Deliver me not over unto the souls of them that afflict me, for unjust witnesses are risen up against me, and injustice hath lied to itself.(Psalm 26, Sept)
We read this Psalm during the Royal Hours for Theophany, which I just finished. In this Psalm, David is crying out for help for deliverance from his enemies, all the while expressing confidence that he will be delivered.
The Psalm asks for protection against outer enemies, but whenever I hear such things as this verse, I think of my greatest enemy: myself. “Injustice” should be thought of as all kinds of unrighteousness. The biblical meaning of justice is to be good in all things, as God is, and not a narrow understanding of rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior.
In another place in the psalms (which, by the way, it is my fervent hope that each of you says every week (why? – please answer in the comments) it says that “All men are liars”. This latter verse means, as one holy father I read recently teaches, that when expounding about the Godhead and all Christian mysteries, we cannot say the exact truth because we are too small to know it. However, I tie these two verses together and lament that I am a liar, and I tell most of my lies to myself. A just man tells the truth, because he lives according to the truth.
I know a little something about human nature too, and boldly proclaim that all of you are liars too, and you lie to yourself. This is because of our pride, which we allow to blind us to the truth about ourselves. How wonderful it is to even admit that we are liars, at least we can be truthful in this and therefore begin to be truth tellers about ourselves and therefore learn about He who is true.
