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God makes us pure saints by planting us back in the earth we imagined we needed to escape.
6 The speaking of God is pure: silver proved by the fire, tested in the earth, purified seven times.
Now we have an actual antithesis (comparison and contrast) between the previous “words of men” by which the Saints have failed, depriving their congregations of mercy and truth, and, on the other hand, the words of God that never fail. God’s words are “silver tried, proved, and purified.” Nothing else can “put you in Jesus.” To the world, God’s promises look pitiful. They appear as the dregs and off-scourings of silver making. The church’s failed saints say, “Who cares about God’s keys, his forgiveness, or his assurance of his favor? Those will not pay the bills or give anyone status. Moreover, those words from God will not move any of my congregation to do anything!” But to David, those particular words that set him into Jesus are life itself—proved as “money” (meaning that you can be sure of paying off what they promise). Those words of God are heated in the crucible of life—the words are not sitting on a shelf in heaven.
The way they set you in Jesus is by entering this dirty and caustic life—and yet they make you come out of the preaching utterly assured. Seven is the perfect number, showing that the words are usable and pay off in times of trouble. That, in turn, means that these words of God are not just the written words of Scripture, but the spoken words: the speaking (Latin eloquia, Greek logia, or Hebrew amar, omer, imra, emra) that we call the living, preached word that lands in the ear of its hearers with the “for you” that sets you in Jesus. Luther concluded that the voice that is then speaking to us by God is the soul of the Word.
When you are put into Jesus, you are not taken out of this earth but into it.
For David, the most fantastic part of this word from God is that he uses mere men (who are failed saints themselves) to deliver it: “God speaks by man,” as Luther says, “even without the scriptures.” Yet it is truly God who speaks by a man, through a man, to a man, as when Christ told his disciples to say: “This is My Body, given for you” in persona Christi. When the world does not like this word or its approach to false preachers, the enemies of God within the church seek to swallow you up and destroy you—but remember, when they seek to kill you, your true and only deliverance will be this spoken Word of God that rings out against the dross of a man’s own speech. The wicked saints pretend to teach the Word of God, but they have only the scum. This is true of both the word of God’s law—which the scum always finds some way around (like saying that “thou shalt not kill” only refers to someone using a knife)—and, mainly, of the gospel, which the dross of society attempts to cover by adding some “and” or “but” to God’s complete word that ends the law. When failed saints add their two cents, it is not salvation but dross and scum. They say, “God may forgive you, but fasting really impresses him even more.” Don’t fall for deceitful teachers who end up teaching their own righteousness and stand before you as examples to follow. As Luther says, their “mos” is “mors” (Latin, meaning their method of preaching is death, not Jesus).
Most translators add “fire” to the Hebrew phrase “melted silver” and then say “tested out of the earth.” They then claim that purity and perfection mean taking the Christian out of this world and up a ladder into heaven, as if purity comes only by escaping the body and this world. But the point David is making here is the opposite—the phrase “tested in the earth” puts “earth” (or, as Reuchlin and other Hebraists say, refers to a physical vessel of earth—a furnace) in the dative. That means the purpose of testing or purifying you is not to take you out of this earth (as the monks and philosophers always say) but to keep you in or put you into the earth. When you are put into Jesus, you are not taken out of this earth but into it. The saved man, according to the Hebrew preposition, is put into the earth (made a true Mensch or Adam), not separated from this world, as the monks like to say. This means the preaching of a true church that saves you is through a man, to a man (as Johann Hamann wanted to remind us).
Also, that silver “in the vein,” or under the earth, is no good anywhere unless it is refined. Then it does not leave the world but becomes productive in it. David’s Christians—that is, preachers of God’s word—are this furnace, or earthen vessel, carrying the proof, testing, or fire in their mouths that proves or perfects many, in the same way Christ told his disciples that they were salt (Mark 9:5). Furnaces are nothing if they have lost their fire, as salt is nothing if it loses its saltiness. This fire and salt are not some power or mineral in the preacher but are “God himself speaking his pure words” (eloquia, Taher). Those pure words are always the offense of the cross. Yet because no man ever wants to say these words or hear them, the church overflows with “vain talkers,” or Paul’s Galatian “fake preachers,” or David’s failed Saints.
No power or mechanism of your own will achieve your true manhood, or “happiness” in life (as Aristotle liked to say).
Yet the only word that does anything is a mortifying, tribulation-word that tries and suffers us in the furnace: you have not done what the law has demanded. To be placed in Jesus is to be put into this furnace. In that tribulation, fire, or purification, Luther observed, we learn a fantastic thing; our salvation is “not so much we that suffer, as the Word in us.” No power or mechanism of your own will achieve your true manhood, or “happiness” in life (as Aristotle liked to say). Instead, our eternal life with God comes from this all-pure Word that makes our subsequently all-pure faith.
God makes us pure saints by planting us back in the earth we imagined we needed to escape. In that earthly furnace, the lead of false preachers is initially mixed (per mixta) in the church (of many sinners and saints together) in a way that finally oxidizes out the dross, leaving nothing but silver, sevenfold, the purest kind. This is David’s little symbolic, analogical coloring of the cold, hard truth: God is using true preachers to give his words that will initially take all works away from you; then his suffering word will give all glory to faith. In the end, you will be nothing but faith, yet that faith is not in itself or in nothing. It is in Christ alone, apart from the law. Thus, you are set in Jesus. That faith that is Jesus-set will believe only and always God’s words (silver), and not the lies of failed saints (dross).
Perhaps it is true that we can finally add what the best church Fathers have done with this verse—to point out that love is compared to gold while faith is compared to silver. Gold/love never saves, silver/faith alone saves—yet it is from silver faith that gold love finally arrives (though that we save for future Psalms).
7 Thou, O Lord, will keep them; thou shalt guard us from this generation forever
This penultimate verse culminates in a prayer that both asks and trusts that God will keep the words (“keep them” is a feminine noun referring to God’s words) by preserving the faithful preachers (the noun is masculine, as used here). If “them” should ever have referred to the “failed saints,” then the meaning of “keeping and guarding” would be—keep them in jail! But David’s prayer correctly recognizes that we have no power to preserve true preaching or to keep our victorious saints. That power is entirely God’s own. So we teach our children to pray to be rid of failed saints and to get good ones in the Lord’s Prayer (and in our Small Catechism to that Prayer) when we say, “give us this day our daily bread.” That prayer includes not only bread for the belly but also true preaching for the ear. Pray, because trusting the daily newspaper for the news or even your careful studies of Scripture for keeping you pure in doctrine will not give you the faith you need.
8 the wicked walk round about: elevating the evilest sons of Adam.
Failed saints and false preachers within the church don’t have to promote their own cause; people everywhere praise and empower them to teach their wicked, evil filth. Paul says, “their god is their belly,” and Psalm 5 says, “their throat is an open sepulcher.” It is hard to find a good preacher and keep him. It is rarely God’s son who is elevated in the church, but the evil sons of Adam. So it is that David ends by drawing this well-known picture (circumnavigating failed saints holding up other evils, Sons of Adam—especially in their presumed power to ordain by the power of the bishop’s hand) within his prayer. How many of us are surrounded by failed saints in a church of cards! They are not just malcontents or pathetic losers in life, but products of (and then producers for) evil from one generation to another. One failed saint lays hands on the next—going back to Adam, whose “original” sin was precisely unfaith that would not believe God’s word. The only way for God to get us out of this mess is not to remove us from the earth, but to send his faithful preachers—silver proved by the furnace—whose words will preserve us from this generation forever and put us each in Jesus. Give us such preachers, O Lord.
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