Psalm 5 is essentially a prayer for guidance.

The message is encapsulated in verse 8: “Lead me, O Lord, in thy righteousness, because of mine enemies; make thy way straight before my face.”

When we follow the Lord’s guidance, we can develop a clearer understanding of those things that come from the Lord, and those things that are in opposition to His design. It's important for us to discern the nature of what comes into our hearts and minds.

In the first verse, we hear the words: “consider my meditation.” Meditation in a biblical sense has a different meaning from the way it is understood today. Rather than the modern idea of simple awareness, this kind of meditation is more a reflection and exploration in the mind. This whole psalm is like such a meditation. We, too, must make use of this practice in our spiritual lives; this kind of mental examination helps us understand which deeper desires our thoughts stem from (see Swedenborg’s work, Divine Providence 61).

The speaker says in verse 3 that he will pray to the Lord in the morning. The morning is significant because it is a time of awakening. It represents a new spiritual state of personal renewal, based on the Lord, His love, His truth, and His presence with us.

Verses 4 through 6 list many things that are not acceptable to the Lord: wickedness, evil, boastful arrogance, iniquity, falsity and deceit. Many of these attributes feed our inclinations toward self-righteousness; these influences are at play whenever we try to convince others (and ourselves) that we always know what is right, and that we are superior to others. They are the ingredients of a hellish life.

A list such as this one helps us to recognize what is contrary to the Lord’s life in us, so that we may be genuine followers of the Lord and the Word. This process involves a great deal of self-examination, and indeed, meditation of our own thoughts and spiritual states.

Verse 7 follows with a promise to come and worship in the house of the Lord, and verse 8 is a prayer to be led by the Lord in His righteousness “because of my enemies.” These enemies are really our internal battles; “a man’s foes are those of his own household” (see Swedenborg’s work, Arcana Caelestia 8282 ).

Verses 9 and 10 move on to recognize the self-destructive path of those caught up in evil. While all of us have our hereditary evils and a lower nature before regeneration, it is intentional evil, as the psalm declares, that can lead us in the direction of hell (see Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell 532[3]).

The psalm comes to an end with an affirmation: let all those who trust in the Lord rejoice! For He blesses us when we live in righteousness, and protects us as with a shield. This simply reminds us to have confidence in our commitment to the Lord, and to trust that He works for our eternal life more than we will ever know (Divine Providence 46).

46. In Everything That It Does, the Lord's Divine Providence Is Focusing on What Is Infinite and Eternal

It is widely recognized in Christian circles that God is infinite and eternal. In fact, it says in the doctrine of the Trinity named after Athanasius that God the Father is infinite, eternal, and omnipotent, as are God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, but that there are not three infinite, eternal, and omnipotent beings, but only one. It follows from this that since God is infinite and eternal, only what is infinite and eternal can be attributed to him.

However, we finite beings cannot grasp what anything infinite and eternal is--and yet at the same time we can. We cannot grasp it because the finite cannot contain the infinite; and we can grasp it because there are abstract notions that enable us to see that certain things do exist even though we cannot see what their nature is.

There are such notions about the infinite--for example, that because God is infinite, or Divinity is infinite, God is reality itself or essence itself and substance itself, love itself and wisdom itself, what is good itself and what is true itself, the Only--in fact, the essential Human. Then too, if we say that the infinite is the all, then infinite wisdom is omniscience and infinite power is omnipotence.

[2] These concepts, though, will get lost in the dim depths of our thought and perhaps even fall from incomprehension into denial unless we can rid them of elements that our thought gets from the material world, particularly those two essential features of the material world called space and time. These can only limit our concepts and make abstract concepts seem like nothing at all. However, if we can rid ourselves of them the way angels do, then the infinite can be grasped by means of the things I have just listed. This leads to a grasp of the fact that we ourselves are real because we have been created by the infinite God who is the All, that we are finite substances because we have been created by the infinite God who is substance itself, that we are wisdom because we have been created by the infinite God who is wisdom itself, and so on. For if the infinite God were not the All, substance itself, and wisdom itself, we would not be real, or would simply be nothing, or would be only ideas of existence, according to those dreamers called idealists.

[3] Material presented in the work Divine Love and Wisdom may serve to show that the divine essence is love and wisdom (Divine Love and Wisdom 28-39), that divine love and wisdom are substance itself and form itself and that divine love and wisdom are substance and form in and of themselves, and are therefore wholly "itself" and unique (Divine Love and Wisdom 40-46), and that God created the universe and everything in it not from nothing but from himself (Divine Love and Wisdom 282-284). It follows from this that everything that has been created, especially ourselves and the love and wisdom within us, is real, and is not just an image of reality.

If God were not infinite, then, nothing finite would exist; if the Infinite were not the All, there would not be anything; and if God had not created everything from himself, there would be nothing real, nothing at all. In short, we are because God is.