"I will destroy anyone who secretly slanders his neighbor; I cannot tolerate anyone with haughty eyes or an arrogant heart. 6. My eyes favor the faithful of the land so that they may sit down with me. The one who follows the way of integrity may serve me."
In the first part of verse 5, David declares that he will not have anything to do with "anyone who secretly slanders his neighbor." David did not want anything to do with gossips. People who spread gossip do not mean anything well for anyone. David knew that when someone said something to him about someone else, he did not know whether or not it was true. The nature of gossip is that a tale about someone else can be true or false. Gossip destroys lives and it destroys churches; therefore, we should follow David's example. In the second part of verse 5, David declared that he would "not tolerate anyone with haughty eyes or an arrogant heart." David wanted to avoid people who were falsely proud and who were arrogant. Today we would refer to these people as "stuck up and overbearing." I don't think David was referring here to people who were confident. I think he was referring to people who thought too much of their own opinions, and who were arrogant in expressing them. i think that the warning for us in this verse is that we need to be aware of our attitudes in our relationships with people. Verse 6 reminds us that we should seek relationships with people who faithfully serve the Lord, and who are people of integrity. These are the people whose words one can trust. In other words, David did not need people around him who were unfaithful to their faith, and who were not people of integrity. We need to seek to be that kind of people. Surely, we want for people to trust our words, and to know that we are people of integrity. The word that we would use for these people is "trustworthy." We should seek to be trustworthy people on whom other people can truly depend. These verses are loaded with good advice for us, and we need to seriously seek to be the kind of people David referred to in them. (May their tribe increase.....) Bro. Joe
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AuthorDr. Joe Beauchamp is the author of this blog and website. Categories
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