Today’s Passage: Psalm 120
Fifteen short psalms, 120 through 134, all wear the same heading: a song of ascents. Pilgrims sang them on the road up to Jerusalem, and that one sentence of setting is enough to place them. This first one does not open with the climb at all. It opens instead with a man who is tired of lying mouths, longing for peace in a place that keeps handing him back war. He cried out, and the LORD answered him.
As you read, hold this: I cried to the LORD, and He answered me.
Context A song of ascents
Jerusalem sat up on a ridge, so the road toward it ran uphill the whole way, and that is really the whole of the heading. Five of these fifteen songs anchor the days ahead of us. The meal here is not the stairs; it is the cry and the answer.
Psalm 120:1-2 (BSB)
A song of ascents. ¹ In my distress I cried to the LORD, and He answered me. ² Deliver my soul, O LORD, from lying lips and a deceitful tongue.
The first movement is already answered before the trouble is even fully named. I cried, and He answered, and only then does verse 2 tell us what the crying was about. It was not famine, and it was not a wound. It was lying lips and a deceitful tongue. Whatever it is he is leaving behind, its sharpest edge is speech.
Psalm 120:3-4 (BSB)
³ What will He do to you, and what will be added to you, O deceitful tongue? ⁴ Sharp arrows will come from the warrior, with burning coals of the broom tree!
Study notes A question the psalm answers itself
Verse 3 turns and speaks directly to the tongue, asking what will He do to you, and verse 4 gives the answer: a warrior’s sharp arrows, and burning coals of the broom tree, a desert wood known for a long and fierce fire. The images are chosen to match the offense. A lie wounds from a distance, the way an arrow does, and a lie also lingers, the way those coals keep on burning. Yet the psalmist does not take up either weapon himself. He names what deceit has earned and then leaves the arrows and the coals in God’s hand. We can teach that hardness honestly without baptizing revenge, and without sanitizing the line.
Psalm 120:5-7 (BSB)
⁵ Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live among the tents of Kedar! ⁶ Too long have I dwelt among those who hate peace. ⁷ I am in favor of peace; but when I speak, they want war.
Word study Meshech and Kedar
Meshech and Kedar were real peoples, but they lay far apart on Israel’s map, one off toward the Black Sea and the other among the Arabian tents. No pilgrim ever lived in both at once, and that is exactly the point. He reaches for the two most distant hostile addresses he can name and uses them as a kind of shorthand for being surrounded by people who prize conflict. This is not a travel report.
Too long have I dwelt among those who hate peace. I am in favor of peace, but when I speak, they want war. No resolution follows any of this. The neighbors are not converted, and the exhaustion is not lifted. The one thing that has changed is verse 1: he has cried, and the LORD has answered. The road up begins in a place that offers no peace at all, and that is precisely why the road matters.
I cried to the LORD, and He answered me.