Ps. 86.14 (the godless day)

O God / the godless have risen / against me
a ruthless gang / has sought my life
they have no regard / for you. 

One thing we indicated in the opening petition (verses 1-7) was the curious absence of an enemy. The psalmists asks for God to ‘hear him’, he asks for protection and he asks for mercy, but he never once identifies who, or what, is persecuting him, causing him to cry out to God. We are left wondering whether it is a sickness, a personal enemy or, if these were the words of a king, a nation. Here, however, as the complaint is again initiated, an enemy comes clearly into focus: they godless, ruthless and ‘hate me’ (vs. 17). We now are coming to see that the force working against the psalmist is malign, and its darkness is one that is not only ‘horizontal’ towards the psalmist, but extends upwards, vertically, to God. Further, the threat is not singular but varied and plural: the godless, a ruthless gang and they. 

The plural and varied nature of the enemy may, thematically, be important. We saw in the middle section how “the nations” became united around Yhwh, implying that before that act of supreme unification they were, although ‘made by Yhwh’, dispersed and varied. This fractured community of nations, as they exist in the present, could be, in part, this ruthless gang and the godless. Notably, at the end of the psalm, it is precisely these attackers that will be “dismayed” by the “working of a sign”—the same sign-effect that unites the nations in the middle section. (As we will see there, this ‘sign’ of God becomes a ‘judgment-sign’. Although it is worked for the redemption of his people, it publicity operates as a judgment against those who refuse it. “I did not come to the world to judge, but those who refuse me stand judged already…”). 

All of these insights can be further deepened by the observation that this verse mirrors verse 7: “In my time of distress (the day of my distress) I call to you, for you can answer.” This ‘day of distress’ now matched with the ‘rising of the godless’ does seem to point to a denouement of some sort (for example, a trial or a battle where the fate of the psalmist will be decided). This lends a very dark, ‘congregating darkness’ sense to the psalm and focuses the psalmist urgency for deliverance—for “a sign”. The psalmist is ‘walking into darkness’, a trial or battle (but, regardless, a destruction), from which his only redemption will be “from the lowest depths of Sheol” (vs. 13); the sign will be, in other words, resurrection (and, resurrection as the conquering of his enemies).