Episode 121 Psalm 58 Living with Injustice

[00:00:00] Dan: Hi everyone and welcome to Training for Life Redeemed. I’m Dan. I’m here with my father David Jackson. We are coming back to look at some Psalms today.  we have been looking through the Theology of the Child.  and now we’re coming back to Psalms, Dad. And I’m excited to dive into Psalm 58 with everyone.

[00:00:19] Dan: Dad, Psalm 58, can you… set any kind of context for this psalm for its original place or do we just kind of not know much?

[00:00:28] David: We don’t know much. It’s, it’s in with a set of David psalms.  But there’s, there really is, you know, it’s a David psalm, but there’s no context for it. So you’ve sort of got to go through the life of David and think, when did he have a problem with Jesus?

[00:00:45] Dan: There’s a few occasions. The first of 40 years of his life.

[00:00:48] David: We should probably read it first. We should.

[00:00:50] Dan: We should. We’ll dive into reading it first. But if there’s context before reading it, that’s always good. Let’s listen to you. You read it, Dad.

[00:00:58] David: Psalm 58

⁰ For the Director.

Don’t destroy.

A miktam of David.

¹ Do you (pl) truly speak the silence of righteousness?

Do you (pl), sons of man, judge uprightly?

² Indeed, with anger in heart you do injustices in the land,

You weigh out the violence of your hands.

³ They are the criminals.

They are estranged from the womb.

They go astray from their mother’s belly.

They are speakers of falsehood.

⁴ His venom is like the venom of a serpent.

He shuts his ear like a deaf cobra

⁵ that does not listen to the voice of snake whisperers,

Even to the cleverest charmers.

⁶ God demolish their teeth in their mouth.

Yahweh, pull down the jawbone of the young lions.

⁷ May they turn to liquid just like the waters.

They are out for themselves.

He fits his arrows the same way.

Let them fall short.

⁸ He moves like snail slime.

Like a woman’s miscarriage, they do not see the sun.

⁹ Before your pots feel your bramble thorns,

Whether kindled or flaring, he sweeps it away.

¹⁰ A righteous one rejoices, because he sees vengeance.

He washes his feet in the blood of the wicked.

¹¹ And man will say, “Surely the result is in favour of the righteous.”

Surely God is there, judging on the earth.

[00:02:18] Dan: All right, dad, so the psalm starts there talking about you. Who are people, because it says here in your translation that they’re plural, so I’m cheating a little bit here,  truly speak the silence of righteousness,  sons of men judging uprightly. So it seems to be having a go here at people, which must be humans because it’s plural,  who are judging and generally not doing a great job of it.

[00:02:44] David: That’s an understatement. So, you’re looking at. I mean, there’s the judgment, justice of God, there’s the judgment of God, there’s the word of God. So we’ve got truth, we’ve got right or wrong. It’s absolute. It’s the way God designed life to work. So we’re doing training for life redeemed. And that builds on the idea that God designed life to work and to work perfectly. And then we come along and we redesign it to do it our way. So you think of how many different ways in our society we have decided God is wrong. And we can redesign life. And then when people don’t go along with our redesign, we appoint judges to censor them and punish them and silence them. So we talk a lot. We’re in a world at the minute that’s,  it’s confused to say the least.  You’re looking at,  on the right, you know, the political right, we’ve got all the people,  saying ridiculous things on the left, you’ve got a bunch of people saying even more ridiculous things and neither of them are right. And there’s God’s judgment. And where do you go for justice?  So David, I mean, this is 3000 years ago. He’s got the same problem, nothing new under the sun. And he’s looking at the judges of his kingdom over which he’s supposed to be king. And he’s saying, , look, you lot , you’ve, you’ve just screwed up the whole country.  do, and I like the language that he uses. I’m, I’m reading off the screen, but,  “do you truly speak the silence of righteousness?” And that doesn’t make any sense in English .  but if you stop and think about it, The silence of righteousness, the idea that these people would be silent when it comes to real justice and truth,  and instead they’re speaking all this ungodly stuff and judging on the basis of their own imagination.  and they do it, he says, “with anger in heart, you do injustices in the land.” So there’s this, we live in a culture of. Outrage and offense and, you know, vengeance and vengeance.

So, I mean, we’re living without getting into the politics of it. We’re in the middle of a referendum. Yep. And the language that’s getting exchanged from one side to the other  about what is justice and what is this and what is morality? And  people just make it. Whose morality? Whose right or wrong? And when you don’t agree with me, my response is just to blow up and get offended.  This is the society David lived in 3, 000 years ago. Nothing’s changed. So, how do we speak to God when this impacts my life?

[00:05:52] Dan: And so is that what David’s going to do here then? Because I’m just looking at the language and how it changes. If this is David saying, he’s saying, do you, do you, and then he’s going to switch over now to a they.

