Ps. 55.22-23 (why judgment is sudden)

Cast your lot in life / on Yhwh
and he will / sustain you
he will not / let the righteous / be shaken forever.
And you / O God
you will make them / go down / to the pit of corruption
those murderous / and treacherous men;
they will not live out / half of their days
But as for me, / I trust in you. 

These verses need to be understood together as they embody the same much the same movement, which is something we have stressed over and over again: that any act of redemption/deliverance for the righteous is an act of judgment/destruction of the wicked. This dynamic is clear here: he sustains the righteous and (re)moves the ‘shaken’ nature of their existence by making the wicked ‘go down into the pit’. While these may be performed chronologically at different times they are, theologically, coincidental. We see this, first, by the fact that Yhwh will not let the rights be ‘shaken forever’. This phrase points us back to the opening where the psalmist complains of the wicked ‘moving’ evil on him (vs. 4). A very similar term is used. The point is that what has been yoked to the righteous by the wicked, will now be overcome by Yhwh. And this will occur by and through the sudden overcoming of the wicked and their being cast down into the ‘pit of corruption’. Second, these two verses represent a type of unity by the fact that the action is ascribed, in both redemption and judgment, to God in terms that are very similar: “he will sustain you…he will not let…you will make them go down…they will not live out”. We are to hear in this close resemblance the fact that the action performed by God on behalf of the righteous is also an act performed by God on the wicked. Third, the act that God performs for the righteous is mirrored, in reverse form, on the wicked. The righteous are ‘sustained’, giving the sense of a perpetual undergirding of their well-being, even through their being ‘shaken’. Furthermore, their ‘shaken’ time will come to an end. For the wicked, however, the opposite occurs: they will be ‘suddenly’ cut off and sent to the pit, and what comes to an end for them is, precisely, their well-being. So, whereas the righteous are sustained, the wicked are suddenly cast down. This sudden nature of their judgment also points, thematically, to a final point inherent in the psalm: their duplicity in the face of the righteous creates the condition of their sudden judgment. We saw this in verses 14-15 when it moved from ‘walking in the Temple’ to “let death surprise them!”. As we saw in our previous reflection, duplicity engenders revelation through destruction. And, further, duplicity, in order to be fully revealed for its wickedness, will come about through the opposite of what it thought it was achieving (it thought it was achieving glory and sustaining power; it will be judged by a sudden and irrevocable reversal of its objective). We have encountered this in other psalms: that evil will be judged by a type of mockery of itself, that God will, in almost a humorous and fitting way, judge evil by and through the opposite of what it (evil) intended. For those who have attempted to appropriate for themselves a type of certainty apart from faithful adherence to God, God will rob them of that certainty precisely through the unforeseen and sudden act of judgment.