DUNCAN/The avenger
If you have your Bibles, I’d invite you to turn with me to Psalm 94, as we continue to work our way through the Fourth Book of the Psalms. This Psalm is a prayer for vengeance. But that’s Old Testament, right? Vengeance isn’t something that has anything to do with the new covenant believer, is it? Well, yes, it does. There is something that we too can learn from an Old Testament prayer for vengeance about the living of the Christian life.
Let me outline the passage for you in three parts. First is a prayer for vengeance on the wicked. You see that in verses 1 – 7. The second part of this Psalm you’ll find in verses 8 – 11. It teaches us that God sees everything we do. Lastly, verses 12 – 23 remind us that God will care for His people, even to the very end.
I. God’s People Hate Sin
In verses 1 – 7 the psalmist teaches us to hate sin. The psalmist, in the most emphatic words, expresses his desire for God to bring vengeance on the wicked. Why? Because he thinks that God is an irrational and capricious God? Not at all! He asks for vengeance precisely because God is a righteous God. And when the psalmist looks out at injustice, he is angry. He hates that sin, and he desires God to bring His judgment. Look at his words: “O God of vengeance, shine forth! Rise up, judge of the earth; repay to the proud what they deserve!” The psalmist burns within him as he sees injustice being perpetrated amongst God’s people, and he asks for God to visit His judgment on that sin. And we, too, ought to truly hate sin.
I don’t know a better way of fostering hatred for sin than to look at misery in this world and trace the line of misery back to sin, and to say to the Lord, “Lord, help me hate sin like I hate misery.” It’s not hard to hate misery, especially when you see someone you love suffering. I’m not saying that all human suffering is caused by an individual’s sin. Jesus makes it clear in the case of that man who was lame from birth that it was not his sin that caused him to experience the suffering that he knew. But all misery in this world is the result of Adam’s sin. Adam’s sin in the garden plunged us all into an estate of misery, and so every time we see a misery in the world, we can draw a line back to sin and say, “Lord, help me hate sin like I hate this misery.”
II. God Sees Everything We Do
The second thing we learn, you’ll see in verses 8 – 11, and that is that we are to live this life in light of God’s all-searching eye. There is nothing that God does not hear. There is nothing that God does not see. There is no thought that we can have that God does not know. And it is that all-searching knowledge of God, the omniscience of God, that moves the psalmist to pray for the wise man to realize his accountability to God.
We may do and say things that our friends and even our families do not know, but God knows everything that we do, everything that we say, and even everything that we think. And the psalmist is calling out to the wicked and saying, “Don’t you understand that God knows everything? You may get by with that in this world, but you will not get by with it with God.” The psalmist is asking us to live in light of the all-searching knowledge of God, and he is warning the wicked that God knows everything they do, including the deepest thoughts of their hearts. In other words, the psalmist is making it clear that nothing will escape the judgment of God.
In criminal cases in the courts, sometimes facts which are not known to anyone in the court exist. There are facts about the case that perhaps are only known to the guilty, and they may never come to light. That will not be the way it is at the bar of God’s judgment, for the Judge and Prosecutor sees and hears and knows everything. Nothing will escape His judgment. He will take into consideration every motivation of our hearts, every word of our lips, every action of our lives, and He will bring His justice to bear on it. And the psalmist is asking us to remember that and to live in light of this.
III. God Cares for His People
Third, the psalmist in verses 12 – 23 makes it clear that even when the righteous are afflicted and see the wicked prospering in this world, the righteous can still acknowledge that God has cared for them and will one day put everything right. The psalmist is acknowledging that sometimes the righteous fall prey to the wicked in this world. Does that mean that God has forgotten them? No. He may not be sparing them from tribulation, but He is sparing them in tribulation. He may not be keeping them from tribulation, but He is keeping them in their tribulation.
In this passage we learn that the Lord protects us from evil, even when we don’t realize it. The believer recognizes God’s protecting providence in his life against the wicked. Look at what the psalmist says: “Who rises up for me against the wicked? Who stands up for me against evildoers? If the Lord had not been my help, my soul would have soon lived in the land of silence.” Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever felt like your foot was slipping? And the psalmist says, “When I thought that, I realized that the Lord was holding me up in His steadfast love.”
This is assurance to the righteous who are afflicted, so that even when we see wickedness prevailing in this world, even when we experience trials and tribulations, even when we experience oppression at the hands of the wicked, we can acknowledge God’s goodness to us. There is a blessedness to us even in affliction. He has His own reasons and His own purposes in our afflictions; He cares for us even in our affliction, and He will put everything right in the end. One of the things that I’m certain of is that when we get to glory there will be far more times that we realize that the Lord has spared us and helped us and aided us than we have ever realized in this life. We will get there, and we’ll say, “I had no idea.” We will suddenly realize that there were so many times in our lives when the Lord was protecting us, and we didn’t even realize it. May God grant us a sense of accountability to Him, and gratitude because of what we have learned as Christians from this prayer for vengeance.