John Calvin Commentary Psalms 12:3-4

"Jehovah will cut off all flattering lips, The tongue that speaketh great things; Who have said, With our tongue will we prevail; Our lips are our own: who is lord over us?" — Psalms 12:3-4 (ASV)

To his complaint in the preceding verse, he now adds a plea for judgment, that God would cut off deceitful tongues. It is uncertain whether he wishes that deceitful men might be utterly destroyed, or only that the means of doing mischief might be taken from them; but the scope of the passage leads us rather to adopt the first sense, and to view David as desiring that God, by some means or other, would remove that plague out of the way.

Since he makes no mention of malice, while he denounces their poisonous tongues so vehemently, we therefore conclude that he had suffered much more injury from the latter than from the former; and certainly falsehood and slanders are more deadly than swords and all other kinds of weapons. From the second clause of the third verse, it appears more clearly what kind of flatterers were mentioned in the preceding verse: The tongue that speaketh great or proud things. Some flatter in a servile and excessively flattering manner, declaring that they are ready to do and suffer anything they possibly can for our benefit. But David here speaks of another kind of flatterers: namely, those who, in flattering, proudly boast of what they will accomplish, and mingle shameless audacity and threats with their deceitful arts. He does not, therefore, speak of the crowd of lowly, conceited persons among the common people who make a trade of flattering so they may live at other people’s expense; but he directs his plea for judgment against the powerful slanderers of the court to which he was attached, who not only insinuated themselves by gentle arts, but also lied deliberately in boasting of themselves, and in the arrogant and haughty speech with which they overwhelmed the poor and unsuspecting.

The Psalmist confirms this more fully in the following verse: Who have said, we will be strengthened by our tongues. Those who think that, even in the falsehood to which they are addicted, they have enough strength to accomplish their purposes and to protect themselves must possess great authority.

It is the utmost height of wickedness for people to break out into such presumption that they do not hesitate to overthrow all law and equity by their arrogant and boasting language; for, in doing this, it is as if they openly declared war against God himself. Some read, we will strengthen our tongues. This reading is acceptable as far as the meaning is concerned, but it scarcely agrees with the rules of grammar, because the letter ל, lamed, is added.

Moreover, the more suitable meaning is this: that the wicked persons spoken of, being armed with their tongues, go beyond all bounds and think they can accomplish whatever they please by this means; just as this group of men so distorts everything with their slanders that they would almost cover the sun itself with darkness.