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Salvation is not merely to be put in “safety” but to be put into Christ.
For any of you who have been wounded by a Church and abused by its leaders, this Psalm is for you. What do you do when the “saint fails”?
1 Save, O Lord, for the saint fails, for the truths have perished from the sons of men.
The Saint fails! The Church (in the singular collective) has stumbled. The Preachers have gone to the dogs. So David calls out to his whole people in this religious yelp (without any preface or even an object for his sentence — like “me”). He cries out: Save!!! Hosia! Yeshua! Jesus! We are at an end. A faithful man—who can find? There is no Hasid (saint or mercy-man) anywhere! Truths are gone. Gone is anyone saying anything faithful and certain from God’s words, so that we people of the church have nowhere to place our trust. Truth is faith for David, and so he knows that those who are justified by faith alone (the righteous preachers) have all gone.
The prophets and preachers who have been called to minister the Word of God but have stooped to teach their own words instead of the words God has bestowed and commanded us to hear.
What are we to do now, O Lord? We begin by getting angry. Luther says, “angry love speaks in this Psalm,” and it is a special anger we call “zeal for God,” like Paul’s zeal for his Corinthians, “I am jealous over you with a godly jealousy” (2 Cor. 11:2). Zeal is the hot anger of a Christian toward his own Christians, for only those we love most deserve this much of our anger. No wonder David uses such hyperbole—the saint has not merely diminished in the church; the just are not only reduced, but they are altogether gone. All those who please God have scattered and now cease to exist.
David speaks in hot love against the prophets and preachers who have been called to minister the Word of God but have stooped to teach their own words instead of the words God has bestowed and commanded us to hear. Instead of God’s truths, the false prophets have substituted their own laws, disguising themselves as theologians and “religious” people. In this Psalm, David looked around and realized he was the only one left in the whole church of God on earth.
Christ said the same about his own age and false prophets: “Woe to you lawyers! You have taken away the key of wisdom. You did not enter yourselves, and you blocked those who were entering by themselves” (Luke 11:52). Luther thought the same had happened in his day: the ministers of the word have failed by putting their own laws in place of God’s words, filling the churches with self-justifying hypocrites who not only close heaven’s door to themselves but also see to it that others are bereft of the unlocking key of the gospel that frees us on earth now and in heaven forever. As the last prophet, Micah, declared: “I come for clusters of grapes…but get only thorns” (Micah 7:1-4). Thus, he despaired: “a man’s enemies are those of his own house” (Micah 7:7).
2 They speak vain things; everyone to his neighbor’s deceitful lips; they speak with a heart and a heart.
The wicked in a church appear as their opposite. Suddenly, you wake up and realize—the saint has failed—using Deceitful Lips. This betrayal comes from your neighbor’s lips, thus from his words. David describes these deceitful lips (labi dolosa) as speaking (strangely) as with “heart and a heart.” The Hebrew repetition of the noun refers to two different, competing, and opposite things. We say that such a man speaks out of two sides of his mouth. Lying lips are “smooth” or “slippery” (as the Hebrew says) in that they start with sugar but end with a sword. They betray you as they speak from two opposite, duplicitous hearts: one that expresses love and the other that puts the knife to your throat—flattering you, then decimating you, all as if speaking “saintly” for God.
But what set David off in this angry love was not the private, petty betrayals that happen every day between two people; David’s psalm speaks of the public office of preaching, or the ministry of the Word of the Lord, which succumbs to such lying lips. Instead of uttering the Word of the Cross, these failed saints preach their own Word of Glory. They advertise the gospel of life, then deliver the law of death. Their mouths slip from one word to the next, always starting with the sugar-gospel and finishing with the sword-law. Fake preachers tickle your itching ear, then bite it off.
