Psalm 83 probably does not immediately resonate with your heart the way, say, Psalm 23 would with its beautiful image of the Lord as our shepherd. Nor does it express the glory of the Messiah in the way that Psalms 2, 45, and 72 do. Nor does it celebrate the wonders of God’s grace to the repentant in the way that Psalms 32 or 51 do. This psalm is a national lament, full of what seem to be obscure geographical references, and its major theme is judgment. This is one of the imprecatory psalms, meaning it is a psalm that calls down judgment on the psalmist’s enemies, a judgment that foreshadows the final judgment of God that is going to come upon all humanity. Is divine judgment something that we as Christians can delight in this morning? Aren’t we much more prone to accept the fact of divine judgment the way we accept cough syrup: we know we’re supposed to, but we’re sure not going to enjoy it?
I have been reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, one of the founders and a former CEO of Apple. Jobs’s parents were never fervent Christians, but they did take Steve to a Lutheran church on Sundays when he was a child. But Steve stopped attending church for good in 1968. In July of that year, when Steve was thirteen, he saw a shocking picture on the cover of Life magazine of two starving children in Biafra. He took the magazine to the church’s pastor and said, “If I raise my finger, will God know which one I’m going to raise even before I do it?” The pastor replied, “Yes, God knows everything.” Steve then pulled out the magazine and asked, “Well, does God know about this and what’s going to happen to those children?” “Steve,” the pastor replied, “I know you don’t understand, but yes, God knows about that.” From that day on, Steve Jobs wanted nothing more to do with such a God who knew of such evil and yet did not prevent it. He spent the rest of his life practicing a form of Buddhism.
The problem that Steve Jobs encountered on that day in 1968 is what is known as the problem of evil. If God is all-powerful and completely good, how can he allow such evil and suffering to go on in his creation? I think at some point, most people encounter this question in some form. The cry of every human heart is to know that, ultimately, we live in a moral universe, where good and evil are clearly distinguished from one another because the God who created us and rules over us is, in spite of what we may see around us now, completely good and therefore completely opposed to evil. Don’t you see that the only hope for such an outcome is that a day of reckoning will come, a final judgment where every single sin receives a fitting answer from God? Don’t you see that, if such a day of judgment never comes, there is no way we can go on believing that God is truly good? As the Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck wrote, “All of history cries out for world judgment.” Let us not be embarrassed of this biblical teaching. With the psalmist, let us embrace it, desire it, and pray for it, learning from the Psalms how and why we should do so.
his psalm calls upon God to bring destruction on a league of nations arrayed against Israel. And though this psalm does not mention the final judgment directly, I believe the judgment it calls for in the defeat of Israel’s enemies is a type of the final judgment when God will deliver us from our enemies at the end of history. So then, how does this psalm speak into our situation? It shows that we should desire and pray for God’s final judgment to come. As we suffer through the trials of this present age, let our hope be fixed on the day when Christ will come to set all wrongs right. Isn’t this exactly what Jesus taught us to pray for in the Lord’s Prayer: “Your kingdom come”? What does it mean for God’s kingdom to come? Well, in one sense it has already come. Jesus, risen from the dead, is now reigning at the right hand of God the Father. But while we acknowledge the rule of Christ, the kingdom remains a hidden reality. Most people do not recognize the sovereign rule of King Jesus. And so we do not yet experience the full reality of the kingdom. We must, then, pray for the kingdom to come, meaning we pray that it would be openly revealed. And the open manifestation of the kingdom necessarily includes the subduing and judgment of all who oppose the reign of King Jesus. Make no mistake: if you pray, “Your kingdom come,” you are praying for God to execute judgment on this rebellious world through the man he has appointed to judge the living and the dead: Jesus Christ.
The psalm follows the basic pattern of a lament. It begins with an address in verse 1, followed by the lament itself in verses 2-8, then concludes with a petition in verses 9-18. As we open ourselves to the Word of God this morning, let us learn from this psalm three reasons we should desire and pray for the final judgment.
When the devil tempted Jesus in Luke 4, he showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment and said, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Satan is a liar, but on this occasion he was not lying. The kingdoms of this world do, in fact, belong to him. He is the prince of the power of the air, the god of this world, the power who stands behind the beast of Revelation 13, a symbol of worldly powers and institutions. God created Adam to rule this creation as God’s representative, but when Adam and Eve listened to the serpent and rebelled against God, the serpent seized dominion over creation. The enemy we face is not a cartoonish figure with horns and a pitchfork. He is a mighty spiritual foe whose influence extends over every nation, over every human culture, over every human institution, over every human being who is born into this world under the dominion of sin. And as Revelation 12 narrates, since he has no more power, because of the finished work of Christ, to accuse us before God in Heaven, his focus during the short time that he has remaining is to destroy us.
