Psalm 53, to be precise.
Psalm 53:5, to be preciser.
Okay, so if you really wanted to connect the gospel with the people in the community, you just know intuitively that telling them that they’re under judgement is marketing suicide. It’s a bit like selling your medicine by asking people to come along to a discussion group so that they can share about their favourite disease.
Christians who believe judgement is real often respond, therefore, by hiding the information about God’s wrath inside the fine print of their mind. After all, they reason, the Bible reserves its worst words of judgement for religious insiders.
Being frequently tempted to think like this, it’s been a shocking and humbling experience for me to read and pray through the book of Psalms. I started a while ago, and I’m up to Psalm 53. The reason progress is slow is that if I wake up in the morning having forgotten yesterday’s psalm, I make myself read it again. So it is taking a long, long time. But by this means, I’ve managed to disabuse myself of some of my favourite mistakes (including the one just mentioned in the previous paragraph), and along with it, the idea that it is wrong for us to take joy in judgement.
Psalm 53 paints a picture of total human depravity. But, to cut to the chase, verse 5 promises judgement on all fools who reject God—that is, basically, everyone. And then the final verse (verse 6), with what feels like a terrible grinding of gears, declares:
Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion!
When God restores the fortunes of his people,
let Jacob rejoice, let Israel be glad.
How can we go from a declaration of God’s judgement on sinful fools, to a joyful rejoicing in God’s salvation? Has this psalmist no compassion? Is he as mad as a hatter? Is he, perhaps, an Al Quaeda operative who has managed to sneak his way of thinking into the Christian Scriptures?
But of course, the problem is not the psalmist; it’s us. We are feeble, wet and flabby in our understanding of what God’s salvation involves. The psalmist isn’t. He knows that Israel’s salvation from the enemies of God will mean that said enemies are trampled like the red grapes of wrath. We get rescued from our enemies only when those enemies are crushed.
And lest we forget that this psalm is more than just an ancient piece of Israelite history in a time of war, it so happens that this is one of the key psalms that the Apostle Paul chooses to allude to when he reveals a timeless truth in Romans 3: that all humanity is sinful and deserves nothing less than the full judgement of God.
And once Paul has proved his point by quoting this psalm, he is able to unveil the glorious truth that all God’s anger against our sin has been borne by the Lord Jesus . This happened, as Paul will remind us in a couple of chapters, “while we were enemies” .
Next time you doorknock your neighbourhood in an effort to connect them with the gospel, ignore your marketing instincts. After you’ve said hello, ask them if they are aware that we all stand under the judgement of God .
Come to think of it, I’m lined up to talk to some non-Christian friends about this next week. In due course, I’ll report back so Sola Panel readers can find out how it went.
Not to sure about your door-knocking strategy. You look at Acts 17, you see Paul attempts to build a few bridges before he lays into them with the message of judgment.
Gordo, thanks for this post, which follows on well from Tony’s An Offensive God.
A few thoughts.
1. Yes I have often been tempted to drop the explicit judgment bits in evangelism.
For example, when I first had to take funerals, I dropped the line of the prayer book which talked about the “certainty of our own coming death and judgment”. Of course, the way we speak about judgment and hell will vary from time to place, and I don’t think a funeral is normally the place for a fully orbed exposition of this topic.
But it was a gutless failure of my nerve as an inexperienced pastor. I never omit the line now, though I am still tempted to go soft in other contexts.
2. It is right that we should rejoice in God’s judgment of sin. Your post and Tony’s make that clear. It is good that the totally moral and pure God will judge sinners such that all evil is removed form his new creation, and wrongs are righted. And it’s good that he does it rather than us.
3. And yet it was right that in a comment on Tony’s post that you quoted Jude 22-23 and said,
I have to say I think there is a danger in some of our macho, new reformed circles of being gung ho about judgment and hell.
The tone sometimes seems to lack the compassion of Jesus grieving and longing over lost Jerusalem…
Remember this comes straight after his most sustained and damning diatribe against the scribes and Pharisees. He left no doubt the unrepentant would be judged and that it would be terrible.
And yet there was no hint of triumphalism. And he was immediately full of compassion.
I am worried by the lack of compassion we sometimes hear when people rediscover the importance of confidence in the goodness and reality of God’s judgment.
4. Do you think it makes any difference that the psalms of David are ultimately the psalms of Jesus?
When I read David’s words, I sometimes think he has no right to claim all that he claimed of himself. For example, in Psalm 26 when he proclaims his complete innocence and blamelessness. The psalms of sinful David can really only be truly prayed by Jesus, to whom all the psalms pointed.
Hebrews 10 reveals that only Jesus can truly and perfectly say what David did in Psalm 40, that he had come to do God’s will.
