Psalm 10 "Terrify No More" Scott Hoezee

Few psalms have been read more the last several weeks than Psalm 10. If you attended our prayer service the evening of September 11, then you know I opened that service by reading this psalm. Since then it has been quoted and read at a number of services, and it is not difficult to figure out why. As one person said to me, "It seems like Psalm 10 was written with the last couple of weeks in mind!" Indeed, the imagery of villains lying in wait near a village (or a city) to ambush the innocent and the picture of arrogant men with mouths full of curses fits recent events with uncanny eeriness (not to mention the last verse of the psalm with its phrase about preventing people from further acts of terror!).

The unhappy fact of the matter is that Psalm 10 has fit eerily well into any number of periods in history. Ours is just the most recent example of a time when evil people have burst onto the scene with deadly results for the innocent. But because it fits this present moment and because these words reflect the way many people are talking these days, it seemed appropriate that we spend some time as a congregation reflecting not just on Psalm 10 but on the larger issues it introduces. How are we to read a psalm like this as Christians? Are these words that we may properly take upon our own lips, or does the gospel's interaction with such a psalm lead us in a rather different direction?

To begin, let's examine Psalm 10 as an example of the "imprecatory Psalms." Scholars believe that originally Psalms 9 and 10 were a single poem (in fact, in the Septuagint or Greek translation of the Old Testament, these two are lumped together as the 9^th psalm). Because not only do both psalms deal with the same subject in pretty much the same way, the two together also form an acrostic, with the first word of every other verse beginning with a subsequent letter of the Hebrew alphabet, from A to Z.

Both psalms are an earnest call for God to bring his justice to bear on the wicked. No punches are pulled here. As C.S. Lewis once said, opening up Psalm 10 is like throwing open the door of an oven that is set to 500 degrees--you immediately get hit full in the face with the heat of the psalmist's righteous fury! But Psalm 10 is actually mild compared to some other psalms, the most famous of which is the startling conclusion of Psalm 137, where the psalmist pronounces a beatitude on those who dash Babylonian babies against rocks!

As we have noted before, the psalmists were not shy about speaking their minds to God. In the psalms, these poets of old did not hesitate to accuse God of a failure to care properly for his people. They didn't hold back in all-but ordering God to get moving to make things better. And where wicked people were concerned, there was rarely a call for God to forgive them or lead them to repentance. No, most such psalms pronounce a straightforward malediction or curse on Israel's enemies.

The cause of all this fury and righteous anger is often the exploitation of the innocent. Throughout the Old Testament God himself makes repeatedly clear that there is a special place in the divine heart for the anawim, which in Hebrew refers to "the poor." The specific anawim most often mentioned in the Bible are widows, orphans, strangers, and the poor--all such people were, back then, vulnerable. It wasn't difficult to take advantage of an orphan or swindle a widow, and foreigners in the land could also perhaps be cheated with impunity in that sometimes they fell between the cracks in the legal system. God makes clear that he despises those who exploit the weak, and so the psalmists who shared God's perspective reacted to real-life examples of just such abuse with vast oceans of indignation.

This is particularly clear in Psalm 10. Nowhere is God asked to act because the threatened folks are said to be holy, or elect, or so religious as to warrant God's intervention. Instead we find a cluster of words to describe the people in need: they are victims, they are helpless, innocent, weak, fatherless, oppressed. These are people who are not in a position to defend themselves, which is precisely why the wicked go after them. Like the terrorists who rammed jets into buildings three weeks ago, so here: the wicked people in question are not trying to take on an army or a well-armed cadre of police officers. They are not "picking on somebody their own size," but are instead taking the cowardly way out by savaging the unsuspecting, the unarmed, the people who are merely going about their daily business without a clue in the world that death awaits them around the next corner. And it is precisely this aspect of the evildoers that evokes the psalmist's gravest anger. God simply must do something to defend the defenseless.

In commenting on psalms like Psalm 10, C.S. Lewis once noted that in his reading of documents from the ancient world, seldom if ever did he run across poetry as angry as can be found in the Book of Psalms. But how can that be, Lewis wondered. Why would supposedly holy people like the ancient Israelites end up expressing more hostility than pagan people from other nations? Wouldn't you expect it to be the other way around? Lewis' answer to his own question is intriguing: Lewis said that perhaps this is an example that "the higher up, the more in danger." That is, the closer you are to the heart of an all-loving, righteous, and totally just God, the more this world's injustices will upset you. Maybe the Israelites got upset more often about the state of this world precisely because they knew better than most the way things are supposed to be.

