Psalms 38:12

They also that seek after my life lay snares for me.

When friends are slow in helping, foes are most busy

Our friends should blush, that the wicked are more instant against us, than they are to maintain us. But it is no wonder, since by nature men are more bent and prone to evil than to do good things. By constraint they do good, but willingly they commit evil.

1. Their profit and pastime was to undo me. The order is here inverted; for meditating properly precedeth speaking, and speaking doing; but in the words of the text it is otherways; their malice extendeth to the highest degree, they will not be contented to banish him, prison him, and revile him, nothing can satisfy their thirst but his blood. This is the envy of the serpent against the seed of the woman. The devil is a murderer, and so are his children.

2. The means which they used against him: their purposes, their words, and their actions. They meditated, they consulted; for wrongs done rashly are less dangerous, and more excusable, out of a spleen and choler; but advised evils are more fearful, and more hardly to be eschewed, laying the grounds and pillars of their proceedings upon some sure hold. But we have one advantage, that God is present in all their counsels, and cannot only reveal them, but also disappoint them.

3. Finally, those their meditations and communications, which proceeded from cruel hearts, burst forth in actions which were mixed with craft, and so much the more perilous, for they are said to lay snares for him: taking the metaphor from hunters, fowlers or fishers, whose trade is only to catch birds, beasts and fishes by their engines and policy, seeing hardly they can be taken otherways. (A. Symson.)