Set a Watch Before My Mouth
1 A Psalm by David. Yahweh, I have called on you. Come to me quickly! Listen to my voice when I call to you. 2 Let my prayer be set before you like incense; the lifting up of my hands like the evening sacrifice. 3 Set a watch, Yahweh, before my mouth. Keep the door of my lips. 4 Don’t incline my heart to any evil thing, to practice deeds of wickedness with men who work iniquity. Don’t let me eat of their delicacies. 5 Let the righteous strike me, it is kindness; let him reprove me, it is like oil on the head; don’t let my head refuse it; Yet my prayer is always against evil deeds. 6 Their judges are thrown down by the sides of the rock. They will hear my words, for they are well spoken. 7 “As when one plows and breaks up the earth, our bones are scattered at the mouth of Sheol.” 8 For my eyes are on you, Yahweh, the Lord. I take refuge in you. Don’t leave my soul destitute. 9 Keep me from the snare which they have laid for me, from the traps of the workers of iniquity. 10 Let the wicked fall together into their own nets while I pass by.
A man asks for a sentry on his own lips, and says he would rather be hit by a good man than flattered by a bad one.
Let my prayer be set before you like incense; the lifting up of my hands like the evening sacrifice.
The verse that establishes what the incense altar was for Exodus 30:7, and the vision of the heavenly sanctuary takes it up unchanged Revelation 5:8. A man who cannot get to the temple describes his own prayer as the smoke rising at the hour the evening lamb was offered.
Set a watch, Yahweh, before my mouth. Keep the door of my lips.
A sentry posted on his own speech, and a door that needs guarding from the inside. In a collection where the characteristic weapon is a tongue, this is a man asking not to be issued one.
Don’t incline my heart to any evil thing, to practice deeds of wickedness with men who work iniquity. Don’t let me eat of their delicacies.
The request is about attraction rather than action. And the delicacies are the giveaway: what is being resisted is not a threat but an invitation, and the danger is that it looks like dinner.
Let the righteous strike me, it is kindness; let him reprove me, it is like oil on the head; don’t let my head refuse it; Yet my prayer is always against evil deeds.
The finest verse in the psalm. A blow from a good man is classified as kindness and a rebuke as anointing oil, and the last clause admits how unnatural that classification is — don't let my head refuse it is a prayer against his own reflex.
Set beside the previous verse, the psalm's judgment is complete: the flattery of the wicked is the poison and the correction of the righteous is the medicine, and both arrive feeling like the opposite.
For my eyes are on you, Yahweh, the Lord. I take refuge in you. Don’t leave my soul destitute.
The servant watching the hand Psalms 123:2, and the same posture.
Let the wicked fall together into their own nets while I pass by.
The pit-digging principle for the last time, and the psalmist's role in it is to keep walking.
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