Sunday Morning Meds--Last Judgment(s)

“He summons the heavens above, 

and the earth, that he may judge his people:. . . “ Psalm 50:4

“Judgment begins at the house of God,” Spurgeon says in his explanation of this verse of Psalm 50.  “The trial of the visible people of God will be a most awful ceremonial.  He will thoroughly purge his floor.”

If Charles Spurgeon is right, then, in this song of praise to the righteous judge, God is cleaning house. “He will discern between his nominal and his real people,” Spurgeon says, “and that in open court, the whole universe looking on. My soul,” he asks—and not rhetorically, I don’t believe—“when this actually takes place, how will it fare with thee? Canst thou endure the day of his coming?”

Hebrew verbs, I’m told, are distressingly vague when it comes to tense, which makes this vision somewhat ambiguous.  Spurgeon thinks its reference is "the Last Judgment," as Michaelangelo rendered it, so painstakingly, on the great wall of the Sistine Chapel. 

But the whole vision might well be a sermon in and of itself, with God preaching a lesson specifically designed for Israelis putting too much stock, so to speak, in their own sacrifices. The present tense ("summons") suggests that Asaph may be seeing a dream more than delivering a prophecy.

If the event at the heart of this psalm is what Spurgeon says it is—something akin to Michaelangelo's Last Judgment, then why is there no suggestion of heaven or hell are. The after-life, it seems to me, is conspicuously absent.  Promised rewards and threatened punishments are offered in terms of this world—verses 15 and 22—and not the next.  Where is this court and when was it held?  Is it still in session?  Or is it yet to come?

I don’t believe Charles Spurgeon is wrong in asking his soul if it’s ready for the final judgment, but I’m not as sure as he is that Psalm 50 is some prophetic view of that single, last heavenly tribunal. 

Here as elsewhere—or so it seems to me—revelation, by which I mean our hearing the very voice of God--is not in the facts of the verse, but in the truth or moral of the psalm itself, specifically, in what Asaph claims God tells us, believer and unbeliever alike. It seems to me that the heft of this psalm is homily, an admonition to humanity to live right, and for that reason isn’t in any sense “final.”

In Egypt, under bondage, the people of Israel had simply forgotten the God of Abraham. They didn’t remember him. Years had passed, piety waned, discipline fell away. In Egypt, his chosen had to be reminded that way back in some bleary ancient past, there was this God of their forefathers. Who was he again?

Psalm 50 isn’t closing the book; it’s a vision of God having, once again, to remind his people who they are and who he is. Because Israel needed that reminder.  

I ought to say it this way.  God’s people need (present tense) that reminder, time and time again.

And time and time again. 

And time and time again.