Psalm 15 – “What It Takes To Live With God”

Translation & Sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church, Manhattan, KS, 3 Aug 2014

Translation:

1. A psalm belonging to David.

Yahweh, who will be a guest in Your tent?

Who will settle down on the mountain of Your holiness,

2. Walking perfectly,

and working righteousness,

and speaking truth in his heart?

3. He has not been a busybody with his tongue;

he has not done evil to his neighbor;

and he has not raised a reproach against his close [friend].

4. A reprobate is considered dishonorable in his eyes,

but the ones who respect Yahweh he considers honorable.

He vowed, and despite his loss he will not make a retraction.

5. He has not lent his money at interest,

and he has not accepted a bribe against an innocent man.

The one who does these will not be overthrown forever!

Intro:

After Psalm 14, which describes the typical ungodly man, comes Psalm 15, which describes the typical godly man.

Exegesis

1. A psalm belonging to David. Yahweh, who will be a guest in Your tent^{^[1]}? Who will settle down on the mountain of Your holiness?

· The old-fashioned word for “tent” is “tabernacle.”

o Since the Jewish people – and even David himself – started out as shepherds, it was not an odd thing for a person to live in a tent.

o In fact, that is what God had told the Israelites to build as a house of worship when they were wandering through the desert and living in tents themselves. That tent/tabernacle that Moses had built in the dessert had survived into David’s day when most Jews had settled down and built houses to live in.

o David, during his reign as king had conquered the Jebusite tribe and took their hill – Mount Moriah, or Mount Zion – as the place where he developed his capitol city – the city of Jerusalem.

o Also, during David’s reign, he got inspired to move the place of worship out of the old tent and into a permanent temple building in Jerusalem, so he bought some land from the nobleman Arunah and got cedar trees from Lebanon and set his son Solomon up to build that temple. I suspect that this Psalm arose out of David’s thinking during that time of planning for the transition from the tent to the temple.^{^[2]}

· This verse uses words like “abide,” “sojourn,” and “dwell” that are not in common use nowadays,

o but the idea of the first Hebrew verb, yagur means to be an overnight guest at a friend’s home.

o The second verb, yishkon, has to do with settling down and residing in a place.

o Maybe there is a progression of thought from just visiting the place of worship in Israel to actually living in heaven with God^{^[3]}.

o (Often the place of God in scripture is pictured as a high mountain, as in the visions of Isaiah and of John the Revelator.^{^[4]})

· “The unthinking many imagine it to be a very easy matter to approach the Most High, and when professedly engaged in his worship they have no questionings of heart as to their fitness for it,” but if we have a realistic understanding of the awesome holiness of God, this should be a striking question. “Where angels bow with veiled faces, how shall man be able to worship at all?” ~Spurgeon

· There is only one person who can give the answer to that question, and it is God Himself. Don’t take any human’s word for it. As the great Puritan Bible commentator Matthew Henry put it, “Those that would find the way to heaven must look up to God, must take direction from his word and beg direction from his Spirit.”

· But before we do that, I want to ask a question that I think helps frame the whole Psalm: “What would it take for you to get a bedroom in the White House?” Could you just saunter into the White House and roll out a sleeping bag there and expect to get away with spending the night with the President of the United States? No way! The security guards would never let you in the door with a sleeping bag.

o Either you have to fulfill the requirements to be President of the United States,

o Or someone who did fulfill the requirements of President could invite you to stay with him.

o Now, here’s a second question: “Once you moved in, what would happen if you began to disagree with everything the President did?”

· In a similar way, we would like to go to heaven where we can always be happy. That is reasonable for anyone who understands the horrors of hell and the joys of heaven.

So Psalm 15 tells us what the requirements are to qualify to get into heaven:

1. Live a perfect life (v2 the Hebrew word tamim translated “upright” or “blameless” in some versions literally means “perfect”)

2. Always do what is right (as defined by the law of God in the Bible)

3. Always speak the truth

4. Never say anything mean

5. Always be perfectly aligned with God’s opinions on right and wrong

6. Keep all your promises

7. Never put poor people at a disadvantage

8. Never do anything unjust.

According to the standards of this Psalm, it is not possible for any one of us to fulfill these requirements. They are too high to attain. None of us is able to do what it takes to get to heaven!

