The Home Built on a Sure Word

The Christian home stands sure only when it is built, not upon the shifting words of its own generation, but upon the pure and preserved words of God.

“The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times” (Psalm 12:6).

The Marker and the Fence

Two men argue over a fence line for eleven years. One says the old man set it wrong when he put it in. The other says it has been there longer than either of them, which he takes to settle the matter. They argue from the shed, from the ditch, from the water oak they both agree has always been there.

Then a surveyor comes out. He does not look at the fence. He does not look at the shed, or the oak, or the eleven years. He walks off into the weeds at the corner of the section, kicks around a while, and uncovers a brass disk set in a concrete post, stamped by a man neither of them ever met.

That ends it. Not because the surveyor is clever, but because the disk was in the ground before the argument started and had no interest in how it came out.

Every other landmark on that property could be moved. A fence can be shifted by a bulldozer or by agreement. A tree can be cut down. The marker is different in kind, not in degree: nobody standing there set it, and nobody standing there may move it. A boundary both parties can revise is not a boundary. It is a negotiation that has not finished yet.

A household works the same way. If right and wrong under a roof are whatever the people under that roof presently say they are, there is no standard in that house, only a running negotiation among people of unequal strength. I intend to show from the twelfth psalm that a family must have a word from outside itself, a word it did not mint and cannot recall, and that God has both purified that word and pledged Himself to keep it.

A Generation of Failing Words

David opens the psalm with a cry for help, and what alarmed him was not an army: “Help, LORD; for the godly man ceaseth; for the faithful fail from among the children of men” (Psalm 12:1). Reverence toward God goes first, reliability toward men second. David names them in that order.

How does he know? He listens. The rot showed at the mouth before it showed anywhere else: “They speak vanity every one with his neighbour: with flattering lips and with a double heart do they speak” (Psalm 12:2).

Their words were vanity, which is breath spent to no honest purpose. Their lips were flattering, which is praise aimed not at blessing a man but at working on him. And their heart was double, one thing on the tongue and another behind it, so that a hearer never knew which of the two he was getting.

Then David writes down what that generation actually believed: “With our tongue will we prevail; our lips are our own: who is lord over us?” (Psalm 12:4). My words are mine. Nobody stands above my speech to judge it, correct it, or hold me to it. It is a declaration of verbal independence, made by men who had discovered that language is a serviceable tool for getting and had stopped treating it as a bond for keeping.

Men who talk that way do not go unanswered. “The LORD shall cut off all flattering lips, and the tongue that speaketh proud things” (Psalm 12:3).

Now bring it under your own roof, because this is the air your family breathes. Where a promise made on Monday is quietly revised by Friday, where a vow means whatever the party to it currently wishes it to mean, the children learn something years before they can spell it: that words are property, and that the strong own more of them. Such a household is not free. It is standing on a floor that will not hold still.

A God Who Speaks for the Weak

Proud words wound, and lying speech crushes people who cannot answer back. God does not sit still for it: “For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise, saith the LORD; I will set him in safety from him that puffeth at him” (Psalm 12:5).

Note how He answers. Not with an argument. With four words in which He does something: “now will I arise.” The boasters had said, “our lips are our own.” They were right about that, and it did them no good.

And note whom He rises for. Not the loud and the puffed-up, but the poor, the sighing, the needy, the one too small to answer a bigger voice. Your house is full of exactly such people. The child who cannot argue back. The wife at the end of a long day. The parent whose voice has gone thin. In most houses the loudest voice wins, and everyone living there could tell you within a week of moving in whose voice it is. A home that fears God learns God’s own posture instead, and that posture is bent toward the weak. A man who uses his voice at home the way the boasters of verse 4 used theirs has taken his stand against the God of verse 5, whatever he believes about himself on Sunday.

Now see where the whole guarantee rests. Everything in verse 5 hangs on three words: “saith the LORD.” The needy man has nothing else holding him up. Take away the word and the shelter over your children goes with it.

A Pure Word That Is Kept For Ever

Here David sets God’s speech against man’s: “The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times” (Psalm 12:6). Man’s words were vanity. God’s are pure. Man spoke with a double heart. God’s words come out with nothing false left in them.

The figure is the silversmith. Silver comes out of the ground mixed with dross, and the fire drives the two apart. Run it through once and it improves. Run it through seven times and there is nothing left to take out.

Note what the verse does not say. It does not say the refining was begun, or that it went as far as it could go. It says purified seven times, and it leaves no room for an eighth firing. When a reviser offers to improve on what God has already refined, he does not purify; he pollutes. There has been no shortage of offers since 1881.

And look where the refining happened: “a furnace of earth.” Not in some sterile heaven untouched by human hands. God’s words came down here, through prophets and scribes, through pens and ink and skins, through the fingers of men, and they came out without a trace of dross. Their purity is not the fragile purity of a thing that never touched the ground. It is the purity of metal that went through the fire and lost nothing.

But pure words can still be lost, like a perfect statue smashed the morning after it was carved. So God does not stop at describing His words. He pledges Himself to keep them: “Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever” (Psalm 12:7). Two verbs, doubled for certainty, keep and preserve. One Keeper, addressed by name, “O LORD.” And a stretch of time with no gap in it, “from this generation for ever.”