It would be bad enough if one preacher did this, but, as David experienced, it is “everyone.” The whole church has double hearts and slippery tongues. They are not what they seem—they attract you with flowery words but only create sects or divisions in God’s true church. Luther says the church has always been like this: Arius comes in and says Christ is something between God and man; then his Arian churches break off into even worse groups, like the Eunomians and the Macedonians. The Donatists (who say the only good preacher is a sinless preacher) produced the Maximians and endless types of false churches. Luther noted that in his own day, the prominent false preacher was Aristotle, who had taken over Luther’s own Christian teachers of every stripe: Scotus, Thomas, and Occam (the Nominalist or Thomists), teaching the natural law as God’s essence and so the form of Christian righteousness, as if faith and righteousness were a soul who becomes like God by “apprehending” God’s glory (knower and known united by their knowing). But that is not faith! Who can resist the cavalcade of false preachers in the church when we can’t even seem to resist one single false preacher like Aristotle?
3 Let the Lord cut off all deceitful lips, and the tongue that speaks proud things.
The deceitful lips of preachers are such because of their abuse of the tongue, and the tongue is abused when it “speaks proud things.” When preachers begin using their lips “proudly,” they have fallen into flattering themselves and then doing the same to their hearers, instead of preaching what God has given, as Luther put it, the “true wisdom of the cross.” James 3:8 says that a man can't control his tongue because he can’t help but desire the respect and admiration of his congregation. His sermons then become like a fox tail: colorful and bushy but with little meat. Sermons cease to repeat and convey the actual words written in Scripture for the purpose that God wants said to his people. Instead, the preacher utters whatever he thinks is needed, which is always whatever will motivate people to do something, like a Martha, rather than sit there like a lazy Mary, taking it all in.
4 Who have said, We will magnify our [proud] tongues; our lips are from ourselves. Who is our Lord?
Proud tongues and deceitful lips always end up speaking ill of the chief doctrine of our central teaching in the church: righteousness through justification by faith in Christ. First, they say, “we will magnify our tongues” (or, more commonly, “we will win or prevail” by means of our tongues). Both parts–magnify and prevail– are true. Proud tongues start by building up the case for their false, substitute teaching. They claim that you can truly be obedient to the law (if only you will do xy or z) and that the law will ultimately sanctify you. Meanwhile, these tongues diminish and defeat God’s actual teaching of justification apart from the law. The false words increase, the true words decrease, and all the while the “proud tongue” imagines it is God’s best advocate and most faithful servant on earth. Yet the opposite is true: the proud tongue is not from God but “from ourselves.” Augustine translated our lips as “from ourselves” by saying the false preaching is done “in our own power,” while Luther was even more pointed: “our lips are our own.”
The failed saints who are damaging their own flocks speak with false tongues, saying: “We are the church; listen only to us,” and “We make the rules,” just like the Pope in Rome, issuing Bull after Bull and claiming that “there must be someone at the top who tells you what Scripture means,” and “We alone have the Keys! A church must have one Pope!” Soon, such church leaders don’t even feign intelligence; they simply rule by violence and tyranny. Jesus was approached that way in the temple by the priests, who demanded, “Tell us, by what authority do you do these things?” (Matt. 21:23). They claimed, “We are the teachers! Our lips are what matter! What about our customs and traditions in the church? You ask, ‘Who gives us authority?’ We authorize our own authority!” In the end, these failed saints claim: “We have no Lord but ourselves.”
Just so, Amos—the true prophet—was accused by Amaziah of rebellion and sedition for merely speaking God’s words and their uncomfortable truth (Amos 8:10). But faithful preachers like Amos need to remember that when the church finally divests itself of them, it is not they but God who is being rejected. True preachers must go on, saying, “Glory to God alone,” regardless of what happens to them.
5 For the misery of the needy, for the sighing of the poor, now will I arise, saith the Lord; I will set him in Jesus; He will breathe (speak) confidently in him.
