Today’s Passage: Psalm 64
This is a prayer of David, handed to the choirmaster to be sung. He comes to God with a complaint, and the trouble he brings is not a sword or an army but a mouth. Men are sharpening their tongues the way a soldier hones a blade, and they aim their bitter words like arrows at a man who has done them no harm. David asks God to hide him from it all, and he trusts that God will answer. In the end God bends their own weapon back on them, and the very tongues they aimed turn against them.
As you read, hold this: Their own tongues turned against them.
Context No blade in the field
There is no army in this psalm, and no sword in anyone’s hand. The whole of the danger is speech: the scheming, the secret plots, the words aimed like arrows across a room. An attacker like this never has to be seen to do his damage. He only has to be heard, or to be whispered about where the one he is wounding cannot answer.
Psalm 64:1-4 (BSB)
For the choirmaster. A Psalm of David. ¹ Hear, O God, my voice of complaint; preserve my life from dread of the enemy. ² Hide me from the scheming of the wicked, from the mob of workers of iniquity, ³ who sharpen their tongues like swords and aim their bitter words like arrows, ⁴ ambushing the innocent in seclusion, shooting suddenly, without fear.
Listen to how David prays. He asks God to hear him, to guard his life from the dread that the enemy stirs up, and to hide him from all their scheming. Then he tells what they do. They shanan, pronounced shah-NAN. Strong's H8150, to sharpen, to whet. To whet. To hone a blade.
This tells you the speech was prepared. It was practiced and aimed, not some careless word that happened to cut on its way past. It is the picture of a soldier sitting down to sharpen his sword before he ever lifts it against a man. their tongues and aim their bitter words, lying in wait for an innocent man and shooting at him suddenly, out of hiding, with no fear at all of being caught.
Psalm 64:5-6 (BSB)
⁵ They hold fast to their evil purpose; they speak of hiding their snares. “Who will see them?” they say. ⁶ They devise injustice and say, “We have perfected a secret plan.” For the inner man and the heart are mysterious.
They hold fast to what they have set their hearts on, laying their snares in secret and asking one another who could ever see them. They tell themselves they have perfected the plan. All their confidence rests on one idea, that no one is looking.
Psalm 64:7-8 (BSB)
⁷ But God will shoot them with arrows; suddenly they will be wounded. ⁸ They will be made to stumble, their own tongues turned against them. All who see will shake their heads.
But the one they forgot was watching is God, and He draws His own bow. Suddenly the arrows fall on the men who fired them, the very same weapon they had been so proud of. Their own tongues, honed and aimed with such care, are turned back against them, and everyone who sees it shakes his head. We should not soften what is happening here. This is God’s judgment, asked of Him and carried out by Him, and He does it by taking up the very thing the wicked trusted in.
Study notes The tongue is not only theirs
James will not let the wound stay only on the enemy’s side.
"But no man can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison." James 3:8 (BSB)
No man can tame it, James says. It is restless and deadly, never fully at rest. The psalm named the tongue that was aimed at David long ago, and James names what any mouth is still capable of, our own included. Their own tongues turned against them.
Psalm 64:9-10 (BSB)
⁹ Then all mankind will fear and proclaim the work of God; so they will ponder what He has done. ¹⁰ Let the righteous rejoice in the LORD and take refuge in Him; let all the upright in heart exult.
When it is over, all mankind will stand in fear and tell one another what God has done, pondering His work. This is not a private victory tucked away where no one can see it. It becomes public testimony to the God who acts. And so the psalm ends where the trouble first began, with the righteous taking refuge in the LORD, rejoicing in Him, and all the upright in heart lifted up to praise.
Their own tongues turned against them.