So my pondering is whether only sinless Jesus can truly exult in the coming judgment of God, as in Psalm 53, and whether, sinful like David, we need just a little reticence in how we claim the psalms for ourselves.
Craig: My own view of Acts 17 is that this too might lead to numerous doorslams if used as the basis of a strategy.
Sandy, you said:
<i>When I read David’s words, I sometimes think he has no right to claim all that he claimed of himself.</i>
If he <i>really</i> had no right to make these claims, then
(1)he ought not to have made them
and
(2) God includes them in the Bible as a pointer to Christ and, secondarily, as an example of how <i>not</i> to pray.
But that’s not my view!
I find the doctrine of judgement comforting insofar as it means the inevitable and complete punishment of those enormities that we can never punish adequately in this world. What, for example, could we have done to Pol Pot in this life that could go near to punishing him for the sufferings he brought on others? Only God’s wrath can deal sufficiently with his evil.
But when it comes to me, to my family and friends, I do not feel comforted. And I think that’s about the right balance.
By the way, Sandy and Craig, I was pleasantly astonished when Archbishop Peter Jensen came and preached evangelistically at our church last year and chose to begin by speaking about judgement.
So although I haven’t been bold enough to do this in recent months, our present discussion reminds me that Peter Jensen was.
I am not sure if people became Christians on that day as a result of what they heard, but it was good to be reminded that genuine evangelists (as opposed to theorists like yours truly) continue to put the preaching of judgement at the forefront of their message.
<i>But when it comes to me, to my family and friends, I do not feel comforted. And I think that’s about the right balance.</i>
Ellen, I would love to agree with you, and in fact, I think I do.
But just this morning I finally made it to Psalm 55, and was again slapped upside the head (metaphorically speaking! we wouldn’t want to get too literalistic here!) by verse 15:
<i>Let death steal over them;
let them go down to Sheol alive;
for evil is in their dwelling place and in their heart.</i>
Mainly because the desire for judgement upon “them” so clearly included David’s friend, mentioned in the previous two verses:
<i>13 But it is you, a man, my equal,
my companion, my familiar friend.
14 We used to take sweet counsel together;
within God’s house we walked in the throng.</i>
I don’t know how I could pray for judgement like that. But, David clearly did. And so (following Sandy’s reasoning) does Jesus.
Hi Gordo,
I’ve just been listening to a talk by John Piper on William Tyndale – but during the talk he spent a lot of time comparing Erasmus and Tyndale. It was fascinating to hear how they both knew their Bibles and were even both keen for people to read the Bible – but the fundamental difference between the two was their understanding of sin and judgement. Because Tyndale was thoroughly convinced we are under judgement, and thought that was so important – when he read about grace it carried so much more weight than the ‘philosophical grace’ which Erasmus understood.
I wonder if this theme somehow helps us in the way we explain judgement in evangelism / preaching etc. If we and our hearers are not so completely immersed in an understanding of the depth of our sin, then our appreciation and response to grace will be shallow.
(Piper also made some really interesting points about theological depth and the emerging church – but thats for another day)
Pete
Gordo, quite right about Peter Jensen; and he has written on the importance of the topic of judgment and the seriousness of sin in his column in Southern Cross a number of times.
Can I ask, if we agree about the concern for those who soft-pedal judgment and fail to see that we can rejoice in God’s goodness even in that, then do you see any reason for concern for those who are gung ho about proclaiming judgment without a tone of compassion. Or am I perhaps reacting to a problem that is scarcely there?
Also can I ask you to say what your view of the psalms is, vis-a-vis David’s statements on innocence etc?
Good on you for putting pebbles in our shoes.
<i>Erasmus and Tyndale</i>
Pete, it’s the age-old struggle between reason and God. My latest theory is that the reason Eve was sucked in by Satan was that everything he said sounded just so, well, reasonable.
<i>Also can I ask you to say what your view of the psalms is, vis-a-vis David’s statements on innocence etc?</i>
Sandy, you’ve asked a couple of questions. My answer to this one is that whenever David claims innocence, he is telling the truth.
I will try to get back to you soon about the other things you asked.
So David speaks truthfully about his innocence, not because of his own perfect obedience and truthfulness (even episodically), but because he knows God’s forgivenness of sins, and is clothed (without realising all the mechanics of how it would be done) in the righteousness of Christ, apart from his works.
And therefore, as we are clothed in Christ, we too can pray the psalms, as innocent in him.
Thanks, that seems good.
In praying the psalms, such as the imprecatory bits, rejoicing in God’s judgment on others, how do you factor in the internal battle against the flesh, where we are still subject to jealousy, envy, pride, hatred, dissensions, self-righteousness etc.?
It still makes me a bit cautious not in believing God’s judgment, nor in rejoicing in that reality. But I guess in how I express those attitudes and emotions.