{"id":245,"date":"2010-09-06T10:46:58","date_gmt":"2010-09-06T15:46:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/?p=245"},"modified":"2010-10-26T10:52:04","modified_gmt":"2010-10-26T15:52:04","slug":"the-psalms-in-our-worship-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/the-psalms-in-our-worship-6\/","title":{"rendered":"The Psalms in our Worship 6"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Mark

Mark Hamilton, PhD - Associate Dean, Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology<\/p><\/div>\n

Sometimes life is too much with us.\u00a0 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!).\u00a0 Life is too much with us, and maybe not enough with us at the same time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Apparently, that’s how the author of Psalms 9-10 feels.\u00a0 (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.)\u00a0 Notice the mixture of praise and lament, of calm faith in God and righteous indignation at unnamed enemies.\u00a0 The author struggles with a hidden God, whose latent power could eliminate evil, though it does not always seem to.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Consider, then, the contrast between God and the enemies.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n

In Psalm 10, meanwhile, the enemies of God are those who arrogantly oppress the vulnerable.\u00a0 They are bullies and ne’er-do-wells who use the vulnerability of others to their own advantage.\u00a0 They believe that their position in life makes them invulnerable to attack (even from God!).\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

What to do with such an emotionally raw psalm?\u00a0 It’s hard not to see our own time here.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Moderation seems out of place in such a time.\u00a0 We must choose sides.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Obviously we have forgotten that.\u00a0 And so I hope the Psalmist is wrong because if he or she is right, we are in trouble.\u00a0 We need to pick our enemies a lot better.\u00a0 Then we can be part of God’s work of making all things right, including saving even the arrogant from themselves.\u00a0\u00a0 Sometimes life is too much with us.\u00a0 But this is not one of those times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes life is too much with us.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3538,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Psalms in our Worship 6 - ACU Graduate School of Theology<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/the-psalms-in-our-worship-6\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Psalms in our Worship 6 - 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