Psalm 119:150 – Conspiracy!

My enemies have formed a conspiracy against me,
they are far from your instruction!

Who is it that tends to get angry at what you are doing?

That may seem like a question with negative assumptions, but you can learn quite a lot about someone by looking at the nature of their enemies. You can learn a great deal about yourself by looking for the folks who don’t like you.

The problem with this approach is that it is often difficult to know just what it is about your actions that is making enemies. I have been aware of cases in which I made an enemy, not because of what I really intended to accomplish, but because of the abrasive way I went about accomplishing that. It would be easy for me to assume that the person(s) who became annoyed hated the good things I was trying to do, and thus became my enemies. In fact, it’s frequently the case that the way I’m going about trying to do good is stirring up opposition.

Psalm 119 doesn’t identify David as the author, but David is often viewed as “the Psalmist.” David himself could be an abrasive character and make suboptimal decisions in how he went about things. Read the story of Absalom’s rebellion and you’ll see any number of cases in which David managed to rub people the wrong way, but wasn’t really aiming at something good.

I’ve seen pastors come into a church with some very good ideas, and then see a wall of opposition built up against them because they are stepping on beloved traditions of that church, often without good preparation for necessary changes. “Machine-gunning the sacred cows,” is how one pastor of my acquaintance referred to this practice.

Our verse presents a very clear distinction. We have bad guys who are coming after the writer. These bad guys are far from God’s law. Good guys and bad guys. Clear boundary lines. If you’re a good guy you know who to support.

In reality, we rarely run into such a situation. We are rarely proposing perfect plans and our opponents are rarely opposing them because they are terrible people who know nothing of God’s law. Rather, things get tangled up in the gray area.

And this makes our verse all that much more important. We should examine our activities to see if we are, in fact, working in accordance with God’s laws. We should also look carefully at our enemies, as horrible as they may appear to us, and ask if they are really the kind of reprobates we imagine them to be.

If we can recognize the good and the bad in ourselves and others, we can often find much better ways to work together and accomplish God’s work.

How can you make your approach less abrasive today?

(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)