The good news is that Jesus, the Son of God, did fulfill all the requirements of what it takes to get to heaven, and He can invite us to stay with Him, and we accept that invitation by faith.
But once our place in heaven is secured, we are called upon to live a life that is consistent with the values which God Himself holds, and so we can’t ignore that list of what it takes to get into heaven. We need this list as a guideline to keep us trusting in Jesus to bring us to heaven, and we need this list to orient us so that we can get back on track with God’s values when we go off track.

So, let’s look at this list closely: Who can get in to God’s house, and what is the character of those who stay there?

2. Walking perfectly, working righteousness, and speaking truth in his heart

· In Psalm 5, we saw who would NOT be a guest in God’s house: v4b. “With You, evil לֹא יְגֻרְך will not dwell/ sojourn.”

· Psalm 15:2 tells us who will, using three participles^{^[5]}: “walking,” “working,” and “speaking.”

1. The first participle: “Walking uprightly/ blamelessly/with integrity/perfectly^{^[6]}”

a. Psalm 119:1 explains that this means obeying God’s laws in the Bible: “How blessed are those whose way is blameless, Who walk in the law of the LORD. (NASB)

b. Later the Proverbs and Psalms say that the one who walks perfectly will be “saved” (Whoever walks blamelessly will be saved, But he who is perverse in his ways will suddenly fall. Prov. 28:18, NKJV) and that trusting in God results in walking uprightly “…The LORD will give grace and glory; No good thing will He withhold From those who walk uprightly. O LORD of hosts, Blessed is the man who trusts in You! (Psalm 84:11-12, NKJV) Do you see that it’s either the impossible goal of us being perfectly obedient to His law, or the faith goal of trusting God to provide the righteousness of Christ to save us.

2. The Second participle is “Working righteousness”

a. We saw in Psalm 5:5 that God “hates the workers of iniquity.”

b. The kind of people He loves are those who work to bring about what is right in God’s eyes. This work includes what a man does for a living.

c. But once again, as we saw in Psalm 14, “there is no one righteous, not even one.” We can’t be righteous enough to dwell with God.

d. I can’t help but think of how Jesus fulfilled this requirement for us by living a righteous life and then suffering death and hell on the cross in order to take our punishment upon Himself and give to us His righteousness. That is the ultimate act of “working righteousness”! Jesus earned the right to dwell with God, and He alone can bring us in with Him.

3. And the third participle in v.2 is “speaking truth”

a. This is what God does (Neh. 9:13 "You [LORD] came down also on Mount Sinai, And spoke with them from heaven, And gave them just ordinances and true laws, Good statutes and commandments.” - NKJV)

b. and this is what prophets were to do (Jer. 23:28 "The prophet… who has My word, let him speak My word truthfully…" says the LORD. – cf. 2 Chron. 18:15),

c. and it is what God commanded His people to do: Zechariah 8:16-17 “These are the things you shall do: Speak each man the truth to his neighbor; Give judgment in your gates for truth, justice, and peace; Let none of you think evil in your heart against your neighbor; And do not love a false oath. For all these are things that I hate,' Says the LORD." (NKJV)

d. and yet it’s the sort of thing His people haven’t done so well: Jeremiah 9:5-6 “Everyone will deceive his neighbor, And will not speak the truth; They have taught their tongue to speak lies; They weary themselves to commit iniquity. Your dwelling place is in the midst of deceit; Through deceit they refuse to know Me," says the LORD. (NKJV)

e. As we saw earlier in Psalm 12:3, a “double heart” is not acceptable to God, only a “heart” that speaks “truth.”

f. Jesus, however, fulfilled this requirement perfectly:

i. In John 14:6 He claimed to be “the way, the truth, and the life,”

ii. and His disciple Peter claimed (1 Pet 2:2) that Jesus “committed no sin, nor was any deceit found in His mouth.” He never lied.

