Psalms 52:4 · World English Bible
Psalms 52:4 Meaning You Love All Devouring Words
You love all devouring words, you deceitful tongue.
What does Psalms 52:4 mean?
The horror here is the love. A man might lie under pressure, out of fear or weakness, and still hate what he is doing.
From the Clinical Psychology reading below.
Psalms 52:4 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Clinical Psychology
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Clinical Psychology
The horror here is the love. A man might lie under pressure, out of fear or weakness, and still hate what he is doing. What follows is worse. He has come to delight in the falsehood, to relish words that devour, to prefer deception for its own sake. Corruption reaches its depths when a person stops merely committing evil and begins to enjoy it.
Devouring words consume whatever they touch, the trust between people, the shared reality that language is supposed to build. To love them is to side with dissolution against order, to take pleasure in tearing the world apart with speech. A person can travel a long way down this road, from the first convenient lie to the moment deceit becomes his native tongue. When you begin to love the lie, you have made the destruction of meaning into your appetite, and little of you remains to save.
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Live Psalms 52:4 today
- Check what you clicked on this week. If you keep going back to things that make you feel contempt for people, that is an appetite forming, and you can starve it.
- When gossip in a group chat starts to feel genuinely enjoyable, say so to yourself and stop typing. The pleasure is the warning sign, not the permission.
- Under pressure, when the sharp dishonest answer would get you out of trouble and feel good doing it, take the duller honest one. You are choosing what you will want next time.
What have I started to enjoy that I would be uneasy about explaining out loud?
The same truth in other traditions
Buddhism · Dhammapada
Do not think lightly of evil, saying it will not touch you, for a water jar fills drop by drop. Small repeated choices become the whole of a person.
Stoicism · Epictetus
Every time you act on an impulse you feed it, so the second lie is easier than the first and the third easier still. Character is the sum of what you have practiced.
Cherokee teaching
Two wolves fight inside a person, and the one that wins is the one he feeds. Appetites are trained, not given.
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