Ps. 74.15-16 (ending the 'season of taunts')

The day / belongs to you; / the night also;
you put the moon / and the sun / in place;
you set / all the boundaries / of the earth;
summer and winter / you formed them. 

From the destructive, kingly pacification of Chaos we now move into the more serene verses of ownership and formation. At first glance, it could appear that while the previous verses dealt with the pacification of water-chaos, these verses focus on God’s creation of land. However, that is not the case. The focus is instead on God’s mastery over (his dominion over) time—the focus is entirely temporal. What ‘belongs to you’ is ‘day and night’. And this ownership is expressed by and through his ‘putting the moon and sun in place’. In Genesis, these two ‘govern’ the day and night. Further, the boundaries do not appear to be so much physical boundaries but those of ‘summer and winter’ that he ‘forms’. The question is why would the psalmist focus on this sense of God’s creative mastery over time? The answer, in the context of this psalm, is quite clear: he is acknowledging God’s authority over the ‘how long’ (vs. 10) he will allow his enemies to taunt him (again, vs. 10). That is the real connection between these two sections (vs. 13-15 and vs. 16-17). One focuses on God’s kingly authority over his foes, the other over his absolute authority over the ‘season’ of their taunts. Although the destruction of the Temple appears to be “total” (vs. 3) and “defiled to the ground” (vs. 7), and although the psalmist and his people currently reside in the ‘no-time’ of ‘no-signs’ (vs. 9), God, the king “from long ago” (vs. 12) can, because he is the creator (or fashioner) of time, “draw forth his right hand” (vs. 11). His mastery over time is as equal and effortless as his destruction of Chaos (vs. 13-15). The same conclusion we reached in the previous reflection applies here: God’s creation and mastery over time generates the terrible sense of its defilement into “how long” because, grounded beneath this sense of division, is the conviction that God can effortlessly ‘resurrect’ it as well. He can end the ‘season of taunts’.