iii. And, in the book of Ephesians, the apostle Paul made much of Jesus and God being the source of truth:

iv. The truth is in Jesus: (Ephesians 4:21b)

v. “the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth,” (Eph. 5:9, NKJV)

g. So it is in Jesus that we find the truth, and as we look to Him to save us by His truth, we embrace the truth that He reveals to us in His Word and become people characterized by truth ourselves:

i. Therefore, putting away lying, "LET EACH ONE OF YOU SPEAK TRUTH WITH HIS NEIGHBOR," for we are members of one another. (Eph. 4:25, NKJV)

ii. Eph. 6:14 “Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness” (NKJV)

h. Charles Spurgeon wrote, “Saints not only desire to love and speak truth with their lips, but they seek to be true within; they will not lie even in the closet of their hearts, for God is there to listen; they scorn double meanings, evasions, equivocations, white lies, flatteries, and deceptions.”

i. And indeed when we see the vision of heaven in the book of Revelation, it is truth-tellers whom we find favored with a spot by God’s heavenly throne: “And in their mouth was found no deceit, for they are without fault before the throne of God.” (Rev. 14:5, NKJV)

Now, the three positives in v.2 are followed by three negatives in v.3 which are more specific still:

3. He has not been a busybody with his tongue; he has not done evil to his neighbor; and he has not raised a reproach against his close [friend].

1. “Doesn’t back-bite/slander/act like a busybody”

The Hebrew verb regel has a root meaning of using your “feet,”
and 23 of the 25 times this verb appears in the OT, it is translated “spy^{^[7]}” by the KJV, so I rendered it here as “be a busybody” – going here and there watching people and talking bad about them behind their backs.
He is not careless or negative in the way he talks about others. When a word is on his tongue, he weights it first to decide if it would edify before speaking it.^{^[8]}
James 3:8-10 “But no man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be so.” (NKJV)
Ought not, but that’s the way they are. Once again, we need a perfect man to earn that place in heaven for us and then make a way for us, and that is Jesus. Think about it. If you were omniscient like God is, you would have a boatload of juicy gossip to share because God knows everybody’s secrets, but God doesn’t say everything He knows. He is judicious with what he shares with us.
By the way, there is another party to the sin of gossip, and that is the one who listens to the gossiper: “in slander as well as robbery, the receiver is as bad as the thief,” wrote Charles Spurgeon, “If there were no gratified hearers of ill reports, there would be an end of the trade of spreading them.”
Matthew Henry wrote that the Christian is a “tender of his neighbour's reputation… especially careful not to injure his neighbour in his good name… [for, as the Apostle James wrote in Scripture] ‘If any man… bridles not his tongue, his religion is vain.’”

2. The second negative in v.3 is “He doesn’t do evil to his neighbor.”

When Jesus was asked to define what the Bible means by “neighbor” He told the story of the good Samaritan, which implied that a “neighbor” could be someone as different as someone from a different ethnicity who lived in another country, so I think we can safely apply this word “neighbor” to mean “anybody that we happen to have dealings with.”
Not to do them evil, is the same as not disobeying the Ten Commandments – at least the second half of them that relate to other people: “do not steal, do not violate somebody else’s wife or husband, do not say anything false about them, don’t murder, don’t even do things like depriving your parents of honor, or depriving your employees of a weekly day of rest.” To violate any of these commands is to do evil to your neighbor.
Once again, that is a test every one of us has failed. We do not deserve to dwell with God in heaven, but there is One who has never done evil to anyone, and that is Jesus.
Does that mean we should throw up our hands and quit trying to obey the Ten Commandments and just be mean to everybody? Of course not, the Ten Commandments remind us to keep trusting Jesus to save us from our violations of this law and they conform us to the values of the God we want to live with in heaven.

3. The third thing he does not do is “raise a reproach” or “cast a slur” on his friend – literally someone who is qarov “close” to him.

Also, if he is “attacked, he will refrain from retaliating” ~Cohen
An example of “reproach” was when Nabal accused David of being a terrorist when David was actually loyal to the government and was a faithful protector of Nabal’s property (1Sam. 25:39),
likewise, Job (19:5; 16:10) was “reproached” by his so-called friends when they said he had been wicked and deserved to lose his family and be stricken with disease.
Later on, Nehemiah mentioned “reproach” several times in recounting the history of the Jews who returned from exile in Babylon and reconstructed Jerusalem. The Samaritans and Ammonites kept reproaching these Jews by making fun of the walls they were building and falsely accusing them of insurrection before the governor (Neh. 4:4).
Now, avoiding reproach does not preclude redemptively confronting someone with their sin; but what is forbidden is to carelessly cast shame upon someone without seeking for their redemption from that shame.
Hmm, we could use a little more attention to that around election day! On second thought, I guess we need it every day.
Yes, we need Jesus to save us from all our careless, unedifying comments and to show us the way to love and speak.

