Who can stay in God’s place? God’s holy place? God’s perfect place?
Certainly not us flawed, far-from-perfect people!
Yet if nothing unholy or flawed is allowed in God’s presence, damned are we all.
It is relieving to know that this Powerful Perfect Pure Personal-Being accommodates us after all and lets us stay where we have no right to. I know that I can. Indeed, I can. Because this Fabulous Fascinating Flawless Father keeps the promise to be ever near those who call, even though they have no right to call, even though they keep missing the mark and never quite qualify as “blameless”- except in those circumstances when others want to misplace blame onto them.
They’ll “speak the truth from their heart” if they let God help them; but alas how often we fail to do that. They will not “slander with the tongue” if they only remember the damage done to them when they’re the objects or subjects of undeserved slander. They won’t do evil to their friends if they consider how hurtful it is to have evil done to them. In other words, not slandering or inflicting evil is about doing to others what we would have them do to us.
Taking up a reproach against one’s neighbour?
This reminds me of a day when a ‘mutual friend’ came to my house trying to bad-talk my neighbour (by which I mean the person living next door). It’s not that my neighbour was or is flawless. Nah!
But I had to be wise. I opened my front door and showed our ‘mutual friend’ my neighbour’s house and asked her who she thought I was more likely to call on if sudden illness befell me that night and I needed immediate help. Yes, I asked her- who would I be calling- you or him? The answer was obvious. So, I instructed her against proceeding with maligning my naughty neighbour in my company in the house next door to his!
Thank God, she understood me only too well. And my relief is that I never had to repeat this counsel. If you give in to gossiping and maligning, it’s going to catch up with you and your gossip partners will find you time and time again when there the subject of other people’s meanness is the matter for rumination. All this while, the gossiping parties only get worse, never better, not an inch closer to staying in God’s place.
For God’s sake, please, don’t be fooled. Don’t take a bribe of any sort, even a little “gossip pleasure” against the guilty, let alone the innocent. Of course, I am not saying that you do not call a spade a spade because it seems noble when “in our eyes the wicked are despised” (verse 40). But please let it be that we “speak the truth from the heart “(Verse 2) rather than gloat over the errors of the godless, because we want to stay in God; we want to “dwell in God’s holy hill” and that won’t happen if we despise the sinner more than we despise the sin. You see, there’s that sin-streak in each one of us. Right?