Ps. 85.5-6 (anger, forever and rejoicing)

Will you be angry / with us forever
must your anger be prolonged / for generation after generation?
Will you not turn / and give us life
that your people / may rejoice in you? 

The first verse focuses on the duration of God’s anger, the second on its effect upon ‘life’. As to duration, the psalmist and the people ask God whether his stance of anger is something that will not come to an end. This question is important as it pertains to the opening of the psalm. It indicates a disruption in God’s action toward his people. God has been angry before, but he ‘turned’ from it and, importantly, “put an end to it” (duration). Here, the question, as presented as a question of duration, directly contradicts that experience: will it not come to an end. In a way, the psalmist is asking whether he (they) can rely upon God’s past concern for them or whether they have somehow become disowned, removed from the covenant family. As such, the question is not one asking for ‘information’ but is a plea, an attempt to persuade Yhwh to act now as he did back then—to end the ‘forever’. So the first question focuses on quantity (duration). 

The second question focuses on ‘quality’ (life and death), the experience of ‘life’ under God’s anger. Under the aegis of God’s wrath, the psalmist and his people live in a realm of death. Life, from the cosmic (harvest) to the communal (shame), is failing and they are, as a people, falling into death. This ‘loss of life’ is clearly an expansive, totalizing experience, the loss of which prevents them from enacting that ‘emblem of life’—rejoicing in God (liturgy). We have seen this reality throughout: the Pit (of death) does not offer praise to God while the ‘heavens’ engage in a perpetual liturgy. The closer one moves toward (or dwells in) the embrace of death, the less can one exist within the heavenly realm of liturgy and praise. So, whereas in the first question, the question of redemption involves a question of duration (and a desire to leave the ‘forever’ of wrath) the second involves a question of life and liturgy (the desire to enter into the ‘forever’ of God’s blessing and covenantal power).