Now, after three positive qualifications in v.2 and three negative qualifications in v.3, verse 4 begins with aligning ourselves with the way God thinks and judges:

4. A reprobate is considered dishonorable in his eyes, but the ones who respect Yahweh he considers honorable. He vowed, and despite his loss he will not make a retraction.

· The root meaning of the Hebrew word nimas translated “vile/ reprobate” is that of “rejection” or “throwing away.” I think it applies particularly to a person who has been excommunicated from the people of God due to his or her sin.

· Jeremiah 6:30 is the only other place in the Bible that this word occurs in the same participial form as it occurs here, and it explains that such a person is rejected by the people of God because they are so rebellious against God that God has rejected them and considered them good for nothing but hell.

· So the righteous man, by despising such a person, is actually aligning with God’s own attitude towards what is vile and reprobate, as He says in 1 Sam. 2:30b, “those who honor Me I will honor, and those who despise Me will be lightly esteemed” (NKJV).

· However, since our culture tends to look upon the act of despising another person as an act of irrational hatred or as a refusal to recognize even their value as a human being, I think it better to translate the word by saying that the one who gets to live with God “considers the reprobate to be dishonorable^{^[9]}.”

· So what does a reprobate look like? In our society, probably the closest we come to excommunication from the commonwealth of God’s people is the way we jail criminals for breaking the civil law. Yet, have you noticed that it is those very reprobates who are setting many of the standards for fashion in our culture today? – things like gangsta rap and ostentatious men’s jewelry. If we want to live with God, we should align ourselves with God’s own attitude toward illegal drug culture – it is not “cool.” Neither should prison culture be our example for how to talk.

· However, in a culture where civil law is much more removed from God’s law than it was in ancient Israel, the prisons are not the only places where the reprobates are. They’re also in Hollywood!

o We like to imitate the “cool” actions and words and clothing styles of movie stars, but when a movie star speaks profane words and lives an immoral life, we should consider it a dishonorable thing to imitate their mannerisms and styles rather than an attractive thing.

o I was particularly taken aback when I saw the behind-the-scenes footage of the making of The Hobbit movie a couple of years ago. In J.R.R. Tolkein’s book, Bilbo, the main character, is a fairly-respectable person, but the profanity of the actor who played Bilbo in the movie was one of the things that ruined the movie for me.

o It doesn’t matter to me, however, what your position on The Hobbit movies is, my point is that we need to consider people by the way God looks at them, not just by the way other people look at them, and we need to be careful to allow only those whose character is godly to influence us, because the one who gets to live with God considers those who are in rebellion against God to be dishonorable.

· On the flip side, the one who gets to live with God considers those who love God to be honorable.

o As I was growing up, there was a lady in the church named Caroline Montgomery. All I really remember about her was that she looked really old to me, but whenever my brother and I would see her at church, she would give us an M&M’s candy from her purse, so we made it a point to greet her after church whenever we could! When she passed away, a house dedicated to church hospitality was named in honor of her, so she must have done a lot of other good things, but I was too young to know about anything except her M&M’s. One other thing I remember is that one day, while I was sitting with my classmates at a lunchroom table at the Christian school my church ran, in walked Mrs. Montgomery, and she sat down alone at the next table over. I don’t know what she was doing there – maybe she was praying for us students – but one of the boys at my table looked at her and snickered and called her an “old bag.” I remember that upsetting me. She was a godly woman who should have been honored by the young men in the church, but I was too afraid of what those other boys thought of me to confront them.

o Jesus, on the other hand was a perfect judge of character. He knew when to lay into a Pharisee for hypocrisy and when to give an “attaboy” to a scribe who grasped the foundation of the law; when to chide Peter for lack of faith and when to be gentle in order to restore him.

o As we look to Jesus to save us from our foolish, idolatrous notions about what we want to honor and what we don’t want to honor, He will align our hearts more and more to His heart’s judgment of what is good and bad.

