Psalm 72:12
trading in gold for grains of sand
Behold these are sinners; and yet abounding in the world they have obtained riches. (Psalm 72:12 DR)
Doubt can be like a persistent itch that causes us to return to it over and over. There may be temporary relief after scratching it, but as long as the irritation remains the itch will linger.
Similarly doubt can be temporarily mollified by intellectual reasoning, but unless it is able to satisfactorily address the underlying uncertainty, doubt can linger and fester in the mind. The conditions have to be fundamentally changed. In the case of doubt, there needs to be new information or a new perspective added; mulling the same thing over and over generally is insufficient to alleviate doubt.
Thus for the Psalmist we have seen him struggle through his vexation with the prosperity of the wicked. He acknowledges that God is good to the upright in heart, he understands that on an intellectual level. But he finds that difficult to square with how the wicked seem to enjoy ease of life and great gain; do they not also seem to exist in the same state of God being good to them?
He tries to reconcile this by providing a litany of the ways in which the sinners and the wicked set themselves against God and how their prosperity seems to perpetuate and deepen their wickedness. It even causes them to blaspheme openly. He finds them in state he abhors.
But yet he now comes back to the original vexation. He can intellectually tell himself that they are wretched and set themselves against God, but he does not yet see a solution to his conundrum. For all his intellectualizing of the situation, the fact remains that they not only obtain riches but also seem to be more numerous than the righteous; they abound in the world. The Psalmist thus finds himself in the middle of an unsolvable enigma which no amount of thinking through can untangle. if the conditions remain the same for his considerations, not only is there no solution, but it seems that wickedness is better than righteousness.
The dilemma is, in the end, an artificial one, premised on a purely carnal view of things. We are embodied beings, and thus while we are involved in the world of material things, we are also more than just material beings. The soul is the form of the body, meaning that the body exist for the soul rather than the other way around. The use of material things is thus for the pursuit and attainment of virtue, not for the indulgence of vice.
If we forget the spiritual aspect of our nature, there is no resolution to the Psalmist’s vexation. If we take a purely carnal view of things, then righteousness is of no avail in this life, and the wicked have a more “rational” approach in using whatever means to acquire what they desire.
But if we take seriously that sin and wickedness wound and destroy the life of grace in the soul, then the situation changes dramatically. The wicked may obtain loads of goodies in this world, but they are trading gold for grains of sand, which eventually even that will be taken from them. The righteous, however, seek after higher things that will last and are enabled, by God’s grace, to obtain them forever. The great lie of riches and wealth and prosperity in this world is that it seems to promise security and permanence and other such things, but cannot do so, and may—if used wickedly—lead to eternal ruin:
A carnal soul for things visible and earthly would have sold its justice. What sort of justice is that which is retained for the sake of gold, as if gold were a more precious thing than justice herself, or as if when a man denies the deposit of another man's goods, he to whom he denied them should suffer a greater loss, than he that denies them to him. The former does lose a garment, the latter fidelity. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 72, 14.)
I was playing around with some features in Trapcode Mir and wanted to do something a bit different than what I usually do with it. So I decided to try out a 3D model for the geometry. There is a small library included with Mir, so I found this one which I liked because of all the various faces.
I set up some lights and adjusted the reflection properties so that there would be a a nice interplay of light and shadow and specular highlights as the various faces rotated in and out of the light, which is why it has that fun shimmering effect.
I then animated rotations on various axes and looped it. In the background I placed a nice abstract texture and added dome Turbulent Displace to it to have a nice subtle flow in the background. I finally applied some color correction and a lens flare to finish the animation.
Enjoy.
Behold these are sinners; and yet abounding in the world they have obtained riches.
(Psalm 72:12 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: