Episode Details

Psalm 52: The Green Olive Tree and the Uprooted Man

The superscription places us in one of the ugliest moments in David's story: Doeg the Edomite, that petty informant, has betrayed the priests of Nob to Saul, and eighty-five innocent men are dead. David looks at the kind of man who builds his life on treachery and asks the essential question: "Why boastest thou thyself in mischief, O mighty man?" It is a question for every age. The tongue that devises destruction, the heart that loves evil more than good, the man who trusts in the abundance of his riches — these are not ancient curiosities but permanent features of the human landscape. And their end is always the same: God shall root them out of the land of the living. But the psalm does not end in judgment. It ends with an image so quiet it almost slips past: "I am like a green olive tree in the house of God." Not a cedar, not an oak — an olive tree, that most patient and long-suffering of plants, which produces its fruit slowly and lives for centuries. The contrast could not be sharper: the wicked man uprooted, the trusting man rooted and bearing fruit in God's own house.

00:00 The Tongue Like a Sharp Razor
01:00 A Green Olive Tree in God's House