It is the practice of the congregation that I serve to gather together on Wednesday evenings for a fellowship meal, and what we do after supper truly thrills my soul. We sing consecutively through the Psalter—every word, every verse—and I have the privilege of opening up what Luther called “the little Bible” to the congregation, explaining the passages with regard to the revelations of the Spirit of Christ as well as the myriad other themes such as covenant, exile, lament, eschatology, and even imprecation. Some weeks ago we came again to the 58^th, and one simply cannot help but be struck by a few intriguing words and phrases. Words and phrases echoing the proto-gospel of Genesis 3:15 jump off the page.

Nevertheless, this psalm hits differently than most. Even if there be hints of Christ’s gospel swirling for us, it hits us in a somewhat uncomfortable way, as most imprecatory psalms do. They make us uncomfortable because of the language of violent cursing invoked in them. When we get uncomfortable with any Scripture, we must recall that it is “breathed out by God and profitable” (2 Tim 3:16). Moreover, when we are uncomfortable with the Old Testament, we are to recall what Jesus said to Cleopas and his anonymous friend on the Road to Emmaus—that the whole Old Testament is about him. When we are uncomfortable with a psalm, we must remember that it is Jesus, the liturgist of the great congregation,¹ who is singing through David. And when we give each psalm our melodious voices, he is singing with us.

Concerns of the 58^th

The divinely-inspired prescript reminds us right away that this psalm is to be sung in public worship by God’s people; it is “For the Choirmaster: according to Do Not Destroy.” If we turn back one chapter in the Psalter, we get a clue about the phrase, “Do not destroy.” It appears in the prescript of the 57^th with a little notation about the context. These two psalms, as well as a similar reference included in the prescript of the 59^th, describe a little compendium from a specific time in David’s experience: “When he fled from Saul.” The history of that time is described in the Book of 1 Samuel. These prescripts tell us that the lament and imprecations which follow are set amidst the wickedness of Saul’s royal administration and all the injustices that flowed from it—a time when the king and his officers did not seek justice for the LORD’s anointed, but rather sought to “destroy” him.

So, the Spirit of Christ in David begins with a striking rhetorical device aimed squarely at the royal wing of the government of God’s people in those days: “Do you indeed decree what is right, you gods? Do you judge the children of man uprightly?” (v. 1). From the season of persecution described in the “Do not destroy” prescripts and by the contextual clues of decreeing and judging, we know immediately that David is addressing the rulers of Israel.

Furthermore, what we read in the English Standard Version translated as, “you gods,” also informs our understanding. There is in verse 1 something of a translation issue. The term that appears in Hebrew is a fragment that literally means, “silent,” or “rendered dumb.”² Translators posit that the fragment is a possible abbreviation for elohim (the most general and plural term for “gods”). From the context, they infer that this refers to the idea of a plurality of authorities judging and ruling Israel. What David seems to have in mind is what we might picture in our day as a group of judges enrobed and seated behind a fine mahogany bench looking august and serious; but they are rendered silent because David is indicting them. He is reading them the riot act.

The use of the term “gods” as something of a sarcastic moniker for earthly princes and rulers is employed elsewhere in the 82^nd, and Jesus even made use of the term in John 10. In the way that God has ordered human civilization, princes, judges, and rulers are supposed to represent his interests in righteously administrated affairs. Jesus used this notion to rebuke the Jews who were questioning him at one of the feasts. He was intoning, based on the usage of the term in these psalms, that the spiritual rulers in Israel were not judging rightly.

In verse 2, David says to these supreme justices that they are so wicked and lawless, it is as if their hearts are a foundry of wrongdoing, a place deep beneath the earth where violence is weighed out from their scales, a subterranean factory of violence where their premeditated evils are manufactured and distributed right down to the ounce. This is the indictment against those whom God had charged with maintaining the order of his kingdom. Saul and the princes of his court instead have meted out violence and injustice against David, God’s anointed, as well as against the children of Adam who yearn for the godly justice prophesied in the proto-gospel.

After framing an indictment against those whom God had commanded to judge justly in the land, an oral argument so unassailable that the bench sits in silence, David begins to preach a scorching sermon filled with comparative metaphors about what the truly wicked, the unsaved, are like. I say the unsaved—the unregenerate—because the Spirit of Christ in David sets out to describe a type of person who is, “condemned.” This is the meaning of the word we read as “wicked” (vv. 3, 10). This is a different characterization from what David would describe later in his life after being confronted by his pastor for each of the sins surrounding his adultery with Bathsheba. Where in the 51^st Psalm he describes the sinful condition that the whole race is born into, here he uses the term that is distinctly the opposite of “the righteous.” He describes the “condemned.” There are only two kinds of people, and David knows it: There are those who are justified before the only tribunal that matters eternally. They will be declared not guilty and righteous when standing before the judgement seat of Christ. They have been granted the gift of faith, repentance, and forgiveness, and their sins are not imputed to their own account, but are rather imputed to the Righteous One who died in their place, Jesus Christ the Righteous. Those born again of the Spirit, they are the just—but those who are hardened against the LORD and his Anointed stand condemned. They will be counted among the wicked on the great and terrible day of judgement.

