"A Psalm of David.
I will sing of steadfast love and justice;
to you, O Lord, I will make music.
2 I will ponder the way that is blameless.
Oh when will you come to me?
I will walk with integrity of heart
within my house;
3 I will not set before my eyes
anything that is worthless.
I hate the work of those who fall away;
it shall not cling to me.
4 A perverse heart shall be far from me;
I will know nothing of evil.
5 Whoever slanders his neighbour secretly
I will destroy.
Whoever has a haughty look and an arrogant heart
I will not endure.
6 I will look with favour on the faithful in the land,
that they may dwell with me;
he who walks in the way that is blameless
shall minister to me.
7 No one who practises deceit
shall dwell in my house;
no one who utters lies
shall continue before my eyes.
8 Morning by morning I will destroy
all the wicked in the land,
cutting off all the evildoers
from the city of the Lord."
Psalm 101
The one effective safeguard in all this against any possible Pharisaism is that this standard, which the Psalmist sets, is for himself. He is not saying 'I thank God that I am not as other men', and what he goes on to say in 5-8 is not application of his own standards to others in a self-righteous way but rather an expression of his concern for 'a clean administration, honest from top to bottom' (Kidner). It is simply that he recognises that before he has any right to expect society to be clean, he himself must be true and clean. It may well be, if the commentators are right in thinking that David's longing to see the Ark returning to Jerusalem lies behind the thought of the Psalm, that his experience recorded in 1 Chronicles 13 and 15 provides an important commentary on what he says in the Psalm. For his first attempt to bring back the Ark to Jerusalem ended in failure and divine displeasure, because the way in which that attempt was made betrayed elements of carelessness and superficiality, and a neglect of the clear instructions of the divine law. In 1 Chronicles 15 things were very different, as the record of David's detailed instructions to the priests and Levites, that the operation was to take place in accordance with the teaching of the law of God, makes plain. For here was a man who had put himself under the discipline of the Word of God. It is this that we must read into the words in 2-4: here is a man whose conscience is captive to the Word of God, and who commits himself to living wholly by that Word. That is the significance of the first part of the Psalm.