Rejoicing in Judgment: Reflections on Psalm 9
TExt
I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart; I will recount all of your wonderful deeds. I will be glad and exult in you; I will sing praise to your name, O Most High. When my enemies turn back, they stumble and perish before your presence. For you have maintained my just cause; you have sat on the throne giving righteous judgment. You have rebuked the nations; you have made the wicked perish; you have blotted out their name forever and ever. The enemy came to an end in everlasting ruins; their cities you rooted out; the very memory of them has perished. But the Lord sits enthroned forever; he has established his throne for justice, and he judges the world with righteousness; he judges the peoples with uprightness. The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. And those who know your name put their trust in you, for you, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek you. Sing praises to the Lord, who sits enthroned in Zion! Tell among the peoples his deeds! For he who avenges blood is mindful of them; he does not forget the cry of the afflicted. Be gracious to me, O Lord! See my affliction from those who hate me, O you who lift me up from the gates of death, that I may recount all your praises, that in the gates of the daughter of Zion I may rejoice in your salvation. The nations have sunk in the pit that they made; in the net that they hid, their own foot has been caught. The Lord ha made himself known; he has executed judgment; the wicked are snared in the work of their own hands. The wicked shall return to Sheol, all the nations that forget God. For the needy shall not always be forgotten, and the hope of the poor shall not perish forever. Arise, O Lord! Let not man prevail; let the nations be judged before you! Put them in fear, O Lord! Let the nations know that they are but men!
A Troubling Introduction
Our age knows little of praising God for his justice. We praise him for his beauty. We praise him for his mercy. We praise him for all manner of things, but we rarely consider the biblical call to praise him for his just destruction of the wicked. For all our society's championing of "justice," we do not know it when we see it, and we do not know how to give thanks and praise to the God who sits enthroned in justice. This is due to at least two things: 1) We do not know what justice is. 2) God's justice is frightening to a nation like ours, drenched in the blood of the unborn, enslaved to our lusts, and resolved to cast off the rule of God over us.
In the first place, we have redefined justice to suit our palette of envy. Justice has come to mean for us moderns merely equity of outcome. We must have what everyone else has. Their wealth, their blessings, must be ours. We rage against a system (read: the current state of politics and the power behind most marketing schemes) that does not provide us with the comforts and pleasures we desire and which we assume others possess. God's justice is quite the opposite of ours. Our "justice" is envy-fueled virtue signaling. His justice is fundamentally concerned with equity of process - a generous process, yes, but also a process concerned primarily with standards of righteousness and wickedness.
In the second place, God's justice rewards the righteous and destroys the wicked. To make matters worse, in this Psalm (and others), he speaks of judging nations, not simply individuals. We are a nation drenched in the blood of innocents. We are a nation enslaved to our lusts; sexual appetites run unrestrained in every city. We are a nation that stands condemned before the righteous justice of God.
As a result, we come to Psalm 9 and find ourselves struggling to sing along. Perhaps we can thank God for his justice in some esoteric sense. Still, if we start considering the practical application of this Psalm to our particular cultural circumstances, it can leave us terribly uncomfortable.
All this redefining of justice and failure to praise the God of justice amounts to an insistence on being gods. We reject God's justice because we have forgotten that we are but men. Our rejection of God's justice and presumption that his justice will never come reveals our enormous hubris. We forget that we are made. We forget that we are subject to God's justice and righteousness, so we fail to praise God for his justice.
Examining the Text:
Psalm 9 arrives as a jarring corrective to our misconstruals of justice and our failure to praise God rightly for his justice. The Psalmist gives thanks to God for these things:
- That his enemies stumble and perish before his presence.
- God sits on his throne, giving just judgments.
- God rebukes nations, causing the wicked to perish - He blots out their names forever and ever.
- God causes the very memory of the wicked to perish, comparing the temporality of the evil to the everlasting throne of God.
- God acts as a refuge to those who trust in him as they are pursued by the wicked.
- God does not forsake anyone who seeks Him.
The Psalm portrays the world as one in which the wicked pursue the righteous, and in this context, the judgment of the evil and the salvation of God's people is good news. We are commanded to praise the God of justice whose throne establishes His righteousness forever and ever. This is a psalm of thanksgiving, and it commands us to praise God for his judgment of the wicked and his salvation of his people. It commands us to praise God for his people's salvation through the wicked's judgment. The two go hand in hand again and again in Scripture. God saves his people by righteously destroying the wicked.
Our trouble with this Psalm is that we do not believe it. We do not believe that we need saving from the wicked. We do not believe that the judgment of whom God deems wicked is praiseworthy, and we do not see the inextricable link, biblically, between God's salvation and God's judgment.
But the judgments of God are good and right and praiseworthy - whether we're comfortable with them or not. We should learn, no, we must learn to give thanks to God for his clear promises to destroy wickedness, to destroy those who would profit in the doing of evil, and those who insist on being their own gods. God's mercy and salvation towards all who seek refuge in him is good, right, and praiseworthy. We must learn to first take refuge in him from evil, and then to praise Him for His just judgments. Psalm 9 anchors the worship of God's people, not in a mood or in sentiment, but in the forever established throne of God over all the nations and in his promise to rescue his people and destroy the wicked. It anchors the praises of God's people in the unassailable throne of God's justice as the nations that rebel against his righteousness perish and are forgotten.
Our nation stands condemned in this Psalm. We have perpetuated and celebrated the dismemberment of millions of babies in the womb. Sexual deviancy is not simply tolerated but celebrated as a civic virtue. We pursue the constant satisfaction of our envy and lust. We pridefully condemn those who tell the truth while denouncing the virtue of past generations. And Christians should be those who sing of the coming and sure judgment of God. He will not allow such evils to go unpunished. He will not let such evils to drown the worship of His people. He will save, and He will destroy. Such singing serves as the resilient cry of God's people when they gather and as a warning to all those who hate His justice. A reckoning is coming, and it has happened many times before. Put away your idols. Put away your wickedness. Come and take refuge in the Just Judge and the Savior of All Who Take Refuge in Him. The nations will be reminded that they are but men when God comes to put things to right.