Ps. 94.12-13 (not until the digging is done)

How blest is
the person / whom you discipline
O Yah
and whom / you teach / from your law, 
giving them assurance / because of evil days
until a pit / is dug / for the wicked. 

Up to this point Yhwh’s sovereignty has been portrayed in the ‘negative’, in the sense that it was set in opposition to the wicked’s conception of Yhwh’s power and authority. For the wicked, Yhwh’s sovereignty was one that not only challenged their conception of their own realm of freedom and the moral realm in general, but it issued upon them in scorn and derision. The tone of the psalm was itself a ‘judgment-tone’. As we saw, within the realm of Yhwh’s sovereignty, man’s wickedness operated as a ‘constriction’, it made man’s wicked freedom into a thing of vanity and emptiness. In this portion of the psalm, though, we come see the ‘positive’ of Yhwh’s sovereignty; what it is like to live in conformity and under the guidance of his authority. If living in rebellion against Yhwh’s sovereignty is constriction and death, living in conformity with it is ‘blessing and life’. And this ‘blessing’ is seen most poignantly through Yhwh’s ‘discipline’. We must note that this term has been used already, when the psalmist, rather derisively, chided the wicked for not recognizing that Yhwh ‘disciplines the nations’ with as much sovereign mastery as he has over an individual he has created. The wicked, however, failed to recognize this as discipline. For them, arguably, the ‘discipline of Yhwh’ was interpreted more as his absence and his ignorance. For them, the limitation inherent in Yhwh’s divine power pointed toward zones of his lack of oversight. In other words, for them, the inherent ‘chaos’ in the world signaled divine absence and, therefore, pure opportunity. For the psalmist, this view of history was, essentially, stupid and something only an idiot could believe. In this verse, we see how the righteous themselves look upon history within the same scope of Yhwh’s sovereignty. In other words, they are not confined to the restrictive view of the wicked and, as such, they see history as full, rather than empty. For them—and this is absolutely crucial—history is full of the patience of Yhwh, not his absence or limitation. The wicked are not winning; they are simply digging the pit of their own destruction and it is not deep enough yet. This vision creates history. And this ‘patience of Yhwh’ translates, for them, into a ‘time of assurance’. They can look past the moment and into the future to a time of reckoning, precisely because of what they take to be the obvious sovereignty of Yhwh over the individual, over nations and instruction/wisdom. The more ‘prior’ Yhwh is in authority over these powers, the more ‘dramatic’ time becomes as it “presses forward”. For the righteous, time is more like the drama of a play (or, a courtroom), whereas for the wicked, time (at least under Yhwh’s control) is not, ultimately, moving forward. For the righteous, the utter sovereignty of Yhwh makes history into a movement toward judgment; for the wicked, time-under-Yhwh is simply a time for a will-to-power. It is this perception and understanding that is the ‘blessing of the righteous’. 


The digging. We need to return to a theme that we noted in the opening verses—that of the ‘economic’ transaction inherent to vindication. For the righteous, their ‘payment’ is blessing. For the wicked, however, when Yhwh ‘rises up’ he will ‘turn back on the proud what they deserve’. The wicked receive payment, but their ‘payment’ is a boomerang. Yhwh ‘turns back’ on them their own wickedness. This then leads into questions of ‘how long will the wicked celebrate’. What we see now is that this question and this ‘vindication’ could be phrased: ‘How long will you permit the wicked to celebrate…’. Time is, from this point of view, a ‘transaction’ or a ‘building up’ of debits or credits. For the psalmist, he wants Yhwh to gather up all the wicked’s debits and cast them down upon them. In our verse today, that image changes to the wicked ‘digging their own hole’. Rather than their deeds boomeranging back upon them, their deeds are, in fact, their digging of a pit that, at the appointed time, Yhwh will (or, they will) cast them into. In both of these images, the wicked are themselves crafting their own judgment that is being stored up with Yhwh until he ‘rises up’, the ‘God of Vindication’.