2 God was looking down from heaven on the children of men, to see if there were any who had wisdom, searching after God.
And he came face to face with Asa and said to him, Give ear to me, Asa and all Judah and Benjamin: the Lord is with you while you are with him; if your heart's desire is for him, he will be near you, but if you give him up, he will give you up.
But still there is some good in you, for you have put away the wood pillars out of the land, and have given your heart to the worship of God.
The fear of the Lord is the best part of wisdom: all those who keep his laws are wise: his praise is eternal.
Make search for the Lord while he is there, make prayer to him while he is near:
And you, Solomon my son, get knowledge of the God of your father, and be his servant with a true heart and with a strong desire, for the Lord is the searcher of all hearts, and has knowledge of all the designs of men's thoughts; if you make search for him, he will be near you; but if you are turned away from him, he will give you up for ever.
And he said to man, Truly the fear of the Lord is wisdom, and to keep from evil is the way to knowledge.
The Lord is in his holy Temple, the Lord's seat is in heaven; his eyes are watching and testing the children of men.
The Lord is looking down from heaven; he sees all the sons of men; From his house he keeps watch on all who are living on the earth;
For my eyes are on all their ways: there is no cover for them from my face, and their evil-doing is not kept secret from my eyes.
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Commentary on Psalms 53 Matthew Henry Commentary
Psalm 53
God speaks once, yea, twice, and it were well if man would even then perceive it; God, in this psalm, speaks twice, for this is the same almost verbatim with the fourteenth psalm. The scope of it is to convince us of our sins, to set us a blushing and trembling because of them; and this is what we are with so much difficulty brought to that there is need of line upon line to this purport. The word, as a convincing word, is compared to a hammer, the strokes whereof must be frequently repeated. God, by the psalmist here,
Some little variation there is between Ps. 14 and this, but none considerable, only between v. 5, 6, there, and v. 5 here; some expressions there used are here left out, concerning the shame which the wicked put upon God's people, and instead of that, is here foretold the shame which God would put upon the wicked, which alteration, with some others, he made by divine direction when he delivered it the second time to the chief musician. In singing it we ought to lament the corruption of the human nature, and the wretched degeneracy of the world we live in, yet rejoicing in hope of the great salvation.
To the chief musician upon Mahalath, Maschil. A psalm of David.
Psa 53:1-6
This psalm was opened before, and therefore we shall here only observe, in short, some things concerning sin, in order to the increasing of our sorrow for it and hatred of it.