Ps. 73.20 (the nightmare)

Like a dream / when one awakens
so when you / rouse yourself, / O Lord
you will despise them / as mere images. 

These lines further a theme we have been tracing: the effortless destruction of the wicked by God. This sense of complete mastery by God is, as we have indicated, something that emerges only upon the psalmist’s entrance into the Temple. It is the solidity of the Temple, as the dwelling of God, that grants him the comprehension of God’s mastery over the wicked. Whereas before, the wicked’s presence, we noted, was not simply massive but oppressively dominating the entire landscape of perception (heaven to earth), in these lines that reality is completely overturned: they are mere ‘dreams’ that vanish upon awakening. Whereas before they seemed immovable in their assurance and in their power, they now seem to be so effortlessly dismissed that God needs to mere “wake up (rouse yourself)” in order for them to vanish. This image is crucial in this regard to grasp: God’s action in order to destroy them is likened to the almost inevitable dissipation of a dream upon awakening. There is no confrontation, no battle, no exertion whatsoever. God’s ‘arousal’ itself accomplishes their destruction. God’s ‘will’, in a sense, does not even need to be directed toward them. They simply ‘dissipate’ before his awakening. This sense of ‘confrontation’ (or, the lack thereof) flows throughout the ‘battles’ waged by God on behalf of his own (from the Exodus, to the taking of the promised land, to Jericho in particular, to David’s rise). There is the sense that there is no real battle occurring, no real striving. Notice how the psalmist expertly avoids implicating that God is ‘asleep’. “So when you rouse yourself…” Unlike most other forms of ‘awakening’, God is not subject to the forces of sleep. Rather, he ‘rouses himself’. God’s power here to dispel the wicked coincides with his freedom at ‘rousing himself’. Both are total and neither are subject to forces outside of God. It is because of this alignment that the reality of the wicked is understood to be that of “mere images”. There is a final observation to make about this series of images—when God ‘rouses himself’ the wicked will simply dissipate in the light of his face. The reality that is the Temple will now be the reality that is creation. Here is the profound reality: that the judgment of God is the prelude to his ‘awakened’ (or, aroused) face as it pervades creation in the same manner as it inhabits the Temple. In other words, the time of the wicked is the time of the localized Temple. And, the localized Temple is what reveals “the time of the wicked”. Further, there is not in this psalm a ‘logic to the wicked’. The ‘time of the wicked’ is not a time of ‘patient endurance’ and their existence does not serve some other end. Rather, their existence is completely ephemeral and unsubstantial. To ask ‘why God does not rouse himself’ is to miss the decisive note being struck here—the ‘time of the wicked’ is ‘no time at all’. Within the presence of God, in the Temple, their time and their reality is, in a way, unreal, a nothing. Their time is ‘mere seeming’, a ‘mere nothing’. It is the ‘time of vanity’. Hence, the psalmist was, outside of the Temple, wrong when he said: “it surely seemed as nothing that I kept my heart clean…”. Real ‘time’ and ‘presence’ is God in the Temple.  In the Temple of God, the ‘why’ is completely subverted to his presence.