Mark Hamilton, PhD - Associate Dean, Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology
Sometimes life is too much with us. I’ve thought about that a lot this weekend: when sawing up a tree that the wind broke, when painting a fence I had repaired a year ago but just now got around to finishing, when trying to send text messages to a more tech savvy colleague (my children laugh at how slow I am and how often I inadvertently call the text message a fax!). Life is too much with us, and maybe not enough with us at the same time.
Apparently, that’s how the author of Psalms 9-10 feels. (Originally this seems to have been one psalm, and an acrostic at that, which somehow got split apart in the Hebrew Bible; in the Septuagint, it hung together.) Notice the mixture of praise and lament, of calm faith in God and righteous indignation at unnamed enemies. The author struggles with a hidden God, whose latent power could eliminate evil, though it does not always seem to. He or she lives in the world of praise, which always stands just a step away from lament because God’s praiseworthiness consists not just in some timeless quality but in the commitment to pursue justice and peace for the creation, including especially humankind.
You see this point clearly in the discussion of the enemies, who in Psalm 9 seem to be foreign powers, and in Psalm 10 may be more personal. Consider, then, the contrast between God and the enemies. In Psalm 9, God defeats the enemies (v. 3/Hebrew 4), defends the Psalmist (“you have made my justice and defense”), established the divine throne on justice, caused the evil nations to perish, judges the earth on the basis of righteousness (v. 8/Hebrew 9).
In Psalm 10, meanwhile, the enemies of God are those who arrogantly oppress the vulnerable. They are bullies and ne’er-do-wells who use the vulnerability of others to their own advantage. They believe that their position in life makes them invulnerable to attack (even from God!). The Psalmist recognizes the folly of these people and his or her confidence in God’s sovereignty and goodness leads to the inevitable conclusion that their fate is both sure and dismal.
What to do with such an emotionally raw psalm? It’s hard not to see our own time here. The extraordinary dishonesty of our public discourse, the involvement of Christians in movements that prey upon the poor (think of those who, quite irrationally, feel the country threatened by babies born to parents who got here the wrong way), the trivialization of suffering and the transformation of even honorable charity into acts of self-fulfillment (mercy as tourism) — all these abuses, in which Christians unquestionably play a significant role, can open the door to despair to people of conscience. Moderation seems out of place in such a time. We must choose sides. And too many of us seem to be on the wrong side because we have forgotten that Christ’s interpretation of Torah — and therefore of God’s vision for humankind — centered on two principles, one of which was love your neighbor as yourself.
Obviously we have forgotten that. And so I hope the Psalmist is wrong because if he or she is right, we are in trouble. We need to pick our enemies a lot better. Then we can be part of God’s work of making all things right, including saving even the arrogant from themselves. Sometimes life is too much with us. But this is not one of those times.