Finally, in this fifth verse, David’s true preacher speaks for himself—finding solace in the fact that the banner of this Psalm, “the Saints have failed,” is not entirely accurate. David, the prophet and preacher, spoke hyperbolically of his church’s lost cause. Not all the saints have failed. David himself remains, does he not? Now the Psalm shifts to God speaking to David, answering his plea. God speaks not to protect the failed saints but for the sake of the “needy” (aenim) and the cries of “poor” (aebionim). Those are the terms God uses for “the saints” that David had feared were all gone. True Preachers, the victorious saints, are disparaged in this world as rebels and irreverent opponents of those in power—the needy and poor. Yet God now says (as he did also in Psalm 3) that it is time for him, himself, to “arise.”
“He will breathe (speak) confidently in—or even “to him” whom he has set in Jesus—united with Christ in his body, blood, spirit, and all that Jesus has.”
Suddenly, the law goes silent, and the promise takes the podium/pulpit. When the saints have failed, God determines to speak for himself to the wounded David and “set him in salvation.” Salvation is not merely to be put in “safety” but to be put into Christ, or Yeshua, which literally means, “I will put him in Jesus.” The false preachers are driven out, and the true saint is “set” or nestled into Christ. How settled? How will David be “put in” Jesus? Not as Aristotle imagined by the soul “apprehending” so that the eye that beholds an apple becomes likewise “red” in form (not in matter)—an “ontological” or “ontic” union, nor like a wax candle having God’s impressions placed into it, but by God putting his word in your ear and heart by the power of the Holy Spirit. That act by God “rising” to speak kills the old David and raises a new Jesus instead. This new Jesus-David is thus forever beyond the demands and threats of the law altogether. Even if a failed saint would come and claim that you must now live by the law, David will confidently dismiss him.
As the failed saints spoke their own proud words through puffed-up lips, God breathed the Holy Spirit into David (who speaks through his lips), who whispers with assurance to the true saint—but also to the saint himself (Christ). God speaks the word, the word is Jesus, and the Holy Spirit hears it—for you. To understand this amazing act, listen to who is breathing and speaking in this verse. The last phrase can be translated as “I will act confidently in him,” which continues with God as the subject. However, the third person is absolute and general, so that we say, “He will breathe (speak) confidently in—or even “to him” whom he has set in Jesus—united with Christ in his body, blood, spirit, and all that Jesus has.”
Thereupon, David can finally say—with utter confidence—what one of the most important words in all the Psalms (often mistranslated) says: “I believed (trusted), and therefore I have spoken” (Ps. 116:10). Paul quotes that phrase as the source of authority for his own sermons, “so we also believe and therefore speak” (2 Cor. 4:13). God says, “My word will make them speak with assurance, and so not frighten others with the law but assure them with the gospel.” Paul often uses this phrase from the Hebrew Psalm to explain why he speaks so “boldly” (parresia in Greek). That is, the true saint speaks publicly with force and assurance that cannot be expressed through typical, legal, prideful, and deceitful lips.
In the end, God’s Word rules because it sets us in Jesus, not the law
What other power do we have, or need, than God’s own Word by which we believe and which then emboldens us to preach his Word rather than our own? In the end, God’s Word rules because it sets us in Jesus, not the law. Failed saints always try to tell their congregations that unity with God comes only through Moses’ law. But putting others into Jesus is the power of a true saint, and this is the Word of God, called the Gospel. There is no other power of a saint—it alone is the power of salvation (Jesus) “to everyone that believes” (Rom. 1:16). So God is here promising David the two-fold help that sets him in Jesus: faith and Word. The faith is in the Word; the Word makes the faith. God sets us in Jesus (safety) and breathes bold preaching into us—while taking us out of the world of the law. Then God’s Word emboldens us to speak back to him and, “in him,” to others. God specifically ascribes this act of “setting in Jesus” to Jesus, and the latter’s preaching (instead of the law) is our participation in him. Don’t pass over the proper order: “being put in Jesus” precedes our “boldly speaking.” We first “believe and burn” and only then “teach and shine,” says Luther: I believed, then have spoken (Ps. 116:10).
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