Psalms 58

The psalm opens with a question fired straight at the people who least expect to be questioned: Do ye indeed speak righteousness, O congregation? do ye judge uprightly, O ye sons of men? The word translated congregation points to an assembly with authority - a body of rulers and judges, those who sit in the seat of decision and hold the lives of others in their verdicts. And David is not asking idly; the form of the question is an accusation. Do ye indeed - really? truly? - judge uprightly? It is the tone of a man who already knows the answer is no, and who wants to force the pretense into the open. There is something especially poisonous about injustice that wears the robe of justice. A common thief at least announces what he is. But a corrupt judge does his violence under cover of law, with the full machinery of authority behind him, while the words righteousness and uprightly are still warm in his mouth. The psalm refuses to let that hypocrisy hide. It drags the question into the light: you speak the language of justice - but do you do it?³

The second verse exposes the gap between the mouth and the heart, and it does so with a chilling, almost businesslike image: Yea, in heart ye work wickedness; ye weigh the violence of your hands in the earth. Notice in heart. The wickedness is not an accident, not a slip, not a verdict that came out wrong by mistake. It is deliberate - manufactured in the inner room where the will does its real work, and then carried out through the hands. And the verb weigh is bitterly fitting for a judge. A judge is supposed to weigh evidence, to hold the scales even. But these men weigh something else entirely: they weigh the violence of their hands - they measure out oppression with the same cold deliberation a merchant uses for grain, dealing harm by careful calculation. The image takes the very instrument of justice, the balance, and turns it into a tool of cruelty. This is corruption at its most developed: not hot-tempered cruelty, but cool, weighed, premeditated injustice, dispensed by people who have made a craft of it. And it is done in the earth - out in the open, in the world where the weak have nowhere else to turn.

Verse 3 reaches back to trace how deep the trouble runs: The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies. This is poetry, not a clinical statement, and its point is the settledness of the wickedness it describes - not a claim about the moment a soul begins. David is saying that these men's estrangement from what is right is not a recent turn or a single bad decision; it is so deeply woven into how they have lived that it seems to reach all the way back, as far back as one can see. They go astray as soon as they be born - from the earliest reach of memory they have been wandering off the path, and speaking lies has been their native speech. The line is doing what the whole opening does: insisting that this is not a surface flaw to be patched but a course long set, a wrongness that has had a lifetime to harden. That is exactly why no human reform reaches it - the next verses will say these men are as deaf as an adder - and exactly why the psalm must finally appeal past every human remedy to God. Only the Judge who sees to the root can deal with a wrong rooted this deep.

After the opening petition, the psalm piles up a remarkable chain of images for how the power of the wicked should come to nothing - and the striking thing is how many of them speak not of violence but of vanishing. Let them melt away as waters which run continually - like a stream that drains off and is gone. The arrows fitted to the bow are as cut in pieces - the weapon undone before it can be loosed. As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away - dissolving as it goes, leaving only a trail behind. Like the untimely birth… that they may not see the sun - a force that never comes to anything at all. And verse 9, one of the hardest lines in Hebrew to render, paints a fire of thorns under the cooking pots swept away by a sudden whirlwind before it can even heat the meal - the wicked's plans scattered before they can be carried out.³ Read the images together and you notice what the prayer is actually reaching for. It is not asking that the oppressors suffer for suffering's sake; it is asking that their power to oppress be dissolved - that the teeth be broken, the arrows snapped, the schemes blown away - so that the predators can no longer prey. The longing is for the harm to stop.

Verse 10 is one of the lines readers stumble over, and it deserves to be read with care: The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. The picture is drawn from the ancient battlefield, where a victor might walk through the aftermath of a decisive defeat - vivid, even shocking imagery for the total and final overthrow of an evil that had seemed unstoppable. But the heart of the verse is in the first half, and everything depends on naming the right object of the joy. The righteous do not rejoice in cruelty, and they do not gloat over a personal enemy brought low. They rejoice when he seeth the vengeance - that is, they rejoice at justice finally done, at the long-awaited moment when entrenched evil is stopped and the wronged are vindicated. It is the relief of seeing a world bent out of true at last set right. This is the same joy that rises in the book of Revelation when the martyrs who cried How long, O Lord? (Rev. 6:10) are answered, and a great voice in heaven breaks into praise because true and righteous are his judgments (Rev. 19:1-2). It is not a hunger for blood; it is a hunger for righteousness - the deep human cry that cruelty not win in the end. To rejoice that God judges rightly is not the same as enjoying anyone's ruin; it is loving justice, and trusting the One who brings it.

It is worth lingering on how the psalm ends, because the ending is the answer to everything that came before. The very first verse put a question to corrupt men - do ye judge uprightly? - and the answer was a resounding no. The last verse answers the unspoken question that the whole psalm has been pressing underneath: is there any justice at all? When the courts are crooked and the powerful prey on the weak and the wicked seem to win, the heart wants to know whether right has any defender at all, or whether might is simply the final word. Psalm 58 says no - there is more. Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth. Note the double verily - truly, truly - the language of certainty driven home against every appearance to the contrary. And note where the reward and the judgment come from: not from the human court that failed, but from God. The justice of men ran out; the justice of God did not. This is the steadying truth the psalm leaves in the reader's hands - not a promise that the wronged will never suffer, but the assurance that the suffering is seen, that the account is kept, and that the One who keeps it is good. The believer who holds verse 11 can let go of the exhausting work of avenging himself, because the case has been entrusted to a Judge who never sleeps and never errs.