February 3 Daily Devotional

Devotional:

And has no slander on his tongue. David, after having briefly set forth the virtues with which all who desire to have a place in the Church ought to be endued, now enumerates certain vices from which they ought to be free. In the first place, he tells them they must not be slanderers, or detractors; secondly, that they must restrain themselves from doing any thing mischievous and injurious to their neighbours; and, thirdly, that they must not aid in giving currency to calumnies and false reports.

David, then, sets down calumny and detraction as the first point of injustice by which our neighbours are injured. If a good name is a treasure, more precious than all the riches of the world (Prov. 22:1), no greater injury can be inflicted upon men than to wound their reputation. It is not, however, every injurious word which is here condemned; but the disease and lust of detraction, which stirs up malicious persons to spread abroad calumnies. At the same time, it cannot be doubted that the design of the Holy Spirit is to condemn all false and wicked accusations.

Who does his neighbor no wrong. By the word neighbour, the Psalmist means not only those with whom we enjoy familiar intercourse, and live on terms of intimate friendship, but all men, to whom we are bound by the ties of humanity and a common nature. He employs these terms to show more clearly the odiousness of what he condemns, and that the saints may have the greater abhorrence of all wrong dealing, since every man who hurts his neighbour violates the fundamental law of human society.

There is also here rebuked the vice of undue credulity, which, when any evil reports are spread against our neighbours, leads us either eagerly to listen to them, or at least, to receive them without sufficient reason; whereas we ought rather to use all means to suppress and trample them under foot. When any one is the bearer of invented falsehoods, those who reject them leave them, as it were, to fall to the ground; on the contrary, those who propagate and publish them from one person to another, are by an expressive form of speech, said to raise them up.

Welcome to a one-year devotional by John Calvin (1509-1564) on the Psalms. We are indebted to P & R Publishing for permission to use this copyrighted material from John Calvin: A Heart Aflame on the OPC Web site. In addition to viewing the daily devotional reading here, you may like to purchase a copy of the book A Heart Aflame from P & R Publishing or your local bookstore.

John Calvin, A Heart Aflame: Daily Readings from Calvin on the Psalms, is copyright © 1999 by P & R Publishing Company, all rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—except for brief quotations for the purpose of review or comment, without the prior permission of the publisher, P & R Publishing Company, P.O. Box 817, Phillipsburg, New Jersey 08865-0817.

Unless marked by an asterisk, italic Scripture excerpts preceding Calvin's exposition are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. copyright© 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society, used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House, all rights reserved. Phrases of Scripture within Calvin's exposition are based on an unidentified older translation, or in rare instances modified to conform to the NIV excerpts preceding Calvin's exposition.

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