Ps. 82.2 (When God asks "How long...")

How long / will you judge unjustly
and favor / the wicked? 

In every other psalm that we have looked at thus far, the question of “How long…” has been on the lips of man and it has been directed at God. Of course, when the psalmist poses the question to God he is not asking for information; it is, rather, a petition for the time of injustice to cease. It is a rhetorical question used to get God to act on his people’s behalf. Here, however, when the words on placed on God’s lips and he is addressing them to the assembly of the gods a fundamentally different meaning emerges, although related. First, it is not a petition but a judgment. This is a verdict that is being rendered on behalf of the gods. Second, it is a type of complaint in that it recognizes that the present time is one of injustice because of the failure of gods in administering, or upholding, justice. What we see is this: when man speaks these words, from ‘the bottom up’, they are intended to move God into action. When they are spoken by God, however, from the ‘top down’, they operate in the form of indictment and judgment. Likewise, when these words are spoken by man they ask God “how long will the wicked persist in their power?”; it is not asking “Why are you, God, judging unjustly?”. In this way the psalmist acknowledge the fact of God’s mastery but his perplexity as to why God will not act. There is a hiatus between the object of the question (God) and the accusation (injustice). When God speaks these words, though, they are aimed at the gods. There is no hiatus between the object of the question and the accusation of injustice—the gods themselves are the reason for time’s distortion. This strikes me as a crucial insight, for several reasons. First, when man asks “how long…” there is a lingering sense that man’s concern for justice might, in some way, exceed God’s passion for justice. It is as if man were saying to God, “if I had the power you had, I would be acting to rectify the situation.” This sense emerges precisely because of the hiatus between the one addressed (God) and the accusation (injustice). Here, though, what we see is that God is just as moved by injustice as the psalmists have been. Except now the question can be formulated without any residue of doubt or question; it can be a judgment in other words. 

And, between these two questions, importantly, emerges the realm of the gods. We might even say: it is the realm of the gods, and their administration of justice, that provides the ‘space’ of man’s hiatus. It is because of them, and their failure, that man’s question to God has a lingering and troubling sense of ambivalence. One point to this is that justice is not something that is administered solely by God but mediated by the divine realm, and then performed on earth. This is the ‘government of being’, and it is not simply God-and-man, but God-the gods-and-man. The gods administer justice in the same manner as man administers it; they both participate God’s justice. However, when the gods fail, man fails and injustice spreads across the earth—uncreating the world. The important point to all this is that what we see in this psalm is that God’s act of establishing justice must take the form of judgment in the divine realm. It is not the case that ‘man’ simply has to be put-to-right, but the gods as well. This ‘order of justice’ could, perhaps, only be seen from the top-down, from this heavenly perspective (it is, in a sense, apocalyptic). The extent of man’s vision does not, unless revealed, penetrate into the realm of the gods. This is why man must be ‘taken to heaven’ in order to be provided this glimpse both into the divine realm’s failure and a glimpse into God’s unquestionable passion for justice. 

(Perhaps we could even say—that in Christ, who is the ‘Word made flesh’, we actually see the enactment of both of these ‘how long’ questions. On the one hand, he has come to battle the divine realm and re-establish the rightful reign of Yhwh; on the other hand, he has come, fully man, in order to petition for his Father to rectify the order of justice. This may not be the reflection of an adequate Christology but I do think there is something to fact that in Christ we are witnessing this ‘how long’ of God as it is performed (in casting out demons, etc…)).