[This is Part 2 of “Songs for the Road”, a 10-part series on honest prayer in the Psalms of Ascent.]

A Pilgrim Song From the Wrong Place

The first of the Psalms of Ascent never mentions Jerusalem. There is no road in it and no festival, and the city on the hill is nowhere in sight. A pilgrim song that begins at the starting line with a spring in its step would be easy to understand. This one begins in a place nobody would pick.

If you have ever wondered what Psalm 120 means by living in Meshech and Kedar, start with where the singer is standing, which is nowhere near the temple. He is among liars and a long way from home. Most of us have been there in some form. A story about you gets twisted at work. A rumor gets legs at church. You try to set things straight, and every attempt seems to make it worse.

Where We Left Off

As we saw in Part 1, the Psalms of Ascent were most likely sung by pilgrims on the road up to Jerusalem, and they sound like tired people praying honestly. Watch where this first song puts its trouble: in a prayer, ahead of any plan. This post walks through the psalm one section at a time and ends with a few ways to pray it. It will not hand you a plan for winning the argument, because Psalm 120 does not have one.

Psalm 120

In my distress I called to the LORD, and he answered me.
Deliver me, O LORD, from lying lips, from a deceitful tongue.
What shall be given to you, 
    and what more shall be done to you, you deceitful tongue?
A warrior’s sharp arrows, with glowing coals of the broom tree!
Woe to me, that I sojourn in Meshech, that I dwell among the tents of Kedar!
Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace.
I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war!

Heard Before It Was Fixed

The psalm opens with the ending. “In my distress I called to the LORD, and he answered me” (Ps. 120:1). There are two verbs, both in the past tense, and the second one is the answer. Before we hear a single complaint, we know that someone is listening.

The word for distress is worth a pause. The Hebrew, tsarah, is built on the idea of narrowness: straits, a tight place with no room to move, and it turns up more than twenty times in the Psalms.¹ The singer is in a tight spot, and the first thing he tells us is that he was heard.

Does “answered” mean the problem went away? Look at the end of the psalm. The singer is still living among people who want war (Psalm 120:6-7), so the answer in verse 1 is that he was heard, with the fixing still ahead. Whether he is remembering an earlier rescue or reporting a prayer he has just prayed, he starts from an answer, where most of us start from a question. Rosa Floyd, who blogged through this psalm in 2010, says it well: “Sometimes, the point of prayer is just to be heard by God.” She also ties the psalm to Romans 12 and 2 Thessalonians 1, two passages we will meet below (you can read her post here).

What Lying Lips Do

The first thing the singer asks for is deliverance, and the first thing he names is speech: “Deliver me, O LORD, from lying lips, from a deceitful tongue” (Ps. 120:2). When someone lies about you, there is nothing to swing at (you cannot arrest a rumor). We are never told what the lies were or who told them, and that silence lets the psalm travel, because lying lips turn up in every era. John Calvin thought the voice sounded like David’s, surrounded by flatterers in Saul’s court, though he would not insist on it, and the psalm itself names no one.²

Verses 3 and 4 are harder, so let’s unpack them a little: “What shall be given to you, and what more shall be done to you, you deceitful tongue? A warrior’s sharp arrows, with glowing coals of the broom tree!” (Ps. 120:3-4). Verse 4 answers verse 3. The liar is on the receiving end of a warrior’s arrows and the coals of the broom tree, a wood prized for charcoal that burns hot and holds its heat a long time.³ These are God’s weapons (compare Psalm 140:10, which prays for burning coals to fall on the wicked). Notice that the singer does nothing. His only move is to pray, and he leaves the liar’s future in the hands of God.

Waiting for that verdict is the hard part. Paul tells the Thessalonians that “God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you” (2 Thess. 1:6), and he places that repayment at the day the Lord Jesus is revealed (2 Thessalonians 1:7).

What Psalm 120 Means by Meshech and Kedar

Verse 5 is where the song gets its address: “Woe to me, that I sojourn in Meshech, that I dwell among the tents of Kedar!” (Ps. 120:5). Meshech was a people somewhere in Asia Minor, far to the north. Kedar was a desert people descended from Ishmael, out toward Arabia (Genesis 10:2; 25:13). Nobody lives in both places. The names most likely stand for the same thing: a long way from home, among people who are not your people.⁴

A sojourner is a resident alien, someone who lives in a place without belonging to it. The New Testament uses the same picture for the church, calling believers “sojourners and exiles” (1 Pet. 2:11), so the singer’s situation is not a one-off. Then comes the clock: “Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace” (Ps. 120:6). That is what a person says after months of it. The season has outstayed its welcome, and many of us can name our own Meshech: a workplace, or a family table where it is safer to keep quiet.

