Ps. 73.19 (judgment sudden and complete)

How suddenly / they can be destroyed
completely swept away / by terrors. 

We saw in verse 18 how the ‘slipper places’ not only recapitulated the experience of the righteous, now in terms of the wicked, but we also noted the emphasis on finality. Whereas the wicked almost stumbled, the wicked “will be put on slippery places”. Here, that note of finality and reversal is signaled again. When the psalmist began his description of the wicked, the first and most troubling aspect to them was the fact that they died without pain (vs. 4). This seemingly smooth movement into death was tantamount to the wicked avoiding the place of Sheol and, by a blessing, being ‘gathered to their ancestors’. Further, this focus on death is then perceived as their state of life itself: their entire lives are lived without pain and suffering. They die as they live—in apparent blessing. Here, however, something very different is perceived in the presence of God. Rather than a ‘carefree life’ and ‘prosperity’ (vs. 12), they are suddenly “destroyed and completely swept away”. To focus, first, on the word suddenly: The fact that judgment overtakes them without warning is crucial to grasp as to how it reverses the psalmist’s previous perception. Before, they lived a life of continuous, perpetual blessing, without anxiety and fully in the open. They sensed absolutely no threat to their existence. By contrast, when God’s judgment comes it will ‘answer’ this assurance by its suddenness. It will be as unpredictable as they were confident in their wickedness. It will be a ‘thief in the night’. Further, we have noted how the wicked operate in this psalm in manner very unlike the wicked in other psalms. In other psalms the wicked move within a realm of secrecy and conspiracy. They ‘set snares’. Here, they operate and move in the full light of day. Indeed, they wear their violence like clothing—on display. This ‘suddenness’ then also operates in response to this openness—it will come from a seeming place of hiddenness in that it will not come in a predictable manner. That realm of open rebellion inhabited by the wicked (that realm that seemed to stretch to and fill out heaven and earth) is here reversed by a hidden (sudden) mode of judgment. This reveals an important point—that wicked’s crossing of the border between heaven and earth, was never as profound as it appeared. They were, rather, enveloped by God’s sovereign gaze to such an extent that when the battle emerges—there will be no real challenge. Their reversal will not come about through a ‘hard won’ victory on God’s part, but rather, he will “suddenly” smash them in moment of complete reversal. Everything they built will be decimated. Which leads to the second point: the complete victory of God’s judgment. From ‘suddenness’ we merge, seamlessly, into the fact that God’s action will be total, effective and absolute: “destroyed”, “completely swept away”. The image here seems to evoke the sense of a massive and sudden flood that is known to occur in the Levant. These floods can occur in the middle of a sunny day (without warning) and be total in their devastation. The sense here is that the wicked’s fate is not to be crippled; it is to be totally and irretrievably destroyed. Both of these points now need to be merged into the fact that these realities emerge from the psalmist’s entrance into the Temple: it is the Temple that ‘births’ these twin assurances of God’s power. In this way we can say that the Temple reveals, as to the ‘suddenness’, the fact that God’s power is always (astonishingly and supremely) prior to, or contains within itself, the power of the wicked to perpetuate their wickedness. In other words, the Temple reveals that God’s judgment can erupt in a moment’s notice. And, further, that it will completely strip the wicked of their presumptions at power. The more one dwells in the real presence of God’s abiding power, the more one comes to see how the presence of the Temple guarantees this ‘substratum’ of God’s sovereign power within the earth. Further, this power of God is one that seeks and will accomplish its complete ‘mirror’ within creation. Meaning—evil will be destroyed so as to make creation into the Temple itself. The destruction of evil points to (or has its purpose in) God’s presence of holiness being expanded to the utmost edges of creation. God’s definitive establishment of the Temple points to (or, contains within itself) the definitive eradication of evil within the entirety of creation.