Ps. 52.8 (the soil of God's loyal-love)

“But / I am like an olive tree / which thrives / in God’s house
I trust / in God’s loyal-love
which lasts / forever and ever.” 

At this point the psalmist places himself in direct contrast to the hero. The olive tree was well known for its incredible durability; even when the trunk died, it still produced shoots and olives. The hero, by contrast, shot up for a time but was quickly torn down; his glory was fleeting. Furthermore, when his destruction came he was “torn from his tent”. Here, the psalmist is “thriving in God’s house”. The contrast between tent and Temple is important, as the hero’s dwelling is an impermanent structure and the psalmist is the very house of God. The hero’s tent points to his own fleeting glory, and is as easily destroyed as the hero itself. The psalmist, however, exists within a house that is enlivened and protected by God himself. In addition, the hero was described as “trusting in his great wealth” (vs. 7). Here, the psalmist says he “trust in God’s loyal-love”. The judgment that fell on the wicked was the enact of this quality of God; we saw it in the first verse cutting in half the ‘bragging’ of the hero and we saw it as an act of mercy in its cutting down the hero and ceasing his acts of exploitation and destruction. Finally, the psalmist reveals that his durability as an ‘olive tree’ is grounded in God’s loyal-love which “lasts for ever and ever”; this is the soil in which he grows and on which he relies. This stands in marked contrast to the ‘utter ruin’ of the hero. Whereas the hero exists within the realm of ‘vanity’, that space wherein stability can be achieved but only ‘for a time’, the psalmist dwells within God’s sphere of ‘forever’ (the sphere of safety and perpetuity). The point is not that what the hero obtained wasn’t real; it was that it wasn’t, and couldn’t be, stable. Only those things which stand within the sphere of God’s ‘loyal-love’ can obtain that type of permanence. And only those things actually ‘thrive’; they produce a fruit that doesn’t fail. Everything else, at some point, will become an object of mockery; will fall from ‘hero’ to ‘man’.