Feeling and Thinking in Psalm 10: The theology of evildoers and their victims
I genuinely wonder if the author of Psalm 10, speaking under the guidance of the Spirit of God, is telling us how it seems or in fact how it is. I think we start with an obviously incorrect assumption by the psalmist. So we begin with how it feels or at least how it could be described by a person disturbed by trouble in their life. Straightaway, if you analyse the logic of the Psalm, you see that not all that a person feels or thinks can be true.
What does God do, according to the description of the writer? And I’m not trying to bring you through a theological exploration but rather a human perspective on God’s actions and character.
v1 God hides from the person in trouble, not offering help.
v2 God is cursed by the wicked.
v3 God is not sought by the wicked.
v4 God is declared dead by the wicked.
v11 God doesn’t see the evil deeds of the wicked.
v12 God needs or requires encouragement to intervene.
v13 God is lax in justice.
v14 God does see the trouble of the victim.
v15 God violently punishes wicked people.
v16 God reigns as King eternally.
v17 God knows the thoughts of the victims.
v17 God can be counted on to give justice to the victim.
v18 God is greater than the wickedness of people.
Do you see the turmoil and inconsistencies in human ideas about God? People feel, think and act according to their conception of God. The author of Psalm 10 is working through all these perspectives. May I inject a few ideas into your reading of Psalm 10 from my own experience?
These 18 verses take less than 2 minutes to read aloud. But the feelings and experiences they reflect may have taken days, weeks, even years to work through. Our narrator had to live a bit and to observe for some time and reflect before he could have expressed these thoughts. I don’t know if we are observing the experiences of a person over a year or a long lifetime, but even after obviously considerable time has passed, the conclusions we read are mixed, fraught and by no means easy to have arrived at by verse18.
You may think that to be moved by the Spirit of God and to have been an author of the Bible you would have achieved such faith and certainty in your theological perspectives that you would know the truth. We have taken a long, complex path of apparent uncertainties. The reader is given freedom to question God’s actions and the circumstances of life. We are allowed to consider the obviously false ideas of the atheist, the diest and the agnostic. But we are also guided along a path of bringing our observations of injustice to God in a way that suggests God may have missed something, may not be acting without encouragement and could possibly even be purposely avoiding (v1) dealing with urgent matters.
It seems like blasphemy. It is certainly inconsistent and nigh unto heretical. Do you feel free to explore God, injustice and hope in the same way as the writer of Psalm 10? Are you willing to give others the time to make observations, to pray prayers and to wait for answers? Are we free to give people time to end up with a hopeful theology?
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| Ernest Normand (1857–1923) |
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