Ps. 59.4c-5 (God's reputation)

Rouse yourself / to meet me / and see!
For you / are Yhwh / God of Hosts
O God / of Israel
up now / to punish all the nations
show no mercy / to all evil deceivers! 

The appeal in the opening verses were for “deliverance”, in the second section (vs. 3-4) it was that God would “see”. Here, it is that God would “rouse himself” and “meet me” and “see”. It is, in addition, the call for “punishment”. We already commented yesterday on how this “seeing” is to be understood as nearly simultaneous to God’s “meeting me” and, now, his punishment. The directive to God to “see” is never a directive for God to perform a merely passive “watching” but an active movement of deliverance and judgment. For God to see is for God to act. And for God to see his righteous suffer at the hands of wickedness is for him to “punish”. Here, the opening line touches upon this same desire by telling God to “rouse himself”. It may be that such statements were, in Baal liturgies, actually meant to awaken the god (as when Elijah taunted the priests of Ba’al). It is not likely that the psalmist/king thought God, Yhwh, was actually asleep. That said, it is clear, that he saw his petitions as instigating movement on God’s part. He could ‘prick him’ into action. All of these directives have been aimed at precisely that (“deliver me”, “set me up high…”, “see..”). It is instructive then, with what ‘arrow’ the king now aims at God’s heart: “For you are Yhwh, God of Hosts, O God of Israel, up now…”. The king of Israel is reminding God of whose God he is—Israel’s god. And, how powerful he is—God of Hosts. In combining both of these, it is an attempt to awaken God’s sense of responsibility and the attack on his reputation that these nations are about to make if they succeed. God will be shamed not only if fails to reveal his power but if he fails to come to the protection of his people. The king is pointing out that, in a sense, God has something to lose if he does not move into action. The fact that the king is here appealing to God’s public persona (his reputation) is very important when it comes to the later portions of the psalm—God’s deliverance, when it comes to his people, is not a merely private affair. It is aimed at displaying, to the world (and all the nations), God’s concern and regard for his people. In the same way that Israel is to be a “light to the world” so too will their deliverance be one that is a “light to the world”. In this way, it sits, almost entirely, within this public arena. By aiming the arrow in this manner the king is showing his awareness of this dynamic and the fact that Israel, herself, is the public display of God’s reputation to the world; indeed, Israel is God’s reputation to the world.