Ps. 52.1-2 (splitting the difference)

“Why brag / about evil / you hero!
God’s loyal-love / does not cease
Why / does your tongue / plot destruction
like a sharpened razor / you con-man!” 

Whenever a psalm begins with multiple ‘why’ questions, we know by now that it is likely to be laden with sarcasm if it is addressed to anyone other than God. They are, therefore, questions of incredible confidence in that the one addressed is framed as absurd in their behavior. To the psalmist, quite literally, they make no sense. Furthermore, by the nature of the question we know that the order of the wicked will be inverted—here, the ‘hero’ will become merely a “man” (vs. 7) and his ‘boasting’ will turn into a source of mockery for the righteous (vs. 6). In many, the absurdity emerges from the attempt to somehow conquer God or his anointed (as in Psalm 2). In others the absurdity is rooted more particularly in the evil person’s belief that their behavior will go unchecked by God, either because he is powerless to stop it, he tacitly agrees to it or he is indifferent to it. These obviously overlap a great deal. The second category is what occurs here. Goliath-like, the evil man “brags about evil”. Immediately we are confronted with the absurdity in the term ‘evil’. It is something that will continue to resonate throughout the psalm and gain more and more specificity as it progresses. Here, the source of the bragging is in the “plotting of destruction” and the “con game”. This points to an important point that will become more so as the contrast is set up between God and this evil man: evil is destructive. That, however, is not the extent of it as God will also be seen as destructive (more so, actually). This evil is deceptive (it is a ‘con game’). We can certainly detect here the sense of it be exploitive, but that dynamic will not become clearer until later. The only remaining issue in these verses is the seemingly odd interjection directly in the middle of the questioning: “God’s loyal love does not cease”. In a purely formal manner this interjection is interesting in that it, literally, cuts the questioning in half; the ‘deception’ (the ‘duality’) is to be countered by the single unified statement of God’s loyal love. Furthermore, the interjection already indicates that there is a countervailing force (“God’s loyal love…”) that, in a sense, is not sleeping even though it may appear to be. This ‘hero’ will soon be conquered by an even greater one, and the source of his bragging will be overcome by God’s “loyal-love”. In other words, the battle lines are being drawn. ‘Evil’—the force of deception and destruction—is to be countered by, not so much ‘the good’ as by “God’s loyal love”. It is God’s covenantal care that will destroy evil and will reveal the ‘hero’s’ boasting to be vacuous and absurd.