Similarly, if I attended an orchestra concert with an expert in music, why is it that the expert would find much more in the performance to be critical of than I would? Because I know so little about music whereas the person who has studied it his whole life would be far more aware of how a given piece of music should be played. So also with the psalms: maybe these writers got angry more often because they were more in sync with God's heart than those who didn't regard God in the first place.

That may well explain much. But you perhaps noticed a moment ago that Lewis did not say "the higher up, the more sensitive" but instead "the higher up, the more in danger." Living on the divine heights does make you more sensitive to injustice and evil, but the higher you climb, the greater the danger of falling, too. Anger, including what we might define as "righteous anger," is always dangerous. (Indeed, in English if you just add the letter "d" to the word "anger," you get "danger!") Anger is an unstable compound with a low flashpoint--it can and often does go wrong. That's why biblically speaking it is never enough to say, "But I have a right to be angry, you know," even as you wring someone's neck. Even if the source of indignation is righteous, that does not sanctify all subsequent actions that result from that anger. Having righteous anger is the mark of a moral person. Prudent channeling of that anger is the mark of a wise, Spirit-filled person.

And so also for us: there are great dangers that attend reading psalms like this. Before we finish this morning, we will want to ponder those dangers a bit more. But before we get to that, it may well be time to note another danger that arises from not just Psalm 10 but the Old Testament generally. In this psalm you perhaps noticed verse 16's line about God's getting rid of other "nations" from the midst of God's land, which is presumably Israel. Just such political language pervades the Old Testament.

As most of us remember, at that particular stage in God's larger plan to save the world, he had started his work with a small group of covenant people known as the Israelites. So it is not surprising to find frequent mention in the psalms and elsewhere of other "nations," usually seeing them as the enemies of Israel. It is also not uncommon, therefore, to find a good deal of discussion about the various things Israel must do to serve God--practices that did not always apply to other nations in quite the same way since those nations had not been set aside the way Israel had been. There was, in short, a big difference between Israel and the rest of the world. Israel was supposed to be distinct and, if it was, Israel would receive things from God that other nations might not receive.

But a main line of Christian theology for the last 2,000 years has held that the political particulars of all that have vanished. Now we live in the age of the Church. Now we are first and foremost citizens of God's kingdom through baptism, in whose waters other distinctions drown and go away. We live in the power of the Holy Spirit, whose first act on the day of Pentecost was pulling together people from all nations.

That has been a main line of theological interpretation, yet it is eclipsed again and again, especially in this country. Listen to how some preachers talk or read the letters to the editor in various newspapers and you can regularly detect the naive belief that wherever you read the word "Israel" in the Old Testament, you could just as well substitute the word "America." The United States, it seems, is the land of divine destiny from which all other countries are viewed. This is the thinking that undergirds Jerry Falwell and it also explains why it is so often suggested that America alone can warrant, or alternatively can forfeit, God's special protection in pretty much the same way that was once true for ancient Israel.

But that's just wrong. Does that mean God has no concern for the United States? No, God is concerned. Does it mean we are wrong to pray for God's blessing on this nation? No, we should pray for our country and its leaders. But what this does mean is that as Christians, we begin our reflections on this world from a kingdom perspective. We have a unity in Christ with Christians from all other nations. That kingdom solidarity should transcend all other identities.

So when we read about "the nations" in the Old Testament, we need to see our country as lumped together with all other nations, not as some reference point from which all other nations are judged. Since this country is our home, and insofar as we have reasons to believe it has good things going for it, it is only natural that we say or sing what we have heard scores of times in recent weeks: God bless America. There is nothing wrong with that phrase as far as it goes. But if as Christians we cannot pray also, "God bless France. God bless Russia. God bless Australia. God bless South Africa"--if we cannot wish God's blessings on also other nations, then there may well be something wrong with our core kingdom perspective.

But suppose we do manage to maintain that perspective. What about the more basic issues surrounding the angry malediction we find in psalms like this one? Is it ever right for us to feel or pray the kinds of sentiments conveyed in Psalm 10 and other such psalms? Let me close with some observations on this excessively ticklish and difficult question.