[00:06:03] David: Yeah. So he’s speaking to the judges in verses one and two, who are doing the wrong thing. And then he turns to the congregation or to the people of Israel or whoever will listen. Yeah. And he said, he talks about them, those judges.

[00:06:16] Dan:. So he’s not necessarily directing that.  God and saying, these people over here are criminals, gods, you know, they are estranged from the world. Blah, blah, blah. He’s trying to convince a crowd. Basically

[00:06:27] David:. He’s basically saying to the crowd, look at these guys. So first, I mean, it’s a biblical thing before you criticize anybody, you speak to them. Yeah. So you judges, this is, you’re stuffing everything up, you’re throwing your tantrums, you’re doing the whole thing wrong and destroying life. You’ve broken it because you’re trying to redesign God’s world your way. That’s not going to work. Now he turns to the congregation and he says, they are the criminals. And that’s a powerful statement about judges,  the people who set up your justice system, they are the criminals. And he’s going, Oh, I just love his description of these people.  cause I mean, if you’ve ever suffered the injustice of courts,  It really is horrendous.

I mean, for people, you’ve got to stop and pause and think where do Christians suffer injustice from the court system?  let me start with the divorce court.  you, you go to a divorce court, you’ve got a domestic violence man on your hands.  Usually men could be women.  and.  we’ve had some experience of this as an extended family. So you have the domestic violence husband who does everything under the sun to hurt his wife,  including, you know, coming in and stealing the firewood, stealing all of the tools in the house,  just reducing her down to absolute poverty and everything else, takes the mortgage on the house that they own and borrows hundreds of thousands of dollars on the mortgage that she is now liable for and he doesn’t pay, doesn’t pay taxes, charges that to her account, all the injustices of that system. Then when they go to court, takes, leaves her with all the debt, the court doesn’t care who does whatever, they just split it down the middle 50:50.  and he racks off with the business and leaves her with all the debt.  the next thing you know, the taxation department’s on her,  and it’s all lies and it’s corrupt. And he’s got the lawyers and he’s got the accountants and here’s this poor woman, absolutely devastated.  

You go to court with sexual assault issues, you get a 5 percent conviction rate.  and you, and you’re talking child sexual assault,  and the community’s outraged and the next thing you know, he’s released because we’re there to rehabilitate the offender.

If I go down to the level of school teaching where you and I have operated,  I’m, I’m appalled at what goes on.  even in schools where every effort is made to look after the wellbeing of the bully. We’re trying to rehabilitate the bully. You can’t expel people. You can’t suspend them. You can’t deal with them. You can’t deliver justice. There’s got to be a process that goes on for God knows how long. And then at the end of the day, the kid that’s getting bullied ends up leaving the school to go find somewhere else where it’s safe. I’ve, I’ve watched cases like that. You have too. I’m sure that it just dragged on forever. And it’s, I’ve handed, I’ve handed a few school principals, Ecclesiastes 8:11, which I translated here somewhere,  Ecclesiastes 8:11,  “Their order concerning evil/ a destructive act isn’t put into effect quickly.” So you’ve got this long process. “The heart of the individual becomes confident to do destructive things among themselves.”

So the cops arrested a girl,  a teenage girl who had knifed a boy.  so we’re having these knife attacks at the minute. And her line to the cops was, you can’t do anything to me. I’m a child. Take me to the children’s court. There’s nothing they can do. I’ll get it, get warned and rehabilitated and you can’t touch me.

[00:11:08] David: So in our culture, we’re. That’s the level of justice. Look at how he describes the judges.  they go astray from their mother’s belly. Yeah. Right. So from, from birth, these judges have got it wrong. They speak falsehood. Full of venom, full of venom, like a snake, deaf cobras, you know, you can’t, you know, a deaf cobra, a snake charmer could charm, but not these clowns,  you know, the, the, there’s, there’s this other description there, I like,  yeah, he’s going to call on God, okay, “break the teeth in their mouth,” their ability to punish. We want to break that down because they’re punishing the wrong people. But then they turn to liquid. So when you bring justice to the court, the judge just goes to water. And the process he describes beautifully as,  “he moves like snail slime.” I mean, he summarized 3000 years ago, what we’re seeing, isn’t he?

 I mean, how long does it take to get a conviction cases in court for three years, five years, you know, millions of dollars are spent and the end result is nothing.  

[00:12:27] Dan: someone just gets to take a lot of money.

[00:12:28] David: Yeah. This, this last phrase you were talking about, verse nine, before your pots feel your bramble thorns. This is hard to translate whether kindled or flaring, he sweeps it all away. So you’re trying to get the fire, trying to get the process going,  you’re trying to bring some heat on evil and phooph, it’s all gone in a blink. So, what do you do with this? Well,

[00:12:56] Dan: you call on God, don’t you, and tell him to come and put things the right way. Isn’t that generally the way Psalms work?

