“He will
redeem / my life / in well-being
from the battle / against me,
when many /
oppose me.
From the ‘push back’ of time that we saw in the previous verse is
now found the necessarily corresponding ‘geographic’ deliverance. The psalmist,
standing alone, had only time to fill in contrast to the wicked people’s
ability to fill both time and the city with their acts. In this way the
psalmist stood within a breach that needed to be closed: time and geography
needed to coincide. And that closure of the breach comes in the form of
deliverance, here “redeeming my life in well-being from the battle against me.”
God will hear me / and he will / answer them
God / enthroned from of old
God / who does not change
he will / answer those / who have / no fear of God.
The opening line is interesting in the way it resolves this tension—God ‘hears
the psalmist’ but ‘answers the wicked’. We find here a fascinating insight into
how the ‘breach of time and geography’ is healed: through the vigilant and
persistent prayers of the righteous the wicked are ‘answered’, as if their actions were a question posed to
God through the righteous. In other words, when the righteous pray in times
of distress they call out to be heard and pose the ‘question of injustice’ to
God for him to answer. In a way, they become the question of the wicked. When
the hiatus (or, the ‘breach’) is closed, it is understood as a form of ‘answering
of the wicked’ that has been formulated by the righteous (or, mediated by the
righteous). The prayers of the righteous are, therefore, a type of overtaking
of the wicked, of putting them within the presence of God so as to instigate
judgment/healing. Something similar is seen in Revelation from those ‘under the
altar’—it is their prayers that instigate the judgment of the angels. In this
psalm, we see this again in the concluding line: “he will answer those who have
no fear of God”. From the ‘throne of God’, the prayer has been heard, the ‘question
posed’, and, now, judgment will descend from that throne, a judgment that will
re-unite time and geography and will ‘cleanse the city’ of its wickedness. We
can now contemplate the two phrases: “God, who is enthroned from of old, God,
who does not change.” What is central in these lines, within the context of the
psalm, is that God’s unchanging nature is wed to, and understood to be parallel
to, his ‘enthronement from of old’. Perhaps we are to hear here the ‘enthronement
over creation’ when god established his throne (creation) on the waters of
chaos. It is his ruling and sovereign
power over creation that is in focus here, which is precisely what the psalmist
has been appealing to. This is not an abstraction, but a prayer that God would make
present his sovereign rule, a rule that has existed ‘from of old’ and ‘does not
change’. The point, clearly, is not that God’s sovereign rule is ‘eternally
present’. The whole statement is prefaced by God’s ‘hearing the prayer’ and
then acting. There is a drama being enacted and the psalmist is asking that the
drama ‘move forward’ by calling into the present the sovereign rule.
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