NOTES for Psa 120:7
In various psalms, confidence is repeatedly expressed that God will preserve His faithful from every evil. At first glance these statements can seem excessively optimistic. Who does not know that in every age many troubles and sufferings usually fall to the lot of a righteous person? But such an answer appears quite unambiguous only at first glance.
What can be considered evil for a person? The answer depends entirely on the system of values and priorities by which this or that person is guided. What is good for one can quite well turn out to be evil for another. However, in the psalm the matter concerns not simply a person, but a person of God, a person who has set out on the path of righteousness. Here the question of good and evil is wholly determined by God's will, by the Torah, by the commandments.
And in principle it too is resolved differently than when a person lives according to the laws of this world. What can be considered the chief goal of the righteous person, what is his highest good? As for every person, for the righteous person the highest good would be the possibility of attaining the goal to which his chosen path leads him.
In this world it often happens that a person who has striven toward a goal and reached it then becomes disappointed in it, not finding in it what he sought. This cannot happen with the righteous person: he will not be disappointed in his goal. The goal, if we mean the path of righteousness taken as a whole, from beginning to end, is the Kingdom.
Before the coming of Christ it was still too early to speak of this, but after His coming it became clear: the path of every righteous person ends precisely there, in the Kingdom. And therefore the only evil for the righteous person will be what prevents him from walking the path of righteousness and attaining the Kingdom.
In that case, the confidence of the hymnographers that God will preserve His faithful from evil acquires a new meaning: the matter is that God will help them walk to the end of the path they have chosen and attain the goal that awaits them at the end. The troubles and hardships that await them on the path, in that case, will not in themselves be evil: like all life circumstances, they are only a kind of raw material, starting material, which can serve the one walking the path of righteousness either for benefit or for harm. This, of course, in no way justifies those who strive to make the righteous person's path difficult and complicate his life.
God promises His faithful that He will not abandon them and will do everything so that they reach the goal, finding at the end of the path the Kingdom and salvation.