Someone has been saying things about me that are not true and people believe them. I want to go and set the record straight, hard. What do I do with this?

“In my distress I cried unto the LORD, and he heard me. Deliver my soul, O LORD, from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue.”

This is the first of the Songs of Ascents, sung by pilgrims setting out for Jerusalem. It opens not with praise but with a complaint about lying lips and a deceitful tongue. Whoever wrote it was living somewhere hostile, far from home, watching his reputation be dismantled by people he could not answer. The community kept the song. Being lied about is treated as a real grief to bring to God, not a small thing to rise above.

“Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously:”

Peter writes to believers slandered as troublemakers across Asia Minor, and points them to Christ before Pilate: reviled and not reviling back, suffering and not threatening, committing himself to the one who judges rightly. That last phrase carries the weight. His silence was not passivity or denial, it was handing the case to a judge he trusted. Not answering every lie requires believing that somebody else is keeping the record.