The formidable nature of our enemy is pictured in this psalm, where a league of ten nations stands ready to attack Israel. Asaph mentions Edom (the descendants of Esau, Jacob’s twin brother), the Ishmaelites (descendants of Ishmael, Abraham’s son with Hagar), Moab (one line of the descendants of Lot, Abraham’s nephew), the Hagrites (a nomadic people who lived east of the Jordan river), Gebal (most likely located in the mountains of Edom), Ammon (another line of descent from Lot), and Amalek (the first enemies Israel faced after they came out of Egypt). All of these nations were located to the southeast and east of Israel. But verse 7b goes on to mention Philistia, located to the southwest, and Tyre, located to the northwest, of Israel. And to cap it all off, Asshur (another name for Assyria) is mentioned in verse 8. Assyria would have been the most powerful of these nations, and in fact that is why they are called “the strong arm of the children of Lot,” or the real power that stands behind Moab and Ammon (and perhaps the other nations as well). Geographically, Assyria is located to the east of Israel, but they would always invade from the north, thereby completing the circle. The psalm pictures Israel as utterly surrounded.
More than that, this alliance of enemy powers is arrogantly confident of certain victory. Verse 2 says they make an uproar and have raised their heads in defiance of the living God of Israel. Not only are they confident, they are also unified, according to verses 3 and 5: they make crafty plans, they consult together, they conspire with one accord, even entering into a covenant with one another in this endeavor. And what is their purpose? To make Israel into a client state and force her to pay tribute? No. Their purpose is the total annihilation of Israel. In words that sound like they could come straight out of Nazi propaganda, verse 4 says, “They say, ‘Come, let us wipe them out as a nation; let the name of Israel be remembered no more!’” In short, Israel’s foes are confident, numerous, united, powerful, merciless, and all around. The odds of survival in the face of such a threat are slim.
And that is why Asaph prays. It is why he calls on God not to remain silent but to hearken to the dire need of his people and come to their aid, for if he does not, there is no hope for them to come from elsewhere. But note in particular how Asaph recognizes the love of God for his people in the way he crafts this lament. Verse 3 says of the nations, “They lay crafty plans against your people; they consult together against your treasured ones.” So the opposition is against God’s people, his treasure. But verse 2 says, “For behold, your enemies make an uproar; those who hate you have raised their heads.” And verse 5 reads, “For they conspire with one accord; against you they make a covenant.” In verse 3, the nations oppose God’s people. In verses 2 and 5, they oppose God himself. What is the meaning of this subtle shift in terminology? It is that God takes an attack on his people very, very personally. You attack a man’s wife, and you have attacked that man. God will act to defend his bride. This is the lesson that Saul of Tarsus learned in Acts 9:4 when the risen Christ appeared to him on the road to Damascus, where he was on his way to lock up Christians, and Jesus asked him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting”—not “my people”—but “why are you persecuting me?” Christ so closely identifies himself with his people in covenant love that to persecute Christians is to persecute Christ.
The enemy we face in this present age is a formidable one. Now, that may be easy for you to recognize when you hear about church bombings in the Middle East, but does Satan’s opposition really touch us here? Though it comes in different forms, the answer is unmistakably yes. We bear witness to the lordship of Christ, and that is a testimony that will always be offensive to those who worship the god of Self. In particular, we are called at this moment in history to bear witness to the truth about human sexuality, namely, that Christ is lord over it, and thus we have no authority to deny our created nature and reconfigure sexual arrangements according to our distorted desires. And as we bear witness to this reality, the culture around us will call us bigots and haters, and it will move for our marginalization from society. We should not be surprised by the fact that professional athletes who openly declare themselves homosexual are lauded as courageous heroes while those who publicly declare their Christian faith are vilified in the media. The seed of the serpent will not warm to those who bear witness to the lordship of Jesus Christ. Our enemy’s desire is to destroy our faith, and he will use any tool at his disposal to accomplish that goal. And his reach over this world is extensive. So let us pray for it to come to an end, as it will at the final judgment.