· Finally, v.4 tells us that the person who gets to live with God is a promise-keeper. He won‘t retract a vow. Whatever he swears he will do, he can be counted on to do, even if he discovers that it is to his disadvantage.

o He will not effect a change later on; he will not try to swap out with a different promise.

o He won’t say “read my lips; no new taxes” and then institute more taxes,

o or say, “until death do us part” and then divorce later over relationship issues.

o He won’t say, “I’ll be home for dinner” and then call back later saying he’s going to be late,

o she won’t cross her fingers behind her back and use it to rationalize deceiving her friend.

o The Bible clearly calls it a sin: Lev. 5:4-6 “…if a person swears, speaking thoughtlessly with his lips to do evil or to do good… he will be held accountable… he must confess that he has sinned… and bring a sin offering…”

· Once again, Jesus is our saviour. “Our blessed Surety swore to his own hurt, but how gloriously he stood to his suretiship! What a comfort to us that he changeth not.” ~Spurgeon

Faith is not something practiced only in church, though, it spills out into our everyday dealings in the marketplace, so two sins having to do with money are mentioned in verse 5.

5. He has not lent his money at interest, and he has not accepted a bribe against an innocent man. The one who does these will not be overthrown forever!

1. The first financial thing that the person who gets to live with God does not do, is he does not charge interest/usury.

2. The 2^nd financially-shady thing that the righteous does not do is that he does not take a bribe.

I don’t have time now to go into the details of these practices, but hope to address them in a follow-up sermon.

Finally, the psalmist concludes, “Whoever does [all] this will never be Moved/ shaken/ overthrown/ thrown off track” (cf. 10:6 & 13:4).

Do you want that kind of unshakeable confidence through all the vicissitudes of life’s ups and downs? Do you want that kind of assurance that when Jesus returns you will definitely go to live with God in heaven and not be thrown into the lake of fire?
The New Testament book of Hebrews tells us how to get it: “…God, determining to show more abundantly to the heirs of promise the immutability of His counsel, confirmed it by an oath, that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we might have strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before us. This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters the Presence behind the veil, where the forerunner has entered for us, even Jesus, having become High Priest forever...” (Hebrews 6:17-20, NKJV)
Jesus is the one who has entered into God’s presence on our behalf because He perfectly fulfilled all these things and was acceptable to God. He did this as a priest, taking on the role of one who helps others get right with God. The only way to get us right with God was for Jesus to suffer the punishment we deserve for our rebellion against God. God requires the death of anyone who breaks his law, so Jesus laid down His life when He was executed on the cross, and God the Father accepted Jesus’ death in place of our own, then He erased the sins we had done to offend Him, and credited us with all the righteousness of Jesus. All we do is flee to Him and trust that He has really saved us from eternal death and hell, and we will never be shaken.
“Every true living member of the church… is built upon a rock... The grace of God shall always be sufficient for him, to preserve him safe and blameless to the heavenly kingdom. Temptations shall not overcome him, troubles shall not overwhelm him, nothing shall rob him of his present peace nor his future bliss.” ~Matthew Henry

