Psalm 94: Mischief by a Law

Conservatives are handicapped by human nature when seeking to convince liberals that their understanding of the world is wrong, that more government is not going to make things better. No amount of education or persuasion will get the job done.

God is not so handicapped. He created us and made us and sustains us. He can soften the hardest heart; in fact, He can give each of us a new heart with which we can know Him and more clearly see the world as He sees it.

For the truth is that less government ultimately won’t make the world better either unless we also repent of our sin against God and confess Jesus as our Lord and Savior. Yes, less government will greatly improve the human material condition and lift millions, even billions, out of poverty. But without submitting to Christ this would be a prosperity that points us towards perdition.

Doug Wilson uses Psalm 94 to help Christians understand this. Psalm 94 provides the standard for how we identify the people we deal with. It is not, as we would often have it be, whether or not they oppose us; instead it is whether or not they oppose God:

So when you have learned to treat your personal enemies the way David did (1 Sam. 24:1-15), then you are in a good place to begin learning how to sing the way he did about God’s enemies (Ps. 139:21). The heart of the lesson is that psalms of imprecation are instances of us turning the whole thing over to God because He is the one to whom vengeance belongs (Ps. 94:1). When you do it right, you are taking your fleshly desires out of the dispute, not inserting your flesh into the conflict, and all in the name of Jesus.

Learning to pray the imprecatory psalms is a high necessity—the events of the last few months indicate that they have been prayed far too infrequently with regard to the wickedness of our national life. Getting your personal peeves and your own ego out of consideration does not turn you into a spiritual pacifist. Rather, it makes you a reliable warrior. And never forget that the high logic of all imprecation is found in the cross. There we see the wickedness of man, there we see the hatred of God for sin, and there we see the love of God for sinners. When curses rain down, now that Christ is come, that is how they rain down. And when rebels are destroyed outside of Christ, destroyed in the old school fashion of Sodom, or Egypt, or the antediluvian world, they are destroyed because they refused the wrath that transforms enemies into friends, and thereby embraced the wrath that turns men and women into wraiths.

When Christ ascended to His throne, He commanded us to go make disciples of the nations. The nations would include conservatives and liberals, blacks and whites, politicians and pastors, i.e., anybody we have contact with whether or not we agree with them or like them.

The results of our discipleship, though, are not in our hands. God’s enemies may become his children or be destroyed. We are simply to disciple, pray for, and love God’s enemies and let him take care of the rest.

Read the rest of Psalm 94: Mischief by a Law.