Psalms 58

Psalms 58:1

Psalm 58: The Judges Judged58:1, 2 As the Psalm opens, it is a vigorous protest against unjust judges or rulers. The mighty lords of the earth are put on the spot. Have they been fair in their decisions? Have they dispensed justice to the common people? The obvious answer is “No.” In their hearts they have concocted all sorts of crookedness. Then their hands have dealt out the violence that their hearts had planned. The land is filled with perversion of justice. 58:3 The subject broadens from dishonest magistrates to the wider class of wicked people to which they belong. Their corruption is not a development of later life; it can be traced right back to their birth. Their lawlessness and rebellion are inborn; as soon as they begin to talk, they begin to lie. 58:4, 5 Their speech is slanderous and malignant like the deadly poison of a serpent. Their ears are deaf to the voice of God like the deaf cobra that will not listen to the charmer, no matter how skillfully he plays. 58:6, 7 Just as David drew from the world of nature to describe their wickedness, so he now dips into natural science for fitting metaphors of judgment. Let the teeth of these fierce lions be broken, their cruel fangs extracted. Let them vanish like waters that quickly disappear into the ground, or a stream that mysteriously vanishes underground. The Hebrew of verse 7b is uncertain. It may mean, “May they be as arrows with the heads cut offblunt and harmless.” 58:8 Then the world of snails and slugs is invaded. Just as a snail “melts away” in a trail of slime, so let these criminals disappear from the haunts of men. Whether snails actually dissolve in slime is an unimportant technicality. No one objects when we say that a burning house “goes up in smoke.” Then why quibble over a figurative expression in the Bible? The next imprecation is that these evildoers might die prematurely, like a stillborn child that never sees the sun. “The eyes of the wicked have never been opened,” says Scroggie, “and their possibilities have never unfolded; the sinner is an abortion, a promise never fulfilled.” 58:9 Finally the psalmist asks that they may be suddenly swept away, like burning thorns are scattered by a whirlwind before the pot above them feels the heat. Maclaren says: The picture before the psalmist seems to be that of a company of travellers round their camp, preparing their meal. They heap brushwood under the pot, and expect to satisfy their hunger; but before the pot is warmed through, not to say before the water boils or the meal is cooked, down comes a whirlwind, which sweeps away fire, pot and all. 58:10 There is nothing uncertain about the Hebrew here. It states unmistakably that the people of God will be elated when the wicked are punished, that he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. If this sounds vindictive and loveless to our Christian ears, we may justify it by saying, with J. G. Bellett, that while we cannot rejoice in judgment in this Age of Grace, believers will do so when the Lord vindicates His divine glory by vengeance. Or we may consider the words of Morgan that “it is a sickly sentimentality and a wicked weakness that has more sympathy with the corrupt oppressors than with the anger of God.” 58:11 In the ongoing judgment of the ungodly, men realize that the righteous are rewarded, and that God actually does judge men here on earth.