Ps. 53.5 (overcome with fear)

“So / they were overcome / with fear
there / where they had not / been afraid
for / God scattered / your besieger’s bones;
you put them / to shame / for God / despised them.” 

We have indicated already the tension between the fool/evildoer and God. While the fool cannot see “heaven”, God, when he looks for ‘the good’, can’t see the fool. We have gestured at what this means: this mutual blindness. For the fool, it is a type of indifference (a ‘liturgical indifference’: they “do not call on God” vs. 4), whereas for God, it is a type of judgment (he sought out goodness and cannot find it). The fool’s blindness, furthermore, finds expression in evil and wickedness; it is, manifestly, a type of limitation on his part. For God, on the other hand, his blindness to the fool is actually an expression of his sovereignty. All of this leads to this verse and the reversal of fortunes. It is here that the two forms of blindness meet and become utterly inverted: the fool will now be overcome and God’s blindness will be manifest in his judgment over them. This inversion is captured well in the two opening lines: “they were overcome with fear, where they had not been afraid.” Regardless of what historical event this is (or could be) referring to, the point is that the wicked had gathered for battle against Israel and had initially gained an upper hand (“where they had not been afraid”). However, it was then that God “looked down” and searched all of humanity for goodness and didn’t find any. Instead, to his horror, he saw his people being devoured. At this point, the heaven that had seemed previously sealed is torn open and fear rains down on the fools. This onslaught is something typical of military battles wherein God causes fear to run rampant in the enemy camp; it tends to cause mass confusion and disarray. Here, it “scatters” them (more particularly, their ‘bones’). This is the ‘closing of the hiatus’ between God’s seeing and God’s acting. In other words: judgment. It is important, it seems, that ‘fear’ is now employed to take the place of the atheistic heart (“he said in his heart, there is no god…”). As we pointed out previously, this is a form of practical atheism that sees in god either an unwillingness or inability to thwart the fool’s designs. Directly into this heart, however, when judgment descends—pours fear. It exposes the massive distance between reality and the fool’s heart, the massive difference between their heart and the vision of God from heaven. All at once the fool’s error is exposed and it is exposed as a moment of terror—God not only does care, but his previous silence was merely a prelude, a ‘time of patience’. The fool now realizes, suddenly, that his judgment has been building up, being ‘made full’ until the proper time. And this, quite literally, comes crashing down on his head and into his heart. And, as public was his “eating” is now his shame: his “bones are scattered”, an incredibly humiliating form of public shaming and judgment. The devourer is now to be left for the beasts to be eaten.