I Am for Peace, They Are for War

The psalm ends with its hardest line: “I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war!” (Ps. 120:7). The Hebrew is blunter than our English. It reads, literally, “I, peace,” and John Gill, citing the Jewish commentator Aben Ezra, renders it “wholly peace.”⁵ The singer leans entirely toward peace, and the more he talks, the more they fight.

It is tempting to hear a boast in that line. Read it at the pace of a tired person and it sounds more like helplessness: he keeps trying, and it keeps backfiring. Nothing in the psalm says he is sinless. When we reach Psalm 130 in Part 8, the same road will produce the question “who could stand?” (Ps. 130:3). Paul puts the other half of the picture in front of us: “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Rom. 12:18). That sentence has two escape hatches built in, “if possible” and “so far as it depends on you,” because Paul knows some people will be for war no matter what. The next verse says what to do with the rest: “never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God” (Rom. 12:19). In Psalm 120 the singer does exactly that: he speaks peace as far as it depends on him, and he hands verses 3 and 4 to God.

Why do we rehearse the argument instead of praying it? Because the heart would rather be its own defender. When someone lies about us, the heart reaches for the oldest plan there is: clear our own names, on our own terms, and make sure the other side knows it. Repentance here is a change of mind about who is going to defend us, and a turn toward resting on the One who hears (Psalm 120:1).

The One Who Was Lied About

There is one Person this psalm fits perfectly. Jesus stood before the council, and “many bore false witness against him” (Mark 14:56). When He was reviled, “he did not revile in return” (1 Pet. 2:23). Paul says that Jesus “himself is our peace” (Eph. 2:14) and that “he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near” (Eph. 2:17). He was the one truly for peace, and He got war, starting with lying lips and ending on a cross.

The far-off part matters. Meshech and Kedar are far-off places, and Paul says that is where we once were: “far off” until we were “brought near by the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:13). Christ went out to the far country for people who were at war with God, and that includes us (Romans 5:10). So we pray this psalm as people who were once in Meshech ourselves, and whose Peace walked into the lying-lips country to bring us out.

Application Points

• Name the trouble in plain nouns. The psalm does exactly that: lying lips, a deceitful tongue, Meshech, Kedar. Take five minutes to write down who and what, as specifically as the psalmist does, and pray that version. A vague prayer about “things at work” is harder to hand over than a prayer about one named situation.
• Pray it instead of rehearsing it. Most of us have run the argument in our heads more times than we have prayed about it. The next time you catch yourself replaying a conversation, finish it by turning it into a prayer shaped like verse 2: “LORD, deliver me from . . . .” Christ is at the right hand of God, interceding for us (Romans 8:34), so you can bring the unedited version.
• Say what is yours to say, and leave the rest. Romans 12:18-19 draws the line. Speak the truth once, calmly, to the person who needs to hear it, as far as it depends on you. Then skip the second email and the group-text correction. The verdict on the liar, and the timing of it, belong to God (Psalm 120:3-4).
• Let peace come to you before you try to make it. Because Jesus “himself is our peace” (Eph. 2:14), we make peace from a peace already made. That takes away the pressure that makes peacemaking exhausting. You can offer the first word of peace without needing the other person’s answer to settle who you are.

Reflection Questions

• Where do you feel like you are living in Meshech right now, and how long has it felt like “too long”?
• What have you told other people about that trouble that you have not yet told God?

Where the Road Goes Next

Psalm 120 ends with the singer still in Meshech, no closer to home. He has said what he actually feels, he has been heard, and he has given the verdict to someone else. So what Psalm 120 means for the road ahead comes down to this: the first step is a cry, and the cry has already been heard.

The next song picks up the walk. Having cried out from the wrong place, the singer lifts his eyes and asks a question: “From where does my help come?” (Ps. 121:1). As we saw in Part 1, Jesus walks ahead of His followers on this road, so the question is asked in good company. In Part 3 we will see how the road answers.

1. Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon, entry for tsarah (Strong’s H6869), which glosses the word “straits, distress, trouble” and notes its frequent use in the Psalms. ↩︎
2. John Calvin, Commentary on the Psalms, on Psalm 120 and Psalm 120:1. ↩︎
3. Calvin, Commentary on the Psalms, on Psalm 120:4, reads the arrows and coals as images of the slander itself, burning “for a long time.” John Gill, Exposition of the Entire Bible, on Psalm 120:4, mentions that view but prefers the punishment of the evil tongue from the LORD, and notes that juniper coals were said to last a year, citing Jerome and Isidore. The NIV supplies “he will punish you” in verse 4. ↩︎
4. NET Bible notes and the Reformation Study Bible note on Psalm 120:5 place Meshech in Asia Minor and Kedar in the Arabian desert and allow that the names are used figuratively. Calvin treats Meshech as the proper name of a barbarous people. ↩︎
5. NET Bible note on Psalm 120:7 (Hebrew “I, peace”); John Gill, Exposition of the Entire Bible, on Psalm 120:7, citing Aben Ezra.
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