Verse 3 exposes these unregenerate people as profane and loathsome, already estranged from their Maker and God from the womb. They are not predestined as vessels of mercy, but as vessels of wrath. They come forth already staggering in deception, for their father is the father of lies. From birth they are repeating his lies. Is this fair to connect them to Satan as their lying father? Yes, the Holy Spirit goes right ahead and makes the direct connection, saying that these unregenerate wicked have “venom,” they are poisonous, and their malice factory spews forth the venomousness of “the serpent” (v. 4). Mention of “the serpent” is surely evocative of the tempter who deceived the Adamic race into the condition of fallenness on that fateful day in the garden. These little serpents, adders, asps, cobras, vipers, are unrepentant because they refuse to hear. The Holy Spirit invokes this theme against Christ’s adversaries elsewhere, saying through the apostle Paul, “The venom of asps is on their lips” (Rom 3:13). And through the Prophet John, they “are a brood of vipers” (Matt 12:34). Not only will they “not hearken” to the voice which would make them wise, but they are dangerously threatening to that prophetic voice, poised to strike his heel.

Verses 6–9 contain the violent curse that David prays upon his and God’s enemies. This is where the savagely aggressive and uncomfortable language rolls off our cringing tongues as we sing, “Smash their teeth!” (v. 6). The call is for crushing blows upon that most vulnerable portion of the skull, the jawbone beset with precious molars and incisors—“Break those, LORD!” Who else’s teeth? “The young lions, tear out their fangs, O LORD!” (v. 6). David calls upon the name of our covenant God who is Jehovah to disarm and humiliate the “lion prowling about seeking to devour” (1 Pet 5:8). Render the wicked adversary a de-toothed and unthreatening cub before it even has the chance to do harm. May they be like a creek which suddenly disappears underground—cause them to vanish (v. 7)! When the enemy bends his bow to launch fiery darts, may those arrows be dashed to pieces (v. 7)! Disarm the enemies of Thy righteousness, LORD! May they be like a snail, a slug that melts into its own slimy trail (v. 8)! Abort them, O God (v. 8)!

As the curse reaches its crescendo, calling down something so grievous as the abrupt killing of an unborn child, David calls for swift action by employing the simple metaphor of the primitive kitchen stove. A cooking implement of antiquity, fired by the dried-up bramble that was at hand, he prays in the Spirit for God to suddenly rob the energy of the wicked before they can even bring liquid to a boil. Just as their cooking fire gets going, may God sweep away the energy stored in those thorns with a whirlwind.

The cursing concluded, David in verse 10 makes an insightful acknowledgment, amidst the maladministration of Jehovah’s precepts, great sorrow, slander, and near-death persecution he is experiencing at the hands of Saul’s princes. Wicked, unjust judges who ought to be defending the rightful heir to the throne are instead poisoning the politics with slander and seeking the execution of David son of Jesse, of Bethlehem. Yet David is stayed in the sure knowledge that there will one day be vindication and triumph. He has known this reality on the battlefield. When as only a boy he took up his hurler, launching a brook stone into the forehead of Goliath of Gath, what did he do next? He took up the giant’s own sword, stood straddling over him, and cut off Goliath’s immense head. David’s feet were bathed in the blood of that enemy of God’s people.

The LORD brought his vengeance to bear upon the enemies of his church. But David, inspired by the Spirit of Christ moving in him to pen this portion of Holy Scripture, is not taking hold of the vision of an earthly campaign, but rather of the eschatological battle which will sweep away the wicked in a whirlwind of judgement at the end of human history. Having thoroughly described the unregenerate, the wicked, he turns to the antithesis, “the righteous.” The eternally saved—those born again—are the ones who will rejoice at the gore of God’s punishing justice upon the damned. Verse 11 is clarified by the parallels in Isaiah 45 and Romans 14: “We will all stand before the judgment seat of God; for it is written, ‘As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God’” (Rom 14:10–11, cf. Isa 45:23). All mankind will then know that the true reward of the righteous will not be meted out until Christ who is Jehovah comes to judge on the earth.

David’s understanding of his true and eternal salvation is connected to the vision which transcends all of his earthly suffering at the hands of wicked men. He is assured that the righteous reward comes at the end of days when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is judge. As I seem to recall, James Montgomery Boice is credited as saying, “Even the damned will agree with their sentence.”³

Having sketched the contextual and textual concerns in this first installment, in our next, we will not shy from the goriest of the cursings, in order that we may sing the 58^th aright, to the praise of our warrior King, Jesus.

Notes

1. cf. Psalm 22:25; Hebrews 2:12.
2. Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, Charles Briggs, The Brown, Driver, Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson Publishers, 2017), s.v., אֵלֶם ‘elem, p. 47.
3. Attribution unknown.

© Aaron De Boer. All Rights Reserved.

You can find this whole series here.

RESOURCES

• • Subscribe To The Heidelblog!
  • Download the HeidelApp on Apple App Store or Google Play
  • The Heidelblog Resource Page
  • Heidelmedia Resources
  • The Ecumenical Creeds
  • The Reformed Confessions
  • The Heidelberg Catechism
  • Recovering the Reformed Confession (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2008)
  • Why I Am A Christian
  • What Must A Christian Believe?
  • Saturday Psalm Series
  • Heidelblog Contributors
  • Support Heidelmedia: use the donate button or send a check to

Heidelberg Reformation Association
1637 E. Valley Parkway #391
Escondido CA 92027
USA
The HRA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization

Post authored by:

• Aaron De Boer

  

  Rev. Aaron De Boer is the minister at Bethany ARP Church in the foothills of Mount Baker, Washington. He earned an MA from Calvin Theological Seminary and is a ThM candidate at Erskine Theological Seminary. @DutchPresby on X/Twitter.

  More by Aaron De Boer ›