Psalms 62:3
How long will ye imagine mischief against a man? ye shall be slain all of you: as a bowing wall shall ye be, and as a tottering fence. How long will ye imagine mischief against a man? ye shall be slain all of you: as a bowing wall shall ye be, and as a tottering fence.
Psalm 62:3 belongs to a prophetic psalm declaring the judgment to come upon the wicked who have merited punishment, and its words are not a prayer driven by personal feeling against them. The bowing wall and tottering fence portray religious profession that does not rest securely on Christ as the solid rock, lacking underlying godliness based on him. Such a religious life is frail, ill-built and leaning worldward, with cracks appearing in daily life that reveal a faulty foundation.
Such an unstable profession is sure to come down in the first stiff gale of temptation. Even if the flimsy structure holds until the dying hour, the surge of death and the final storm with beating floods will tumble the edifice of presumption and falsehood into irretrievable ruin with no repair in eternity.
The same image shows that the card-built houses of carnal merriment built on constant alcohol use must surely come to an end, with the bowing wall lying level with the dust and the tottering fence coming down to the ground. This exposes as fatal error the thought that steady drinking does no injury because it never causes staggering. The image of the bowing wall and tottering fence is also applied to the weak, unsteady gait of a man with feeble knees, serving as a moral picture that prayerful dependence on God gives strength to stand straight before other people.