Psalm 34:15-22 Commentary

So here we are for the third week in a row in Psalm 34, this time centering on the concluding verses.  In the first of this Lectionary triplet on this psalm we took note of the fact that this is one of those sunny-side-up poems in the Hebrew Psalter in which everything is coming up roses for the people of God.  Yes, yes, there is some acknowledgment that even the righteous have some troubles (you see this in verse 19 in this week’s reading) but they appear to be light and momentary and then God delivers the righteous every single time.  I dealt with how to understand such chipper sentiments in the first commentary on Psalm 34 by locating such psalms within the context of the wider Book of Psalms that provide plenty of evidence that things do not always go as well for the righteous as Psalm 34 indicates.  Since we already covered that angle, for this week I want to focus on a very curious turn of phrase in Psalm 34:21.

“Evil will slay the wicked” this psalmist claims in verse 21.  Now that’s an arresting way to put it.  Not that God will slay the wicked.  Not that the wicked themselves will destroy one another.  Rather it’s just “evil” that is the active force here.  Elsewhere in this psalm we are told that God will be the active force in bringing about justice and in blotting out the names of the wicked.  But in this penultimate verse evil is very nearly personified into a force all its own and the ones that evil is said to slay are not the righteous but evil’s own minions apparently.

Evil is in the end self-defeating.  Evil is nihilistic in the first place.  It is not the least bit creative—God has the creation market cornered after all—but is ever and only destructive and particularly destructive of the things God made good.  As Neal Plantinga once put it, evil is finally always vandalistic of shalom.  But evil has nothing with which to replace shalom.  Evil does not have a vision other than the vision of tearing down what makes for shalom.  But does evil proffer a replacement?  Not really.  Or at best the replacement for shalom is just more ongoing destructiveness.  Tin-plated dictators perpetuate their power and their position ever and only through ongoing punishment of perceived enemies.  They really don’t build anything.  They just tear down the good things and people standing in their way.

Some years ago when I was visiting Uganda we toured the prison where Idi Amin put everyone who opposed him.  It was a brutal, ugly place of suffering and death.  And it was just the kind of place an evil dictator needs to further his destructive ways.  Evil people arrange the world so that everything revolves around them in ways that let them retain exactly what they want even as all others around them suffer and die.

But in the end, somehow, the very vortex of destructive evil that such people unleash will become the very force that will destroy them and their plans.  Evil and wicked people are finally nothing and so it won’t take much for them to just blow away like chaff on the wind.

But in this conclusion to Psalm 34, the righteous are by contrast full of substance and hope and they have a future.  When the Book of Psalms began in Psalm 1, the wicked were portrayed as forever in motion but finally lacking any moorings or rootage.  They could not endure.  The righteous, on the other hand, were those firmly planted trees beside streams of water that would ensure those trees would never shrivel up and die.

These concluding verses pepper the reader with goodness and good news.  God sees the righteous.  God hears the righteous.  God is close to the righteous especially when they pass through times of being broken hearted.  God delivers the righteous.  God protects the very bones of the righteous and vindicates his people forever.

After three weeks in this psalm we have surely come to appreciate that although not every day is as happy for God’s people as the psalmist paints things here, there is nevertheless an overflowing fountain of hope here for all of us even—or is it especially—on those days when we cannot quite bring most of the words of Psalm 34 to our lips due to sorrow and suffering in the present moment.

“I will extol the Lord at all times, his praise will forever be on my lips.”  That is where Psalm 34 begins and it is pretty much where it concludes as well.  The things that vex us the most for now—including evil people—will one day be no more than a memory, if even that.  And in the midst of the pain we experience in the meanwhile, Psalm 34 says over and over, “God is here.  The Lord is near.  Take hope.”

Illustration Idea

In director Christopher Nolan’s first Batman film, at one point Bruce Wayne / Batman is trying to figure out what The Joker wants.  He tells his friend Alfred that criminals are not complicated if you can get an angle on what they are looking to get or to achieve.  Alfred has a different take on the matter: some men don’t want anything.  They just want to watch the world burn.  (Watch this clip here.)  That is an apt description of evil and wicked people as Psalm 34 depicts them as well.