Ps. 81.14 (straightaway)

Straightaway / I would subdue their enemies
and turn my hand / against their foes. 

When Israel entered in the ‘letting go’ of Yhwh it was not entirely clear where exactly she went. We knew how she was directed; what her motive force was: “her stubborn heart”. Within the context of the psalm it is suggested that she was “let go” to follow the ‘foreign’ and ‘strange’ gods. But what happened after that, or as a consequence of it, we did not know. Here, we are provided a glimpse into one of the effects: she is overruled by foes. While this may not exhaust the effect of her ‘letting go’, it does provide us with an important insight—that God’s ‘letting go’ involved the removal of his protection. Israel became, in other words, vulnerable. Within that space of vulnerability she moved back into the ‘egypt-territory’ she had been released from. As we reflected on last time: her ‘letting go’ is not a freeing; she is, in a sense, being ‘transferred’ over to enemies. She does not enter into some neutral sphere, where can move ‘under her own steam’. I highly doubt the psalmist would be able to understand what such a place would look like. Rather, to move out of the realm of Yhwh is to move into the realm of another god. And yet, providing this much space to her rebellion goes against the grain of the psalm. Once she has wandered off, God immediately responds and recapitulates his call to her: “O, that my people would listen to me…” Even within her wandering off God still regards them as in covenant to himself. And now we see how almost inconsequential her wandering has been to his love for her. Within her state of oppression, he seeks to move immediately and without qualification to her aid. This primary movement is important to grasp. As we will see, God seeks to re-introduce Israel into his abundant blessing (vs. 16). However, now he must first deal with her enemies and her oppression. First, there must be war and judgment. 

We should sense in these lines the reversal of the ‘letting go’.  There, God acted in a type of permissive resignation. It was clearly not his desire that Israel be ‘let go’. Here, by contrast, God describes his active passion. This is God’s will without shadow.