Psalm 12 - A Prayer in the Midst of Lies

You may have noticed that today's psalm, the psalm from last week's sermon, and, small spoiler, next week's psalm as well, all deal with situations that are rather sad, even depressing. So allow me to talk to you about a sad subject too: we are about to enter an election season. In fact, we are already in it.

In France, we are getting ready for 2027. In the United States, there will be the midterm elections, and an American election ends up affecting the whole world, even us here. And in a few months there will be elections in Brazil as well, less important and less far-reaching, but since I am Brazilian, I mention them anyway.

And this is the classic season in which we find ourselves in the middle of a tsunami of lies, of twisted truths, of speeches full of bad faith, and so on. Now, yes, perhaps I am painting too dark a picture. It is a good thing that we live in places where people have a voice through elections, and even if it is imperfect, it matters. But it is one occasion among many where we see how badly we lack the virtue of loving the truth. We would be so much better off with more of it.

A world saturated with lies (vv. 1-4)

Lying does damage, in an election season and in any other circumstance. With false words, people without scruples manipulate others, sin dresses itself up as justice, and society as a whole suffers. And that is the reason behind the lament of today's psalm: it is a collective lament, "save us!" Because loyal, truthful people are missing.

On the contrary, the psalm says, people lie to one another. Even when they pay each other compliments, pleasant things, these are flattering words with a double intention. Could we not recognise our own time, our own situation, in this psalm? I am not criticising our age by saying "things were better before," because ever since sin entered the world, lying has been sown everywhere. What I mean is that this lament is still current: we lack loyal, truthful people who do not lie, and we feel that lack, and that lack does damage.

Politicians lie to the people about their intentions; they lie to each other about their alliances; it is not rare for people to lie on their tax returns; companies conceal the fact that they are poisoning the soil and the water; in marriages, lying wreaks havoc, and there are even apps designed so that people can arrange adulterous encounters. And then we lie to one another on social media, displaying a life that is not real, edited, shaped with the intention of producing an impression that is not true.

(I am not saying that social media is intrinsically evil, and I am not saying that it is not. But we can see in this psalm and elsewhere in the Bible that lying is not only passing on false information, but also passing on true information with a bad intention, with the intention of harming or of producing a false idea.)

Lying, the catalyst of sin

Lying is not simply one sin among others; it is the catalyst of sin. We see in the Bible that humanity's first sin was provoked by a lie from the serpent. Then the first murder begins with a lie; you can read it in Genesis. But look at our own history: the worst genocides, the worst abuses, the worst tyrants were all made possible by the power of human speech. Lies, manipulation, threats. And even today, how many atrocities have stayed buried in silence because someone said: "What are you going to do? If you say anything, it will be your word against mine, and nobody will believe you."

And how many times, I ask you to look back over your own life, have we been deeply wounded by a lie aimed at us, by a broken loyalty, or by a "truth" turned into a weapon, spoken in order to bring us down? And we have to recognise that we are part of the problem: how many times have we used our words not to bless, but to wound, to manipulate, to lie.

As we grow up, we come to realise that in our tongue, in our power of speech, we carry a loaded gun, ready to fire. And that we can very easily do intense harm to people if we use it. And what a weight it is to know that this gun exists, that it is always there, loaded, and that we must not use it. And what regret every time that, in an argument, we use it against someone who ought to be the object of our love: a friend, a spouse, a brother, a colleague.

But we look around us, we look at the powerful, and we see that the people with the fewest scruples about using this word-weapon are the ones who climb the ladder of power, and we can begin to wonder whether that is not simply how the world works.

All right, I did say this description was going to be fairly depressing. But is it false? This is the reason behind the collective cry of this psalm: "Save us, LORD! Cut short these lying lips!"

God rises and keeps us

In this psalm we see God's answer, and then a return to daily reality. God answers in verse 5: "Because the poor are oppressed and the needy groan, now I will arise, says the LORD; I will bring salvation to those who long for it." You see, God says that he intervenes not only because truth is being trampled on, but because people are being oppressed by lying and falsehood. God cares about truth, yes, but we can see throughout the Bible that he has a particular concern for those who are oppressed and have no one to help them. And he declares that he acts to place in his salvation the one who seeks it.

So let us pay attention to God's answer in this psalm: even though we cry out to God to cut short those who spread lies, that is not exactly what he says he will do. He says that he rises, that he acts to place in his salvation, in his safe place, the one who asks him for it. It may look like a detail, but the rest of the psalm shows that this is indeed the right reading: for now, God is not going to stop lying altogether; he is going to protect from lying those who call on him.

Verses 6, 7 and 8 are the psalm's response to God's proclamation. With confidence, they declare, in verse 7: "You, LORD, will keep them; you will protect them from this generation for ever." In the Bible Semeur, and in the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, we read: "You, LORD, keep us and will always protect us from these people."

And the last verse shows that the psalmist knows the world's situation does not change straight away: "The wicked prowl on every side when what is vile is honoured among men." This situation persists: it is what the psalmist sees around him, it is the context the people still see when they finish singing this psalm, it is the situation we see around us today. You see: in verse 7 he says that God will keep us; in verse 8, the wicked prowl everywhere, and baseness reigns among men.

