Ps. 74.1 (in the place of presence, anger)

Why / O God / are you unrelenting / in your anger?
Why / does your anger smolder / against the flock / of your pasture? 

In our previous psalm there came a point at which the psalm irrevocably turned a corner: the psalmist’s entrance into the Temple. It was, at that point, that his heart’s purity and the presence of God in the Temple shed a blinding light on the question of the wicked’s prosperity. We noted how absolutely central and fundamental to the psamlist’s change in tone was the Temple. The Temple was, in no uncertain terms, the ‘answer’ to the problem posed by the wicked. We need not rehash here everything contemplated there except to say that it is not possible to overstate the centrality of the Temple (in Psalm 72) when contemplating the problem of the wicked’s apparent blessed state of existence. The reason for bringing this up here is to highlight this important fact: here, the Temple is destroyed. The ‘problem’ therefore, in a very real sense, is unable to resolved by the psalmist. Rather, he is left simply with a plea for God’s redemption. Perhaps more to the point, it is why here, in this summary and introductory verse, do we find nothing more than the repeated question, “Why?”. There will be no answer given at the end of the psalm. Rather, it concludes with a call for God “not to forget the clamor of your foes…”. There is, hovering over and within this psalm, a pervading spirit of incomprehension. The psalmist and his people are surrounded by “signs” but they are the signs of the wicked (vs. 4); as to God, his “signs” and his prophets are silent (vs. 9). Without his ‘word’, there is no comprehending his silence. Or, we might say, without his Temple. Which circles us around to the opening images of anger and smoldering fire. The first line, 1a, poses the question as God’s “unrelenting anger”. This strikes a note that will continue throughout the psalm: the sense that what has occurred (the destruction of the Temple) has manifested something more than a merely momentary act of punishment. The Temple, we must note, is often portrayed as inviolable, unable to be destroyed. In Genesis, we get the picture of the Temple as, in fact, creation itself and, in this way, the Temple is the ‘source’ of creation precisely by being that place wherein God ‘walks to and fro’. It can ‘house God’. It is the place where heaven and earth meet and find peace. When this is grasped we can see how its destruction would signal something profoundly disturbing, so disturbing in fact that it potentially reveals not simply the anger of God but the perpetual, unrelenting anger of God, something akin to the anger that destroyed the earth by the flood. The ‘abiding presence’ in the Temple is replaced by the ‘unrelenting anger’ of God. The second line intensifies the image by making the anger visceral: it is smoldering like volcanic mountain. This image points us to a moment of ‘volcanic’ eruption that has now simmered into a smoldering anger. We will see later that this original eruption was the destruction of the Temple followed by a land-wide destruction of ‘meeting-places’ (vs. 7-8). Both destructions are performed by fire (“They set your sanctuary on fire…So they burned every meeting-place in the land.”). As the psalmist witnessed these literal flames of destruction he perceives in them the ‘smoldering anger’ of God. And this anger is directed “against the flock of your pasture”. There are two important points to make about this phrase. The first is that the people being designated as God’s ‘flock’ makes him the shepherd. The image of the shepherd is very commonly associated with the king. God will later be described as such (vs. 12). This leads to the second point—that we find here, in the form a question, a type of taunt aimed at God. The psalmist is, in effect, imputing a type of negligence to God, that he is not effectively tending to his people in the way a king should but rather, is behaving in the opposite manner. This is very similar to the concluding lines when we read: “Do not forget the clamor of your foes…” To state it perhaps too baldly, the psalmist is attempting to shame God out of heaven. We will see this more-and-more as the psalm progresses but for now we simply need to observe that contained within this question is a plea. Or, to state it another way, this is not a question looking for an answer as much as a plea looking for deliverance.