Comparison of Translations

Ps. 15	NAW	KJV	NKJV	ESV	NASB	NIV	LXX	Brenton
א מִזְמ֗וֹר לְדָ֫וִ֥ד יְ֭הֹוָה מִי־ יָג֣וּר בְּאָהֳלֶ֑ךָ מִֽי־יִ֝שְׁכֹּ֗ן בְּהַ֣ר קָדְשֶֽׁךָ׃	1. A psalm belonging to David. Yahweh, who will be a guest in Your tent^{^[10]}? Who will settle down on the mountain of Your holiness?	1 A Psalm of David. LORD, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill?	1 A Psalm of David. LORD, who may abide in Your tabernacle? Who may dwell in Your holy hill?	1 A Psalm of David. O LORD, who shall sojourn in your tent? Who shall dwell on your holy hill?	1 A Psalm of David. O LORD, who may abide in Your tent? Who may dwell on Your holy hill?	1 A psalm of David. LORD, who may dwell in your sanctuary? Who may live on your holy hill?	1 Ψαλμὸς τῷ Δαυιδ. Κύριε, τίς παροικήσει ἐν τῷ σκηνώματί σου [καὶ]^Syr τίς κατασκηνώσει ἐν τῷ ὄρει τῷ ἁγίῳ σου;	1 A Psalm of David. O Lord, who shall sojourn in thy tabernacle? and who shall dwell in thy holy mountain?
ב הוֹלֵ֣ךְ תָּ֭מִים וּפֹעֵ֥ל צֶ֑דֶק וְדֹבֵ֥ר אֱ֝מֶ֗ת בִּלְבָבֽוֹ׃	2. Walking perfectly, and working righteousness, and speaking truth in his heart	2 He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart.	2 He who walks uprightly, And works righteousness, And speaks the truth in his heart;	2 He who walks blamelessly and ~~does~~ what is right and speaks truth in his heart;	2 He who walks with integrity, and works righteousness, And speaks truth in his heart.	2 He whose walk is blameless and who ~~does~~ what is righteous, who speaks the truth ~~from~~ his heart	2 πορευόμενος ἄμωμος καὶ ἐργαζόμενος δικαιοσύνην, λαλῶν ἀλήθειαν ἐν καρδίᾳ αὐτοῦ,	2 He that walks blameless, and works righteousness, who speaks truth in his heart.
ג לֹֽא־רָגַ֨ל׀ עַל־לְשֹׁנ֗וֹ לֹא־עָשָׂ֣ה לְרֵעֵ֣הוּ רָעָ֑ה וְ֝חֶרְפָּ֗ה לֹא־נָשָׂ֥א עַל־קְרֹֽבוֹ׃	3. He has not been a busybody with his tongue; he has not done evil to his neighbor; and he has not raised a reproach against his close [friend].	3 He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to his neighbour, nor taketh up a reproach against his ~~neighbour~~.	3 He who does not backbite with his tongue, Nor does evil to his neighbor, Nor does he take up a reproach against his friend;	3 who does not slander with his tongue [and] does no evil to his neighbor, nor takes up a reproach against his friend;	3 He does not slander with his tongue, Nor does evil to his neighbor, Nor takes up a reproach against his friend;	3 and has no slander on his tongue, who does his neighbor no wrong and casts no slur on his fellowman,	3 ὃς οὐκ ἐδόλωσεν ἐν γλώσσῃ αὐτοῦ οὐ[δὲ]^Syr ἐποίησεν τῷ πλησίον αὐτοῦ κακὸν καὶ ὀνειδισμὸν οὐκ ἔλαβεν ἐπὶ τοὺς ἔγγιστα αὐτοῦ·	3 Who has not spoken craftily with is tongue, neither has done evil to his neighbour, nor taken up a reproach against them that dwelt nearest to him.
ד נִבְזֶ֤ה׀ בְּֽעֵ֘ינָ֤יו נִמְאָ֗ס וְאֶת־יִרְאֵ֣י יְהוָ֣ה יְכַבֵּ֑ד נִשְׁבַּ֥ע לְ֝הָרַ֗ע וְלֹ֣א יָמִֽר׃	4. A reprobate is considered dishonorable in his eyes, but the ones who respect Yahweh he considers honorable. He vowed to his loss and he will not make a retraction.	4 In whose eyes a vile person is contemned; but he honoureth them that fear the LORD. He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.	4 In whose eyes a vile person is despised, But he honors those who fear the LORD; He who swears to his [own] hurt and does not change;	4 in whose eyes a vile person is despised, but who honors those who fear the LORD; who swears to his [own] hurt and does not change;	4 In whose eyes a reprobate is despised, But who honors those who fear the LORD; He swears to his [own] hurt and does not change;	4 who X despises a vile man but honors those who fear the LORD, who ~~keeps~~ his X oath even when it hurts, X X	4 ἐξουδένωται ἐνώπιον αὐτοῦ πονηρευόμενος, τοὺς δὲ φοβουμένους κύριον δοξάζει· ὁ ὀμνύων τῷ ~~πλησίον^{^[11]}~~ αὐτοῦ καὶ οὐκ ἀθετῶν^{^[12]}·	4 In his sight an evil-worker is set at nought, but he honours them that fear the Lord. He swears to his ~~neighbour~~, and ~~disappoints him~~ not. [lt. does not displace it]
ה כַּסְפּ֤וֹ׀ לֹא־נָתַ֣ן בְּנֶשֶׁךְ֮ וְשֹׁ֥חַד עַל־נָקִ֗י לֹ֥א לָ֫קָ֥ח עֹֽשֵׂה־אֵ֑לֶּה לֹ֖א יִמּ֣וֹט לְעוֹלָֽם׃	5. He has not lent his money at interest, and he has not accepted a bribe against an innocent man. The one who does these will not be overthrown forever!	5 He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh reward against the innocent. He that doeth these things shall never be moved.	5 He who does not put out his money at usury, Nor does he take a bribe against the innocent. He who does these things shall never be moved.	5 who does not put out his money at interest and does not take a bribe against the innocent. He who does these things shall never be moved.	5 He does not put out his money at interest, Nor does he take a bribe against the innocent. He who does these things will never be shaken.	5 who lends his money without usury and does not accept a bribe against the innocent. He who does these things will never be shaken.	5 τὸ ἀργύριον αὐτοῦ οὐκ ἔδωκεν ἐπὶ τόκῳ καὶ δῶρα ἐπ᾿ ἀθῴοις οὐκ ἔλαβεν. ὁ ποιῶν ταῦτα οὐ σαλευθήσεται εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα.	5 He has not lent his money on usury, and has not received bribes against the innocent. He that does these things shall never be moved.

