Thoughts on Psalm 5: Part 1
Psalm 5 is a heartfelt prayer to God,praying for judgement on the evil, and declaring the Psalmist’s dedication to God.
He starts off praying that God will hear his words, and consider his meditations. He then praises God, telling God how the foolish can’t stand in his sight, and how God hates all sinners. He goes on, saying how God will destroy all the sinners, and abhor deceitful men.
In this day and age, abhor is not a word that we use often. It’s a powerful word, meaning to feel excessive repugnance towards, and to detest to extremity. Compare that to hate which means to simply dislike intensely. So, abhor is a powerful word; one that shouldn’t be lightly used.
The Psalmist says that God ABHORS deceitful and bloodthirsty men. Now, bloodthirsty is an obvious word, meaning someone craving violence, but deceit has a broader meaning. It is defined as “an attempt or dispostition to deceive or lead into error”, “any artifice, or practice, which misleads another, or causes him to believe what is false”, and “Any trick, collusion, contrivance, false representation, or underhand practice, used to defraud another”.
Now, lies are lies, and they are wrong, we know that, and most of us don’t do that. But, how many of us intentionally mislead someone, not lying, but just saying things that lead them to believe something not true? According to the Bible, God MORE than hates that. Why then, do we do things that God abhors? Shouldn’t we stop that, and only tell the truth, letting our yes be yes, and our no be no?
Tomorrow, I (hopefully) will conclude Psalm 5.
