Psalm 17 is a particularly confident psalm, showing the feelings of someone who knows the Lord, who knows the ways of the Lord and who also knows the ups and downs of their own relationship with the Lord. In this psalm a lot is claimed, a lot is recognised, and a lot is scorned.

It is also unusually well written, having phrases which catch the essence of spiritual realities, phrases like ‘Keep me as the apple of your eye’, ‘They (the wicked) have closed up their fat hearts’ and ‘I shall be satisfied when I awake in your likeness.’ It is important for us, reading very assured statements on the part of the speaker, not to see these as arrogance or egotism, but rather as conviction and affirmation of someone who will follow the Lord.

The psalm begins, like many do, with a cry -- an appeal to the Lord. ‘Hear a just cause, O Lord, attend to my cry’. It continues, ‘Give ear to my prayer which is not from deceitful lips.’ The rest of the psalm is this prayer, and its sincerity is always apparent.

The spiritual meaning of this – as with all prayer to the Lord – is far more to become aware of states and needs in ourselves, rather than to ask for things or even advise the Lord what he should be doing. This psalm is a perfect model of that understanding and outcome of prayer. (See Apocalypse Explained 695.5)

Verse 2 has the expression, ‘Let your eyes look on the things that are upright.’ This speaks to the idea that in us, there will always be a mix of what is self-seeking and what is true to the Lord. This is fact, even when our commitment to the Lord and the Word has been our constant practice for many years. Even the angels continue to go through changes in their states. (Divine Providence 223.2)

This continues on into the next verse, where the speaker several times declares that the Lord will find no evil in his heart, even, note, ‘in the night’ -- which is during temptation. The Lord sees everything as it really is; he sees our faults and self-deception, but he knows the true state of our heart and its deepest desire beyond all the changing states. (New Jerusalem 57)

This section ends with a statement ‘I have purposed that my mouth shall not transgress.’ Spiritually, this reminds us that our commitment to the Lord is not only to be felt and thought; it must be continually lived out in our words and actions. (Arcana Caelestia 6987)

From verse 4 to verse 12, the focus is on the works of men, as verse 4 says. It seems to be a matter of two things; first, to be kept firmly purposeful in following the Lord, and secondly, to be kept safe from the destructive attacks of the wicked. Spiritually, this is not so much to do with other people as with our own lower nature and self-interest, with which evil spirits will have a field day given the least opportunity.

Verse 5 beautifully says, ‘Uphold my steps in your paths’, and verse 8 says, ‘Keep me as the apple of your eye’ which wonderfully carry the truth that each person is looked on by the Lord as if they were the only person there is. But even our sincere wish to follow the Lord is of infinite joy to the Lord. (Arcana Caelestia 33)

The psalm ends with the momentous words, “As for me, I will see your face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I awake in your likeness.”

6987. 'Who makes man's mouth' means utterance. This is clear from the meaning of 'mouth' as voice, dealt with above in 6985; and since it means voice it means utterance. What the specific meaning of 'mouth' is can be recognized only from correspondence. The mouth including the lips corresponds to inward speech that belongs to thought; and a person's thought is active or passive. Active thought is the thought a person engages in when he is speaking and may be called vocal thought; but passive thought is the thought a person engages in when he is not speaking. The nature of the difference between the two becomes clear to anyone who stops to reflect. 'Man's mouth' means active or vocal thought, and so means utterance.

[2] As regards active thought, meant by 'mouth', it should be recognized that such thought is also in its own kind of way a form of speaking, and that through the activity of this speech it activates the physical organs that correspond to it. Verbal expressions are seemingly present in thought, but that is an illusion; solely the meaning embodied in speech is present there. Man can have scarcely any idea of the nature of such meaning, for it is the speech that his spirit possesses, which is a universal kind of speech such as spirits in the next life employ. When this kind of speech passes into corresponding physical organs it gives rise to speech consisting of words, which is exceedingly different from the thought that produces it. That very great difference is plainly evident from the consideration that a person is able to envisage in a minute what will take him a long time to speak or write about. It would be different if that thought consisted of words such as speech in the mouth consists of. By virtue of the correspondence between speech intrinsically within thought and speech uttered by the mouth a person knows how to talk in the universal language as soon as he comes after death among spirits, and so can talk to any spirits, no matter what language they may have spoken in the world; and by the same virtue, as he talks to them there he is scarcely aware that he is not talking the same way he did in the world. Yet the words of which their speech consists are not words such as a person employs when he is in the body. Rather they are the ideas that have composed his thought, and one idea contains very much detail within it. Spirits are therefore able to declare in an instant what man can scarcely express in half an hour; and there is still more contained in the same idea, such as cannot find expression in physical speech.

[3] Yet angels in heaven speak in a different way from spirits. Angels in heaven possess speech consisting of intellectual concepts, which are called immaterial ideas by philosophers, whereas spirits possess speech consisting of mental pictures, which are called material ideas. Consequently one idea belonging to angels' thought contains very much that spirits cannot fully describe even with very many lines of thought, in addition to much that they cannot begin to express. But when a spirit becomes an angel he uses angelic speech, just as a person uses spirits' speech when he becomes a spirit after death, and for a similar reason. From all this one may now see what active thought is - that it is the speech a person's spirit possesses.