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“Your lovingkindness and Your truth will continually preserve me” in Psalm 40 below describes the twin pillars of protection and/or recovery in times of distress – in this case the distress of evil done by a narcissist* / one with insolent pride. “Lovingkindness” is about emotional support. “Truth” is about understanding what is really going on and changing our actions to match the reality of what is happening.
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Of course, there are human / secular versions of these twin pillars. We can get a modest measure of emotional comfort (“lovingkindness”) from friends. And we can search out things which have been written on narcissism to learn traits and tactics of how narcissists operate – including a few suggestions on how to handle the situation (“truth”). But, the secular solutions can only take us so far. Only God can truly comfort us and give us the emotional support we need (see here, here, and here), And only God fully understands what’s going on inside the narcissist, and can give us the full understanding of how to deal with them.
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Ultimately it is God who is the true source of both lovingkindness and truth for us.
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Psalm 40:1-5 and 11-12
A Psalm of David.
40 I waited patiently for the Lord;
And He inclined to me and heard my cry.
2 He brought me up out of the pit of destruction, out of the miry clay,
And He set my feet upon a rock making my footsteps firm.
3 He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God;
Many will see and fear
And will trust in the Lord.4 How blessed is the man who has made the Lord his trust,
And has not turned to the proud, nor to those who lapse into falsehood.
5 Many, O Lord my God, are the wonders which You have done,
And Your thoughts toward us;
There is none to compare with You.
If I would declare and speak of them,
They would be too numerous to count.………..
11 You, O Lord, will not withhold Your compassion from me;
Your lovingkindness and Your truth will continually preserve me.
12 For evils beyond number have surrounded me;
My iniquities have overtaken me, so that I am not able to see;
They are more numerous than the hairs of my head,
And my heart has failed me.
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- “Narcissism” is the modern colloquial term for what the Bible calls “insolent pride”. See here.