Thus armed, the wicked is in fancied security. "His ways are firm"--_i.e._, he prospers--and, in the very madness of arrogance, he scoffs at God's judgments as too high up to be seen. His scoff is a truth, for how can eyes glued to earth see the solemn lights that move in the heavens? Purblind men say, We do not see them, and mean, They are not; but all that their speech proves is their own blindness. Defiant of God, he is truculent to men, and "snorts contempt at his enemies." "In his heart he says, I shall not be moved." The same words express the sane confidence of the devout soul and the foolish presumption of the man of the earth; but the one says, "because He is at my right hand," and the other trusts in himself. "To all generations I shall not be in adversity" (R.V.). The Hebrew is gnarled and obscure; and attempts to amend the text have been made (compare Cheyne, Grätz _in loc._), but needlessly. The confidence has become almost insane, and has lost sight altogether of the brevity of life. "His inward thought is that he shall continue for ever" (Psalm xlix.). "Pride stifles reason. The language of the heart cannot be translated into spoken words without seeming exaggeration" (Cheyne). He who can be so blind to facts as to find no God may well carry his blindness a step further and wink hard enough to see no death, or may live as if he did not. Following the disclosure of the inner springs of life in the secret thoughts comes, in vv. 7-10, the outcome of these in word and deed. When the wicked "lets the rank tongue blossom into speech," the product is affronts to God and maledictions, lies, mischiefs, for men. These stuff the mouth full, and lie under the tongue as sweet morsels for the perverted taste or as stored there, ready to be shot out. The deeds match the words. The vivid picture of a prowling lion seems to begin in ver. 8, though it is sometimes taken as the unmetaphorical description of the wicked man's crime. The stealthy couching of the beast of prey, hiding among the cover round the unwalled village or poorly sheltered fold, the eyes gleaming out of the darkness and steadfastly fixed on the victim with a baleful light in them, belong to the figure, which is abruptly changed in one clause (ver. 9 _c_) into that of a hunter with his net, and then is resumed and completed in ver. 10, where the R.V. is, on the whole, to be preferred--"He croucheth; he boweth down"--as resuming the figure at the point where it had been interrupted and finishing it in the next clause, with the helpless victim fallen into the grip of the strong claws. With great emphasis the picture is rounded off (ver. 11) with the repetition of the secret thought of God's forgetfulness, which underlies the cruel oppression.