Singing the 58^th Aright

During the height of Nazi ascendency in early twentieth-century Germany, when the Confessing Lutheran Church was becoming more and more oppressed by the regime, a young preacher gave a sermon on the 58^th Psalm. It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Because he was a product of his time and influenced by the higher criticism of the Bible in the German seminaries of the day (the so-called neo-orthodoxy), we do not wholly commend Bonhoeffer’s work. But at times he reads as a prophetic voice amidst the serpents and lions who were lunging at Christ’s church. Here is one insight that he offered in his sermon on the 58^th: “We know that David humbly endured all personal abuse. But Christ, and therefore the church of God, is in David. Thus [David’s] enemies are the enemies of Jesus Christ and his holy church. For that reason, Christ himself is praying this Psalm in David and with Christ, the universal holy church.”¹

This much Bonhoeffer understood, that Christ is the author of the Psalms even as they played out in the real-time sufferings of David and those who were counted righteous by faith in ancient Israel. Jesus gave to David the appropriate vocabulary, undergirded by the appropriate theology of eternal justice at the end of the age. Jesus is still praying this imprecation in and with us, his church. He helps us pray for relief from God’s enemies on earth in our present time—those unjust princes and rulers, and all the children of the devil who, unable to hearken to the voice of the Messiah, attempt to lunge at and devour us. Though in this life, like David and like Job before him, “man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,” Christ in his gospel informs us of our place in history which is filled with trouble, revealing to us the eschatological vision of future justice that we might have hope.

Only through Christ’s gospel can we even begin to apprehend this grievous language of miscarriage found in verse 8. Historically, the term for an abruptly ended pregnancy was called an abortion. A pregnancy could end in a natural miscarriage—perhaps the most grievous effect of the curse in Genesis, “pain in childbearing”—or, it could end at the hands of the wicked, forcing that miscarriage. In either case, the pregnancy is aborted. In our time, however, the wicked practice of terminating pregnancy—the murder of the unborn—and those who perpetrate it have co-opted the term. Thus, we only really understand the word abortion to refer to that which is done violently, either mechanically or chemically, in this wretched and unjust society wherein seven men seated behind a mahogany bench made it legal in January of 1973.

Christ’s cursing song before our eyes and ears today—the song he continues to sing with us and calls us to sing with him, with its two antithetical parties, the wicked and the righteous—can be understood even in this language of abortion. When the free offer of Christ crucified for sinners and raised for their justification is published and announced, a birth takes place—a new birth. “Ye must be born again!” It is a birth unto eternal life with pleasures at God’s right hand forevermore. This is the miracle of the Holy Spirit opening our ears and our hearts to the announcement of the gospel, giving us new life, and forgiving every sin of our past. Those are the “righteous.” They hear and are born again. But for the “wicked”—this is what David is saying, what Christ is teaching us—it is a birth that never occurs. It is a life that never emerges in truth. It never sees the sun; it has no eternal life; it has eternal death. It is terminal sorrow and anguish. The wicked are being aborted in anguish and torment forever.

Yet regardless of the persecuting forces arranged against the church on earth, our salvific vision, our understanding of eternal life, is actually preceded by the vision of justice at the end of the age. As Geerhardus Vos famously said, “The eschatological is an older strand in revelation than the soteric.”² His more modern acolytes fondly paraphrase saying, “Eschatology precedes soteriology.” David grasps this, a vision of final justice that precedes his own everlasting blessedness. Saved to what? No—saved from what? Saved from the judgment. You must know about the coming judgment to be saved from it.

This rings consistently through the Psalter:

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. (Ps 1:5–6)

The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying, “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.” He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, “As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill.” I will tell of the decree: The Lord said to me, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” (Ps 2:2–9)

And for the pupil of Christ studying the New Testament’s apocalyptic literature, the realities come into even more striking view. John writes to the churches the details of his vision in Revelation 19:11–16:

Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.

We have mentioned that there is proto-gospel reference in this 58^th Psalm, but now too we see that there is the gospel at the end as well. There is a serpent, there is deception, but there is a request in keeping with who God is. We cannot call down any kind of curse that is inconsistent with anything God has already revealed about himself. Remember the disciples tried to do it once when they did not get the hospitality they thought they deserved. “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Luke 9:54). Jesus had to rebuke them and sort of say, “You don’t understand the imprecatories, friends. Cursing may only be invoked with reference to what has already been revealed of the divine attributes.” What God had already revealed on that awful day when he covered the two cowering naked sinners with animal skins was that the seed of a woman would crush the serpent’s jaw. The seed would crush the teeth of the serpent; he would smash his head. This is what the sons of Adam have been waiting for; they have been clinging to that first gospel promise. And that promise has been threaded with a hint of the tension surrounding how God foretold that it would play out. Though the seed would crush the serpent’s head, the serpent was going to bite at the promised seed’s heel.

And so now, we have the rod of wrath, we have the Savior, and we have the picture. We can look ahead, but we must understand from this the depiction of Christ Jesus coming in the end to judge. The Book of Revelation describes a robe that is bloody. It is easy to look at the surrounding verses and simply deduce that it is connected to the picture that he is treading the winepress, he is traversing through the carnage, and his feet are bathed in the blood of the wicked. But is there any further significance which reinforces the gospel progressively revealed through redemptive history? If Jesus has been the divine voice singing with the psalmist throughout—and indeed he is depicted in the 2^nd in his begottenness before the foundation of the world, and with the eschatological rod of wrath at the end of the world—are there other significant places in redemptive history where he has been as well, perhaps another place where his feet were bathed in blood?

Christ Jesus, the fulfillment of the warrior king motif set forth in the Davidic covenant, was spiritually present in an even more ancient covenant. There too, he tread the path of blood and gore. Mention of his robe dipped in blood, the hem of his garment becoming stained, may just call to our minds the vision given to Abraham in Genesis 15 where Abraham is promised the long-awaited seed. Although he was very much the lesser in the covenant cut that day, he was not required to tread the trench of blood between the cut carcasses which depicted the agreement that if he should break covenant with God, he would undergo the maledictory consequences and bleed just like the severed beasts. Instead, Abraham falls asleep, and the fire of God passes through the blood trail, indicating that God himself would suffer the consequences of covenant breaking by Abraham and his innumerable descendants that followed.

The picture is of the feet of our Savior and Liturgist in so much blood—blood from fulfilling the Abrahamic covenant, blood from fulfilling the Davidic. His feet bathed in blood is a covenant sign, shown forth in Genesis 15, shown forth in the 58^th Song of David, and revealed in his feet bathed in blood on Golgotha hill as the serpent’s bite was a Roman spike. And yet we sing and we pray and we hope in the next time, the last time, when he comes to judge and destroy the wicked in a gory display. For then will the very last energy of the thorny curse be swept away in a whirlwind. Come, Lord Jesus.

Notes

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “A Bonhoeffer Sermon: A Psalm of Vengeance,” Theology Today 38, no. 4, 1982.
2. Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954), 157.

© Aaron De Boer. All Rights Reserved.

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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.

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