Ps. 94.22-23 (time consummated in judgment)

But Yhwh / has become / a fortress / for me
and my God / is my rock of refuge.
He will turn back on them / their iniquity
through their evil / he will destroy them;
Yhwh / our God / will destroy them.   

Within these concluding verses we catch sight of the dynamic of righteous and wicked as they stand before the active judgment of Yhwh. We need to recall that there is something of a drama outlined in this psalm, a ‘history’ so to speak. The wicked, of course, do not perceive it. They do not see any ‘plan’ being worked out in history. For the righteous, though, when they are elevated to the realm of wisdom, they are afforded a vision of history such that the present is but a time of Yhwh’s patience. It is the ‘time of the digging’ and it is a time that will come to a conclusion when the ‘pit is deep enough’. Within this time, there are ‘Lazarus moments’ of redemption, that speak toward the conclusion of the time and when Yhwh will ‘turn back’ on the righteous their reward and fully enact justice. This time, for the righteous, is also portrayed in these concluding verses, as a ‘time of protection’ or ‘a time of refuge’. It is because time is gathering momentum toward the denouement of the wicked that the righteous can be most ‘empowered’ the more they become patient and passive within Yhwh. Yhwh is not absent; he is profoundly and utterly present but under the mode of ‘refuge’ and ‘fortress’. He will become the ‘active God of Vindication’, but not yet. It is this perception of man’s position within the drama that constitutes man’s wisdom.  

 Further, this ‘wisdom’ is a covenantal wisdom, and one that finds its bearings on Yhwh’s faithfulness to that covenant. We see this when the psalmist describes Yhwh as “my God” and then, in the concluding line, as “our God”. This small phrase echoes the creation of the covenant between Yhwh and his people: “You will be my people, and I will be your God.” This fact is important for how it deepens our previous insights on the question of ‘alliances’. There, we saw that it is only through an ‘alliance’ with the divine, that any real earthly authority exists; otherwise, ‘all is vanity’. Here, that ‘alliance’, which is not afforded to the wicked, is seen not simply as an alliance, but a covenant—that act whereby two foreigners to each other become kin and family. This is the deepest of alliances and it contains within itself vows of faithfulness and protection. This covenantal trust in Yhwh is what forms in the ‘inner life’ of Yhwh as ‘refuge’ and ‘fortress’. 

The final verse speaks to when ‘the digging is done’, or, the ‘time is ripe’ for judgment. The previous verse was set in the present; this verse looks to the future. The verse is rich in how it portrays the act of judgment. What we find here is something we have seen in many other psalms when the psalmist describes how Yhwh judges: he judges through the wickedness of the wicked (“…through their evil, he will destroy them...”). When this occurs, the ‘evil’ that now falls on them mimics (or, mocks) the way it was originally performed by the wicked. What I mean is this: the wicked, when they enacted their evil, claimed that Yhwh could neither see nor understand it. For them, their evil was entirely private and hidden in darkness. Here, by contrast, it is fully public and reveled in the light. What we see here is that the evil is, in a sense, ‘truth-ed’ by Yhwh; he ‘makes it what it actually is’ (not what the wicked think it to be). This is when history reaches a type of ‘fulfillment’, when ‘everything is revealed’. Of course, this is anything but a type of mere ‘display’; rather, it is supremely active. That, in fact, is the point—what the wicked thought to reside in a realm only partially active/revealed (only the effect was visible), now becomes utterly and completely ‘fulfilled’. 

There is a deeply significant point to this in how time and judgment interact. In Yhwh, judgment takes all of man’s acts and ‘fulfills’ them, either in reward or in punishment. Time itself, then, is revealed in judgment because time is, at root, a moral reality. Everything that was only ‘potential’ in time, becomes ‘actual’ in judgment. As such, everything is ‘actually’ oriented not to itself, but to covenant communion with Yhwh. This is why images of judgment seem to oscillate between Yhwh actively judging and the righteous/wicked simply receiving what they have already done (but now in truth). Judgment is both because it is ‘history consummated’.