Asaph moves from lament to petition in verses 9-18, and we will see from the petition section two additional reasons to pray for the final judgment. Second,
Salvation in the New Testament is a multidimensional reality. We “were saved” in the past at conversion, according Romans 8:24. We have been decisively transferred from death to life. But in the very same book, Paul says in 5:9, “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” Here our salvation is still future, salvation from the wrath of God that is coming on the world at the final judgment.
And, in fact, not only will we be saved from God’s coming wrath, we will be saved by his coming wrath when he delivers us from our enemies. Salvation and judgment always go together in Scripture. Just as God’s judgment against the Egyptian armies at the Red Sea was his saving act for the people of Israel, so will the judgment he brings against our enemies represent the culmination of our salvation.
In order to express this desire for deliverance, Asaph prays for the utter defeat of Israel’s enemies. In verses 9-12 he uses past deliverances of God as examples, and in verses 13-15 he uses analogies. Note verse 12: “Do to them as you did to Midian.” This is a reference to the defeat of the Midianites by Gideon’s forces in Judges 7-8. Verse 11 picks up on the same story: “Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb”—Midianite princes who were killed and decapitated by Gideon’s forces—“all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna”—the Midianite kings whom Gideon slaughtered personally. Moreover, verses 9b-10 make reference to another story from Judges: “as to Sisera and Jabin at the river Kishon, who were destroyed at En-dor, who became dung for the ground.” This is a reference to Judges 4, when Barak led his forces against Jabin, the king of Canaan, and against Sisera, the commander of Jabin’s army. Barak’s forces routed the Canaanites, and Sisera fled from the battle to the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber, whom he considered an ally. She gave him some milk to drink, covered him over with a rug, and when he was asleep, she drove a tent peg into his temple, echoing the promise of Genesis 3:15 that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent.
In both stories, the point is that God delivered Israel against overwhelming odds. Sisera commanded an army that included 900 chariots, which were powerful weapons that a non-chariot nation like Israel never could have overcome on their own strength. But by God’s design, Sisera’s chariots were mired in the River Kishon, just as Egypt’s chariots became useless when they pursued Israel through the Red Sea. Moreover, in the case of Gideon, God commanded him to whittle his army down to a mere 300 men who went up against a force of well over 100,000 Midianites and their allies. In both cases, it was unmistakable that God was the deliverer.
And so prays Asaph here. In verses 13-15 he calls upon God to make them like “whirling dust,” which, as the footnote indicates, could be a reference to a certain kind of tumbleweed that blows around in the Middle East. Another analogy is “chaff before the wind,” the light, useless husks of grain that are separated out during threshing and gathered up to be burned. Both images indicate Asaph’s desire for God to reduce the powerful enemies of Israel to fleeting and insignificant nothingness. Verse 14 employs the analogy of fire wreaking utter destruction on a forest, and then verse 15 calls upon God to pursue his enemies with the power of the storm. Although many nations worshiped Baal as the god of the storm, the Bible is clear that the one who holds power over wind, rain, hail, and lightning is the God of Israel, the creator and ruler of all things.
What is the final destiny of the powers of this age who oppose God and his people? According to 2 Thessalonians 1:9, “They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.” All of their designs, all of their power, will be brought to nothing, and they will answer for their sins. And this is something we must long for and pray for. Now, some might accuse me of a bloodthirsty, vindictive spirit for saying such a thing, as though my desire is for nothing more than personal revenge. On the contrary, it is our doctrine of the final judgment that prevents us from seeking merely personal revenge. The very reason we are enabled to refrain from attempting to deal out judgment ourselves is because we have faith that judgment belongs to the Lord, and he will not fail us. This is exactly what Paul argues in Romans 12:19 when he says, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’” And when divine vengeance comes against our enemies at the end of this present age, we will know the salvation of the Lord in a way we have never known before. So let us long for and pray for that day to come.
Finally,
We must not lose sight of the fact that the real battle here is not between Israel and her enemies. It is between God and his enemies. And the same is true for the enemies that oppose us. They oppose us, not really because of who we are, but because they are enemies of God.
So Asaph cries out to God, not only that the enemies of God and Israel might be thwarted in their plans and destroyed, but that they may be shamed as well. Verse 16 says, “Fill their faces with shame,” and verse 17 reads, “Let them be put to shame and dismayed forever; let them perish in disgrace.” Let the shame of their defeat be a fitting outcome of their shameful, sinful acts of rebellion.