Good men have read that “them” two ways. Many take it of the poor and needy of verse 5 rather than the words of verse 6, so that God is promising to preserve His persecuted people. That reading is not absurd, and God certainly does preserve His people; another psalm says of His saints, “they are preserved for ever” (Psalm 37:28). But the nearest plural noun is not the poor. It is “words,” named twice in the verse immediately before. Verse 5, moreover, speaks of the needy man in the singular, “I will set him in safety.” And the psalm has been about speech set against speech since its first line, so that handing verse 7 back to verse 5 breaks the argument at its highest point and leaves verse 6 a beautiful interruption with no consequence.

Even a man who insists on reading verse 7 of the godly poor has not escaped the preservation of the words, because the two stand or fall together. The poor man’s safety in verse 5 rested entirely on a “saith the LORD.” If the words could perish, the promise to the poor would perish with them. Either way you must have a kept Book, and a kept Book is exactly what God pledged, by name, for ever.

Do you doubt that He can keep it? Then look at Jehoiakim.

It was the ninth month, and “the king sat in the winterhouse in the ninth month: and there was a fire on the hearth burning before him” (Jeremiah 36:22). Baruch’s roll was read to him a few columns at a time. “And it came to pass, that when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth” (Jeremiah 36:23).

Note the comfort of it. The man was warm, indoors, in no danger from anybody, and he disposed of the word of God the way a man trims his nails, three or four leaves at a time, until it was gone. There is the failing generation of this psalm in a single evening: the proud tongue, the lips that would be their own, and a small knife.

Now read what it cost the word of God. “Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like words” (Jeremiah 36:32).

He got a winter evening’s warmth out of it. The book came back longer.

The centuries have not improved on his method. In 1526 the first printed English New Testaments were burned at Paul’s Cross in London at the direction of Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London. The chronicler Edward Hall reports that Tunstall also bought up the remaining stock in Antwerp in order to destroy it, and that the money went to Tyndale and paid for the next and better edition. I cannot vouch for that story beyond Hall’s telling of it. What is not in doubt is the outcome: Tyndale was strangled and burned at Vilvoorde in 1536, and by 1539 an English Bible lay open in the parish churches of England, much of it in his own words. “For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven” (Psalm 119:89).

A Kept Book Held by a Different People

This psalm can be made to promise a Christian household what it never promised, so the line has to be drawn where the Bible draws it.

Verse 5 is God’s answer to the oppression of the poor in Israel, and the full and public answer is not yet. It waits for the King to reign and the oppressor to be put down. The Body of Christ is nowhere promised covenant deliverance from earthly oppressors, and a father who reads verse 5 as a guarantee that no bigger voice will ever harm his household is building on an expectation the verse cannot carry. Our Lord said the opposite: “In the world ye shall have tribulation” (John 16:33). What is promised us is sufficiency in the trouble, not exemption from it: “My grace is sufficient for thee” (2 Corinthians 12:9). The weak in your house are still yours to shelter. What changes is not the duty but the ground of it: the shelter you owe them is the shelter of a man doing his office, not the shelter of a covenant made with another people.

The pledge of verse 7 is different. It is not a dispensational arrangement. It does not rest on Israel’s covenants or on ours; it rests on the character of the One who speaks, and He does not change. The Book He kept through Jehoiakim’s hearth and every fire since is the same Book in which the mystery was afterward made known, the mystery that “in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” (Ephesians 3:5). It is the same Book in which we are commanded to be workmen “rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).

Set those two commands side by side. A man cannot divide rightly what he cannot trust to have arrived whole. If he is unsure whether he holds what God said, he has nothing to divide; he is sorting rumors. So the distinctions a father must keep, between Israel and the Body, between the law and the grace of God, rest on the pledge of verse 7. A father who wavers there will waver everywhere else, because he has nothing fixed to reason from.

Build on What God Has Kept

Note where David ends. “The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted” (Psalm 12:8).

God never promised to keep His words in a world that would cherish them. He promised to keep them in this one, where the wicked walk on every side and the vilest men are lifted up. The promise was made for hard centuries and has known no other kind. That is the honest setting of your home. You are not raising children in a garden. You are raising them in the generation of that eighth verse, and David named the danger and the promise in the same short psalm.

Our Lord said that the man who hears His words and does them is like “a wise man, which built his house upon a rock” (Matthew 7:24), and when the rain descended and the floods came and the winds beat upon that house, it fell not. He said that to Jews under the offer of the kingdom. The audience has changed; the ground has not. What a house is set on still decides whether it stands.

So build there. Put the Book back on the table and read it aloud where the children can hear it. Refuse to let your household run on words that may be unsaid at will, beginning with your own. Keep the promises you make to your wife and to your children, including the small ones, because a family finds out from the small promises whether the large ones will hold. And teach your children a word that is not their own, that they did not mint and cannot recall, silver tried in a furnace of earth and purified seven times.

Let the generation boast that its lips are its own. Jehoiakim’s lips were his own, and so was the knife, and so was the fire.

The book came back longer than he burned it.

The fence in your house is wherever the family last agreed to put it. The marker is where God drove it, and nobody living under your roof may move it, yourself included. Your children will build on one or the other. They will not ask you which; they will watch you, and find out.

Thomas Irvin
Pastor, Victory Baptist Church, Coden, Alabama
www.VBCoden.com