The ‘refuge’ that the psalmist finds in Yhwh is not
abstract. He is not confident that his soul will be delivered, regardless of
whether the evil destroy his body. Instead, he is certain that, contrary to his
friends imprecations, that Yhwh sees his plight and will, concretely and
historically, destroy the wicked who are imminently set to destroy him. Indeed,
he calls upon images of shocking and total destruction—of “coals, fire and
brimstone…raining down from heaven” to destroy the wicked. For the psalmist, to
be “in-Yhwh-in-the-Temple” is to stand within the realm of the One who can
mobilize the power of heaven instantly in order to protect “the righteous”. One
is not confined to worldly dynamics of fear-and-flight when one stands
in-Yhwh-in-the-Temple. Instead, the earth is made porous to heaven; it stands
within the glory of heaven; it stands, in the words of the psalm, within the “gaze
of Yhwh” who “scrutinizes the sons of man.”
This, I believe, is the point of the psalm. The psalmist’s
friend who is telling him to flee is confined within a world whose foundations
are not only being shaken but are, in fact, shakable. For the psalmist’s
friend, the imminence of the attack (“look!, the wicked are bending the bow!”)
has led his vision of how the world stands in relation to the righteousness of
heaven to be largely severed. Fear (and concern) has, quite literally, consumed
him. For him, the world is in a darkness that only the wicked have the ability
to see within. In such a world, at a time when destruction is apparently
certain, the only option is flight. And those, the ‘righteous’, who are under
attack, are mere “birds” who can only “flutter to the mountain.” The world is—only—what
it is. The “mountains” are no longer sacred places where heaven and earth meet,
but are mere ‘mountains’ where one can only hide; if the ‘foundations’ are
shaking, then one can only retreat to the highest place(s) on earth.
For the psalmist, Yhwh’s presence in the Temple is a direct
refutation of his friend’s fear and concern. The world is not only what it is.
The world is instead “scrutinized” by Yhwh. Importantly, the psalmist plays
with the image of seeing to make his point. The psalm ends with the righteous ‘seeing
the Face’, but in the middle of the psalm all of the ‘sons of men’ stand within
the ambit of Yhwh’s eyes. The Face that is in the Temple, is the same Face
whose eyes can gaze, absolutely, over the entire earth. The reason this is so
is because in the Temple heaven and earth meet. That is the point of placing
these lines directly in the middle of the psalm—“Yhwh is in his holy temple;
Yhwh’s throne is in the heavens.” The Temple, which stands on Mount Zion, is not merely a mountain but the
dwelling of Yhwh and the place through which his heavenly throne exerts its
control over the world. This is why, for the psalmist, the foundations of the
world are not being “being torn down” as his friend believes. The world is,
literally, in the Temple, within the heavenly control of Yhwh.
Within this reality, the imminence of the wicked’s attack
will be met by the shockingly fast judgment of heaven, when it will “rain down
coal, fire and brimstone.” This is, crucially, why the present moment can be
described as a “time of testing”. It is meant to purify the righteous, as through fire, while the wicked are
destroyed with fire. To stand within
the Temple is to stand within a furnace-that-is-Yhwh. It is, moreover, to stand
within the flame that does not destroy (as with the burning bush, as with the ‘three’
in Daniel) the righteous but will consume the wicked (as in Daniel). And, at the
end of the testing, when the righteous have been further purified, they will be
permitted to see, in the Temple, the Face. This ‘end of testing’, like the
judgment, though, is not understood as beyond history; it is an historical
conviction. The radical wedding of Yhwh to the Temple, assures the psalmist of
Yhwh’s radical faithfulness to the righteous when they “seek refuge in Yhwh”.
At a deeper level, what we are witnessing here is the germ
or adumbration of resurrection faith, a conviction that it is the ‘living’ that
will, concretely, witness the faithfulness of Yhwh. This resurrection faith, in
the context of this psalm, is rooted in the conviction that Yhwh, when he gives
himself to the Temple, really and truly, and faithfully, does give himself. The
Temple is not disposable, exchangeable or merely a metaphor. It is the physical
embodiment of Yhwh’s faithfulness to his people. It is the place where the ‘earth’
fully becomes the earth by being wed to and in relation to heaven. Within this
place, there can be no death, only deliverance. There is life , abundant and
prodigal and overflowing.
For the Christian, the Temple was not done away with. It was
intensified. Christ is the new and eternal Temple, the living Temple. And, as
John would say, those who live “in him” live, already, in the resurrection. When
the Christian prays this psalm, they pray it “in Christ” (just as it is ‘in
Yhwh’) and they can, just as concretely (indeed, more concretely) as the
author, expect a concrete and historical deliverance from enemies. A
deliverance that is not ‘in heaven’, but ‘in the resurrection’, because it is
in the resurrection that our Temple now lives and is being built up.
