Psalm 21

"the Lord will engulf them in his wrath, and fire will devour them"

I chose a cheerful line to meditate on this week. :-)

Psalm 21 is a song about the Davidic king, with the last half of the psalm praising his abilities in battle. It's a war cry. 

In many progressive Christian spaces and within the academy, it is unfashionable to be overly aggressive in reading Christ back into the Hebrew Scriptures. And yet, in my opinion, Psalm 21 is one of those places were I feel it is necessary to read the song Christologically. When the Messiah finally came he didn't come as a Davidic warrior in the style of the Maccabees. Jesus didn't, in the name of God, engulf the Romans with his wrath and devour them with fire. 

And yet, such "Day of the Lord" imagery inaugurated Jesus' public ministry in the proclamation of John the Baptist:

“I baptize you with water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I. I am not worthy to remove his sandals. He himself will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing shovel is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn. But the chaff he will burn with fire that never goes out.”

And as we know, Jesus repeatedly invoked an eschatological fire that would judge all of humanity. But the wrath and fire here have been radically reconfigured, shifted out of the political realm and into the spiritual. This, of course, creates new and different sorts of tensions, questions, and conundrums. But the one clear and decisive thing it accomplishes is taking the sword out of the hand of God's people. Judgement becomes eschatological and is the Lord's prerogative, not ours. 

I know lots of progressive Christians get squeamish around talk of hell, but they often miss the moral implications of hell: non-violence in this world, taking the sword out of our hands and leaving judgment to God. So: Three cheers for hell!

Because when you look at the world today, where terrorists and nation states use lethal violence to accomplish political ends, where children lay dead on the streets, you start to appreciate the sanity and safety of singing "the Lord--and not us--will engulf them in his wrath, and fire will devour them."