But then notice the outcome in verse 16: “Fill their faces with shame, that they may seek your name, O LORD.” And then note verse 18: “That they may know that you alone, whose name is the LORD, are the Most High over all the earth.” In the shame of their defeat, the enemies of God will come to recognize the lordship of Israel’s God. Most commentators see in these verses a hope of redemption for the enemies of God. That idea is a possible way to read it, and it certainly is in line with the teaching of Scripture elsewhere. However, I don’t think the emphasis of the text falls on that point. It falls, not on the possible redemption of God’s enemies, but on the vindication of God. In light of the calls for utter destruction that are so clear throughout this section of the psalm, I am inclined to say that the recognition of the lordship of God that Asaph prays for here is the same kind of recognition that Pharaoh had in Exodus 9:27: “This time I have sinned; the LORD is in the right, and I and my people are in the wrong.” In other words, Pharaoh recognized that he had lost. Asaph is praying for the fulfillment of Philippians 2:10-11, which says, “so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” This passage does not speak of universal redemption, but it does speak of universal recognition of the lordship of Jesus Christ.
And that is the primary reason we should pray for the final judgment to come. Above all, we must love God and desire the vindication of his name against all who oppose him. Every sin tells a lie about God. With every sinful act, human beings claim, at least implicitly, that God is not lord of his creation, but they are. Every sin is a raised hand of defiance against the sovereign of the universe. And if God allows such lies to echo out into eternity, never giving them a fitting answer, then indeed his lordship would be compromised, and he would not be the glorious Lord that he claims to be. But make no mistake about it: in the powerful return of his Son to this earth, God will answer, and when he does, there will be no more questioning who is Lord!
And when Christ comes, bringing judgment with him on the day of the open manifestation of his kingdom, not only will his name be vindicated over those who defy him, but his glory will be revealed to us. Second Thessalonians 1:10 says he will come on that day “to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed.” On that day we will join with the redeemed of every nation and sing with greater joy than we have ever known:
Who is this that comes in glory with the trump of jubilee?
Lord of battles, God of armies, He has gained the victory!
He who on the cross did suffer! He who from the grave arose!
He has vanquished sin and satan! He by death has spoiled his foes!
More than any other reason, let us desire and pray for the coming of the final judgment because of our zeal for the glory of the name of Christ.
If you have not come to Christ in faith, we do not desire God’s judgment to fall on you. Yes, we want God’s judgment to come against his enemies, but we don’t want you to belong to that group. But if you are outside of Christ, you are at this moment an enemy of God, under the threat of divine wrath that is horrifying beyond anything you have ever imagined. Every moment that you do not bend the knee to Christ is a moment you stand in defiance of him. And your time to defy him is limited. Turn away from your sins now, and take hold of Christ by faith. Believe that he is the God-man who came to earth to live a sinless life, fulfilling God’s law perfectly, that he died on the cross to take the wrath that you deserve, that God raised him from the dead on the third day, that he is now reigning at the right hand of God, and that he will come again to judge his enemies and deliver his people. Entrust yourself to this Christ, and he will receive you, no matter how much or how long you have defied him. That is how gracious he is. And to demonstrate before the world that you have died to yourself and now live under his lordship, I call upon you to profess your faith publicly through baptism, as Christ commands you.
To those of you who have professed faith and are members in good standing with an evangelical church, my invitation to you is to profess your ongoing faith by partaking of the Lord’s Supper now. Once more, we memorialize the body of Christ, broken for us, and the blood of Christ, shed for us, as we eat and drink, rejoicing that one day, the Christ who died in our place will return to judge the living and the dead.
One of my favorite novels is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the story of a lawyer named Atticus Finch in depression-era Georgia who was given the task of defending Tom Robinson, a black man, in a trial in which he was charged with raping a white woman. In the course of the trial, the evidence clearly demonstrated Tom’s innocence, but the question remained whether a white jury in the South at that time period could view the evidence impartially when a black man was on trial. In his closing statement, Atticus speaks to the jury about the ideal of true equality before the law. He says, “Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal. I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system—that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality.”
The lordship of Jesus Christ is not a pious ideal, a mere dream that inspires but never touches real life. No, it is a living, working reality, one that we shall one day see with our eyes. And until that day comes, let us see with the eyes of faith, eyes that are nourished by the tangible symbols of the bread and the cup.