And that is the whole point of where this psalm was pointing the entire time. Christ was for peace with you while you were still against him. He absorbed your hostility and handed you his welcome. So you are not being asked to manufacture peace out of nothing. You have peace to spend that you did not earn. You give the liar a little of what Christ already gave you.

LINDA: So the road to God's house doesn't start once I've got it all sorted out. It starts right here, in the far country, groaning, with a person whose forgiveness I cannot grant.

FRANK: Distress is not the end of the road. It is where the whole pilgrimage begins. Track one, for exactly this reason. The very next psalm, 121, he lifts his eyes to the hills and says his help comes from Yahweh, the same God who answered him here. But he has to start here first. In Meshech. Among the tents of Kedar. A man of peace surrounded by war, taking the first step up anyway.

LINDA: So here's what I'd leave a person with. Hold that last line next to your week. There is one name in your head right now, you thought of them the second Frank started this. Before they deserve it, before they apologize, before any of it gets sorted out, greet that person warmly. Say their name. That's the first step up the hill.

FRANK: And if you can't, then do what the pilgrim did before he did anything else. Cry out. "Deliver my soul, Yahweh." He answered before the psalmist even finished the sentence. He has not left the room.

LINDA: This episode is part of the Dig Deeper app. If you don't have it yet, search Dig Deeper in your app store and come climb the rest of these psalms with us.