The Nouvelle Français courant translation brings out this contrast with an "even if": You, Lord, will keep the oppressed, you will always preserve us from these evil people, even if the wicked prowl all around, even if corruption overtakes humanity.

The reason for the psalmist's confidence lies in verse 6: the words of the LORD are not impure like ours, but pure, pure like silver passed seven times through the fire to be refined. Nothing is left in it that is not silver, nothing is left that is not pure. This is the complete opposite of what we see around us: God does not use his word to deceive; he does not speak with a double heart, with a hidden intention that contradicts the one he shows. His word is true, pure and powerful, and he does not lack the power to accomplish what he says.

How does God keep his promise?

So a legitimate question we might ask is this: in what way does God protect from lies those who call on him? We look around us, we look at the news, and we see that there are still victims of the practice of lying: people who have been manipulated, who are unjustly condemned, who are the targets of hate speech, and so on.

We can see in the Bible at least three ways in which God fulfils this promise: (1) God preserves the truth in spite of the lie. (2) God preserves those who call on him by saving them from the lie through salvation in Jesus Christ. (3) God will destroy every lie in the new creation.

1. God does not let the truth die

Yes, one of the ways God preserves us is that, in his grace, he does not allow the truth to disappear completely. Proverbs 12:19 says: "Truthful lips endure for ever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment." And a very common saying goes: "a lie has short legs; it never gets far." Now, a lie always lasts longer than it deserved to. But at some point it goes away, and the truth remains.

Think of the truth of the gospel: so often persecuted, so often distorted, so often people have tried to silence it or to alter it. And yet it is still here. And many of its opponents and alternatives are not.

Think too of that truth which God has placed in the human conscience and in Scripture: that all human beings were created equal, and that there is no inferior or impure race among us. So many times this truth has been questioned, distorted, hidden; and yet, despite the opposition that still exists, it is still here, and God in his grace does not let it be entirely forgotten or erased.

Think of marriage, which today is sometimes presented as an outdated, oppressive institution that ought to be reformed and reshaped, or even abolished. And in spite of the opposition, this truth will remain and will be kept by God: that marriage exists for the good of human beings, in a commitment of full faithfulness between a man and a woman. And it will outlast the lies that have attacked it in the past and that oppose it today.

2. God saves us in Jesus and gives us the Spirit of truth

But God also preserves us from the lie by saving us in Jesus. Jesus, who took upon himself the sins of all those who are in him, including lying, endured in his sufferings the false accusations of those who put him to death. He knows very well, then, the crushing world described by Psalm 12. In the middle of his trial, Jesus tells Pilate that he has "come into the world to bear witness to the truth" (John 18). And Pilate answers cynically: "What is truth?"

Jesus was condemned and put to death in a balance of power where the lying words of the powerful of his day seemed to have the upper hand. And yet all of this was done so that God's words through his prophets might be fulfilled, and so that, raised on the third day, he might bring in all those who, by his grace, call on him for salvation. He saves us and also gives us his Spirit of truth, his Holy Spirit, who convicts us of sin and equips us to speak the truth to one another, as Paul says in Ephesians 4:

You were taught to put off the old self, which belongs to your former way of life and is being destroyed by its deceitful desires; to be renewed by the Spirit in your minds; and to put on the new self, created after God in the righteousness and holiness that truth produces. Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth to his neighbour, for we are members one of another.

So, by his Holy Spirit, God cuts short our lying tongues and our deceitful desires, and renews our minds. We are thus equipped, among those who are in Christ, to rid ourselves of the lie.

And so we do not really have the right to take a defeatist stance towards lying: neither towards the lie that surrounds us, nor towards the lie that persists in our words and our thoughts. Let us not be deaf, then, to the Spirit of truth when we ask God to protect us from lies, for he also wants to protect us from the lies that remain in our own hearts. That is why, in our time of confession at every service on Sunday, we ask God to forgive the sins we commit with our words as well.

And if we have twisted truths in order to manipulate, in order to wound; if we have used our lips, our skill in argument, to get the better of someone unjustly, then let us listen today to the word of God, which pronounces judgement on all proud and false speech, and let us ask forgiveness with real repentance, listening to the Spirit of God rather than to the inner monologues we can produce to justify ourselves.

And perhaps it is worth saying this plainly: if you are the one who has been lied about, the one who has been crushed by someone else's words, this psalm is your prayer. God does not tell you that the lying will stop. He tells you that, if you call on him, he rises and puts you in a safe place. That he cares, already today, about your cry.

3. God will destroy every lie

And finally, we have in Scripture the promise that at the return of Jesus, in the new creation, there will be no lie. In Revelation 22 we read, concerning the new creation: "Outside are the vile, those who practise magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, those who worship idols, and everyone who loves and practises falsehood."

Everyone who loves and practises falsehood: this is not merely one item on the list of what does not enter the new creation; it is a summary of all the categories. To love the lie, to prefer it to the truth, and to practise it: here is the summary of everything that has no place in the world to come.

This is a hope for us; it is a promise we must keep in mind, especially when we are exasperated by the world we live in. It is also a call to live already in the practice of truth, because truth is what will last, what God equips us for, what has its place in all eternity.