May 11, 2022
God is a righteous judge, a God who displays his wrath every day. If he does not relent, he will sharpen his sword; he will bend and string his bow. He has prepared his deadly weapons; he makes ready his flaming arrows. Whoever is pregnant with evil conceives trouble and gives birth to disillusionment. Whoever digs a hole and scoops it out falls into the pit they have made. The trouble they cause recoils on them; their violence comes down on their own heads. I will give thanks to the Lord because of his righteousness; I will sing the praises of the name of the Lord Most High. (Psalm 7:11-17)
Psalm 7: another real good example of the deeply rooted faith of the Psalms that takes God and evil seriously and that finally rests in submission to God and his justice.
At the beginning of this Psalm, David brings his case before God, his refuge, by saying: “Arise, Lord, in your anger… Awake, my God; decree justice. Let the Lord judge the peoples. Vindicate me, Lord, according to my righteousness, according to my integrity, O Most High” (vv. 6-8)
But, David also leaves room for his own presumption of innocence to be overturned by the God who is Judge, by saying: “…if I have done this and there is guilt on my hands—if I have repaid my ally with evil or without cause have robbed my foe—then let my enemy pursue and overtake me…” (vv. 3-5).
And here we have a picture of how the faith of the Psalms understood God’s wrath and judgement to be enacted practically, especially through the final verses of the Psalm that I’ve included in our reading today.
God’s deadly weapons of wrath are displayed, says David, not in activity, but in passivity. God enacts his wrathful judgements by allowing the one who has dug a pit to fall into it, by allowing the trouble one has caused to recoil on them, and by allowing the violence one has committed to come down on their own heads. The fact that God does not save from these calamities of one’s own making, is the evidence that God has passed judgement.
I’ve been struck often in these last years by how many Biblical narratives in the Old Testament and the New portray this exact movement of God’s judgement: a judgement and wrath enacted not by the addition of punishment, but by the removal of presence. The narrative of the Ark of the Covenant we preached through from 1 Samuel earlier this year is an excellent example. The people wished to fight their battles on their own, and so God lets them. It doesn’t turn out well.
Our conception of hell and final judgement fits this picture too. In 2 Thessalonians 1, Paul writes that those who were shutting the Christians of Thessalonica out of society for their faith in Jesus would themselves be “shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might,” which would be their destruction. C.S. Lewis puts it the same way as he writes: “There are only two kids of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ’thy will be done.”
This is far from the picture of an angry, vengeful God that we catch on first blush when reading Psalm 7 or any number of other passages in the Bible. It is a God who sounds rather more just. A God who does not step in to keep troublesome people from receiving the trouble that they seek, but also a God who actively grants salvation and mercy for those who seek to find salvation and mercy in him. So like David, let us be exactly that sort of people.