Today’s Passage: Psalm 101
Here a king makes a vow, and he makes it first about himself. I will walk in my house with integrity of heart, he says, and I will set no beliyya'al, pronounced bel-ee-YAH-al. Strong's H1100, worthlessness, wickedness, ruin. The word means wickedness, a destructive nothing, and later writers came so close to personifying it that it hardens into a name, Belial.
So the vow is a specific one. It is not only a refusal to do the wicked thing, but a refusal even to set it in front of the eyes and let it cling there. before my eyes. Only after that does the vow move outward to the people around him, asking who may dwell in this house and who may stand in his presence. The whole psalm holds together on one thread, the holiness of the house. This is a royal vow about a clean household, and we should not smuggle a later argument about who may hold an office into it.
As you read, hold this: I will walk in my house with integrity of heart.
Context A Psalm of David
The heading, “A Psalm of David,” is part of the text, and the lines that follow read like a king binding himself before he binds anyone else. He speaks of his eyes, then his heart, then his house, and only after that of the people he will keep close around him. Integrity, he seems to know, starts in the room where no one is watching.
Psalm 101:1-2 (BSB)
A Psalm of David.
¹ I will sing of Your loving devotion and justice; to You, O LORD, I will sing praises. ² I will ponder the way that is blameless—when will You come to me? I will walk in my house with integrity of heart.
He begins with loving devotion and justice, the two things he most wants to sing about. Then comes a question, honest and searching: when will You come to me? And then the vow that holds the whole day together, that he will walk in his own house with integrity of heart. This is the walk no one else sees, the one kept when there is no audience at all.
Psalm 101:3-4 (BSB)
³ I will set no worthless thing before my eyes. I hate the work of those who fall away; it shall not cling to me. ⁴ A perverse heart shall depart from me; I will know nothing of evil.
Study notes A covenant with the eyes
Long before David, Job had already bound himself with a vow in this same place, at the eyes.
"I have made a covenant with my eyes. How then could I gaze with desire at a virgin?" Job 31:1 (BSB)
Job made his vow under accusation, and David made his as a king, two very different men in two very different lives. Yet both of them set the same guard, and both set it at the eyes, before the heart is ever tested.
Psalm 101:5-6 (BSB)
⁵ Whoever slanders his neighbor in secret, I will put to silence; the one with haughty eyes and a proud heart, I will not endure. ⁶ My eyes favor the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with me; he who walks in the way of integrity shall minister to me.
Now the vow turns to the household gathered around him. Slander whispered in secret is put to silence, and pride is not endured under his roof. The faithful of the land are welcome to dwell with him, and the one who walks in integrity is the one who gets to serve. This is what the holiness of a house looks like, and it is not a later argument about who may hold an office.
Psalm 101:7-8 (BSB)
⁷ No one who practices deceit shall dwell in my house; no one who tells lies shall stand in my presence. ⁸ Every morning I will remove all the wicked of the land, that I may cut off every evildoer from the city of the LORD.
To dwell and to stand are the very words other psalms use for coming near to God, and here they mark who may come near the king. And this is not a thing done once and then finished. Every morning he takes it up again, until the psalm closes by naming the city of the LORD itself. I will walk in my house with integrity of heart.