[00:13:02] David: Yeah. But, but, what do you do when God doesn’t bring justice in our lifetime?

[00:13:09] Dan: Well, you’re thankful that he brings it in the next life, yeah.

[00:13:12] David: Yeah. Yeah. So this brings us to a very difficult part of singing a song. to God in, in praise or worship or whatever you want to call it. A righteous one rejoices because he sees vengeance. So for the Christian, there will be joy in seeing the vengeance of God. And this description, he washes his feet in the blood of the wicked. That’s really a description of Jesus.

[00:13:42] Dan: Yeah, I was gonna say, there’s passages in Revelation aren’t there? They’re talking about Jesus being up to his waist in blood.

[00:13:48] David: that’s, I mean, you don’t go to church and sing and you know, imagine singing songs on a Sunday morning that says, oh, we’re looking forward to Jesus wading through the blood of his enemies.  where does that fit into the Christian life when we’re out there to evangelize and forgive and extend grace and all the rest of it?

And there’s our problem, isn’t it? Here I am, with people who do terrible, terrible things, and God in His grace saves some of those people. But what do I do with the fact that, meanwhile, all this injustice is happening?  Where’s the other side of that penny?

[00:14:30] Dan: Yeah, I think some of this too comes in play when you think about,  the paradigms through which everyone looks at the world, and you think… Like, a lot of people will see that and go, you know, we can’t talk about Jesus in that way. Like, He’s not like that.  and, they talk about, we tend to water down sins. And go, well, it’s not that bad.  but, when you take a biblical perspective on sin, sin was bad enough that we got thrown out of the garden. Death came in. It’s bad enough that… God has to send his son to die on a cross, and we’re going to sit there and go, it’s not that bad. And that’s, that’s, that’s us having an incorrect paradigm through which we’re looking at the world.

[00:15:20] David: And we end up saying, and this is where I come to, we sit in a world of injustice and wickedness, and it’s okay when you sort of, you know, you’ve got a job, you’ve got a life, and everything’s going along smoothly. But, what do you do when that evil hits you, and you are hurt, you are outraged, I mean I, I think of the women in my family who have been sexually violated,  particularly, I mean I’ve had aunts and cousins and everything,  we won’t go into who who, but when you see that happening, and you see the hurt. And you go, where is God in this? Where is God in this? If all we ever talk about is God’s grace and forgiveness and redemption, it’s as if we’ve forgotten that there is this, the evil of evil, the rottenness of it, the damage that it does. And, and there’s, there’s part of the gospel is, these mongrels are not going to get away with it. God is going to deliver justice. There is a thing called hell.  and let me describe hell.

Hell is not all that mythological nonsense. You know,  in the Middle Ages there were torture chambers and all those sort of things. And people imagined hell to be like a medieval torture chamber. It’s not the Bible picture at all. Hell is where… All that’s left is you. Just you. No light. Total darkness. No contact with any other anything. Not persons, not things, not nothing. Just you. Solitary confinement in the dark, with no way back for all eternity. That’s hell. So, death is separation, not annihilation. Conscious, alone, for eternity. So you think anything in this life is bad? Jumping, jumping out of this life without Jesus is going to make it worse.  and the judgment that God is going to bring down on these people is that they’re going to live with what they’ve done alone in the dark for eternity with no way back. And from that, we have been redeemed. So…

The only way I can let go of my hurt and the evil that’s done is to recognize that God is going to deliver a punishment on that that’s bigger than anything we can offer. These judges that are doing injustice themselves will be in that cell,  with all of that guilt on their head,  along with the victims that they will never see.  

Meanwhile, what’s the last line of this thing? Surely the result is in favour of the righteous. Surely God is there judging on the earth. If there is no justice, if there is no judgment, if God isn’t there. So if we turn around and say, well, I’m going to blame God, you know, I’ve suffered all this injustice. I ditch God. What did you win? Not much. You want a world where this is normal and this is okay. There then is no justice. And there is no hope. so God has come into this. He’s delivered the justice. But in the meanwhile we’ve got this song to sing that says, bring it down. Bring it down.

[00:19:11] Dan: Well, no, that’s going to bring us to the end of this episode. If you enjoyed this, you want to grab the notes to go along with this study. Enjoyed? Yeah. Oh, if you learned stuff from this, if you, yeah,  go to trainingforliferedeemed. com/121. Yeah. That’s under the numbers. And you’ll land on a spot where you can get the study notes for this psalm. And yeah, hit the subscribe button, come back and join us again next week. We’ll continue to look through psalms. I presume we’re doing psalm 50. What did we do? 58. 58 this time, didn’t we? So 59. Look forward to talking to you again then.