The insolent smear me with falsehood,
but with my whole heart I keep your precepts.
Meditation on God’s word in all its various forms is useful when you feel that others are smearing you with lies. That is the most direct lesson to learn from this verse.
But there is a benefit to meditating on the verse and then writing what has come to me–I can talk about a variety of things. And what my mind turned to was how one can be insolent (arrogant is also a possible translation) and smear people.
You see, we tend to read scripture as one of the good people. This verse is written from the perspective of someone wronged, but steadily sticking to the right path himself. But how often are we in that sort of a “pure” position.
I’m thinking especially of our behavior in the church community, but this sort of problem can occur when we speak about people in our families, our communities, and even of celebrities. We tend to delight in gossip. We tend to repeat it.
Any time you pass on negative information you’ve heard about a person to someone who doesn’t need to know it, you are harming that person. Now in the secular world, we consider “truth” to be an adequate excuse for the most part. If it’s true, we think repetition is justified.
But in the church community, gossip is listed as a sin. And unless you’re following an appropriate path to reconciliation, or engaging in a loving effort to help someone, repetition is hurtful. Matthew 18:15-20 provides a procedure that starts with talking to the person who has offended first, and ends with talking to the whole church. All too often, the entire church has heard before any effort is made to talk directly to the person concerned.
When we do this, we’re part of the first half of this verse, not part of the second. We need sometimes to read these verses in reverse.
Now I’m going to add something. Gossip is not a major temptation of mine. This is not a claim to righteousness of my own. It’s just that the ultimate bad guy knows what to tempt me with. What I’m tempted to do is to listen politely, not comment, and then leave.
But let me suggest to myself and to all of you that listening to gossip in a polite way can itself be smearing someone’s character. You encourage the gossiper. You pollute your own mind with bad things about that other person. You may unconsciously poison your own relationship.
You can’t stop all lies. There are too many of them. But whenever you can, you need to explicitly say no. When someone says, “Have you heard about what ____ did?” You need to say, ‘No, and I don’t want to.”
What hurtful speech my you cut off today?
(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)