The first thing to note is the obvious biblical fact that the lips of our Lord Jesus did not exactly drip with angry diatribes against enemies or sinners. Were I to give you no more than ten minutes, just about everyone here could locate a good many New Testament verses where Jesus tells us to love our enemies, to forgive those who persecute us, to turn the other cheek, to forgive seventy times seven times. Ultimately, we believe Jesus achieved the final victory over this world's evil not by grabbing a sword and hacking his way through enemy lines but by laying down his life on a cross--a cross from which he asked God to forgive the very ones who were even then murdering him. Similar advice comes later from apostles like Paul, who, when faced with a government as hostile to the Christian faith as Rome, nevertheless urged Roman Christians to pray for and submit to their leaders. James warned again and again about the dangers of anger and particularly of angry speech.

To state the obvious, all of that steers us away from vengeance, wild-eyed fury, and eye-for-an-eye retaliation. But does it rule out righteous anger? No, but it does make this much more complicated for us. Some of you read Lance Morrow's Time magazine essay titled "The Case for Rage and Retribution." It is a steely-eyed essay calling Americans to summon up rage, hatred, focused brutality, and a deep purple fury. If you do not completely loathe these terrorists, Morrow wrote, then you are "too philosophical for decent company." But in the end, it is difficult to tell the difference between the bile Mr. Morrow spits out and the bile Mr. bin Laden spews forth. Pure rage and unbridled anger lead to the abyss. The guilty must be punished and future threats from them warded off. But the gospel calls us finally to move through the heart of darkness with the light of God's grace and forgiveness. The worst of what's wrong with this world will not be fully or finally solved with weapons.

So may we pray for God to frustrate the plans of the wicked? Yes. After all, if your Uncle Jacob is violent when drunk, it is surely not wrong for you to pray that this coming weekend old Uncle Jake won't reach for the Jack Daniels. We rightly pray for God to keep people from sin. But what if the person about whom you need to pray is Osama bin Laden? In a way, asking God to prevent him from carrying out further destruction is on the same level as asking God to keep Uncle Jake from the corner bar. As believers, we desire the world God desires, and our prayers reflect that. Assuming God does not want a world where airplanes become kamikaze bombs, we are right to ask God to keep the wicked from committing their horrid acts. Alas, that prevention will likely end up being military and violent--in a fallen world, even our options in such matters are often themselves tragic.

Still, we pray as citizens of the kingdom first. We pray such things not because we want revenge but because we want shalom. We pray such things not because we hate our enemies but because we love all people and do not wish to see more harm come to God's imagebearers. We pray such things not because those terrorists have messed with God's special place of the USA, but because all creation and people matter to God and so to us.

Someone once said that if you think God hates all the same people you hate, you are almost certainly worshiping a false god. True, but a more basic issue is that as followers of the crucified Lamb of God, we are not to nurture hatred but love. When evil gets put on glaring display, we cannot help but feel righteous anger. But even then the gospel must temper our thoughts and words.

There are no easy answers as to how we should think during a time when talk of revenge and comeuppance is the air we breathe. But part of that is simply, though tragically, the nature of the gospel's interaction with a world as fractured as this one. The rescue workers in lower Manhattan have to be so careful as they walk on those giant heaps of rubble in that those piles contain jagged hunks of steel, volcano-like hot spots of fire, broken glass, and potentially crushing slabs of concrete. It's dangerous there as things can shift, fall, shatter. In a way that provides an analogy of the work we do for Jesus in a world that sin has similarly reduced to heaps of spiritual rubble. We're trying to work with God's Spirit to re-build things back to the shalom of the original creation. But it's dangerous and requires great thoughtfulness--there are so many mis-steps we could make.

The New Testament reveals that when Jesus first brought the gospel to this broken world, it was not easy, not always popular, and ended up getting him killed. So also now the world tears at us, tempting us in myriad ways to abandon the gospel for other ways of thinking and living. Our challenge, so much graver in times of war and crisis, is to incarnate the gospel and its particular way of bringing hope and new life to the world. That may very well make things more complicated for now. But out of that complexity, the simple beauty and beautiful simplicity of God's kingdom will one day come. It really will. Amen.