Ps. 69.24-25 (the logic of wrath)

Pour out / your wrath / on them
and let your fierce anger / overtake them;
let their encampments / become desolate
and let no one dwell / in their tents. 

From the natural destruction of the wicked now comes the ‘pouring out’ of God’s wrath. Destruction upon destruction; terror upon terror and “guilt upon guilt” (vs. 27). The image of ‘pouring’ points us in the direction these lines are heading: it is of an encompassing, saturating and overpowering flood of wrath. The fact that God’s wrath here operates as a form of ‘liquid’ probably has some resonance with the encompassing nature of the ‘flood’ that engulfed the psalmist in the opening lines. God’s wrath then, when it is ‘poured out’, operates in precisely the opposite manner to the wicked’s ‘flood’—rather than being the anti-creation force of chaos seeking to murder the righteous, it is a cleansing flood seeking to remove the wicked from the land. As we said yesterday, God’s judgment seeks to remove the wicked, not simply neutralize it. Hence, this ‘pouring out’ does become a totalizing force of removal—the ‘fierce anger’ overtakes them, makes their encampments desolate and prevents their return. There is a clear, and important, progression here—the wrath of God is not aimed at simply the removal (making the encampments desolate) but also at establishing a perpetual safety (let no one dwell in their tents). This points us toward the end of the psalm where God is called upon to save Zion and ‘build the towns of Judah’, allow them to ‘possess it’ and—importantly—to ‘inherit it and pass it on’. This is not mere possession but perpetual (resurrection) establishment. Again—it is with this goal in mind that the wicked are now removed. The land must be cleared in order to re-establish it in holiness and liturgy. And God’s wrath is this ‘clearing’, this preparation. But, it is penultimate. Zion (the liturgical center and ‘home of God’) and the land are the end. God’s wrath must be understood in the context of this “zeal” for his house. And this leads to the final reversal and a key resolution of the psalm. We noted before that the psalmist is the ‘idiot’ of God because he has all of God’s zeal but none of his power. All of the insults that should have fallen on God and provoked his ire instead fell, mutely, on the psalmist. He was forced to suffer the silence of God in the face of accusers. However, what we see here is the ‘answer’ to the zeal-without-power—it is God’s “wrath poured out” with the goal being the establishment of the ‘house’. The ‘idiots’ zeal for God’s house is now met by God’s own zeal (his wrath) for his house (house being, as it was with the psalmist, both the Temple/Zion and the ‘house of Israel’). This act of judgment then both unifies that which had been separated and judges/separates that which had been unified—the psalmist was not unified because his zeal and history were not coinciding (hence, shame, humiliation and reproach are the central evils of the psalm); God was, in a way, not unified because he saw all of the injustice but wasn’t acting; the evil were unified in that their desires and their actions were accomplishing their goals. In God’s judgment—the psalmist’s zeal is honored and his reputation glorified, publicly; God acts in righteousness; the evil are subjected to their own devices and removed from the land.