^{^[1]} Some Hebrew manuscripts (incl. Cairo) pluralize “tents.” But that doesn’t make much difference.

^{^[3]} Augustine and Henry thought so, saying that tents were resting places when at war, and the holy mountain is our eternal heavenly home, but Delitzsch denied it, saying the meaning was the same, “גּוּר and שָׁכַן which are usually distinguished from each other like παροικεῖν and κατοικεῖν in Hellenistic Greek, are alike in meaning in this instance.” Leuphold suggested that both phrases are figures of speech for being found acceptable when they worship God (cf. Boice), and G.Wilson said it was just the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but I agree with Henry who said that it is bigger than that and includes heavenly residence.

^{^[4]} So Spurgeon. Cohen concurs, quoting Hirsch, “‘Your holy mountain’ is a reference to the heights to which man ascends at the end of his days, the sanctuary of God in heaven.” Stott, however, located it in the Jerusalem temple mount.

^{^[5]} Leuphold noted that the participles express “enduring qualities” whereas the Perfect tense verbs in the following verses express “that which is habitual.” I am not opposed to this interpretation, but I doubt this is the only correct view which can be held on the grammar. I think that the participles express more general principles and the perfects express more particular examples.

^{^[6]} This phrase about “walking perfectly” only occurs twice before this Psalm in the Bible, first to describe Noah - Gen 6:9b. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time; Noah walked with God. – and then to express God’s expectations to Abraham. – Gen. 17:1 Now when Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram and said to him, "I am God Almighty; Walk before Me, and be blameless. (NASB)

^{^[7]} Or some other word similar to “spy.” 2 Sam. 19:27 is the only other location where the KJV translates this word as a form of slander.

^{^[8]} Delitzsch: “Instead of בַּלְשֹׁנֹו [“with his tongue”] we have עַל־לְּשֹׁנֹו [“upon/over his tongue”]… because a word lies upon the tongue ere it is uttered, the speaker brings it up as it were from within on to his tongue or lips” cf. Dahood and Craigie: “trip over the tongue,” Kraus: making “the rounds as a slanderer,” G.Wilson: “roams around on his tongue”

^{^[9]} cf. Leuphold “he despises the man who deserves to be rejected.” An alternate translation for this Hebrew phrase is, “He considers himself despised in his own eyes, but he esteems God-fearers.” Delitzsch preferred this, and thus it was printed in the Book of Common Prayer, but Calvin decidedly rejected it, as did Spurgeon, Stott, Leuphold (“a dubious translation… a contrast into the text that does not fit it... also overstate[s] the nature of true humility.”), and most other English Bible translators.

^{^[10]} Some Hebrew manuscripts (incl. Cairo) pluralize “tents.” But that doesn’t make much difference.

^{^[11]} The Vaticanus and Theodotian’s Greek translation followed the Hebrew more literally “to his hurt,” but Symmachus went wide with “swear to be other.”

^{^[12]} According to Field’s reconstruction of Origen’s Hexapla, multiple ancient Greek versions instead went with sphalle “shall not stumble”