Psalm 9:17
a judgy judgment
The Lord shall be known when he executeth judgments: the sinner hath been caught in the works of his own hands. (Psalm 9:17 DR)
One of the earliest heresies to plague the Church was that of Marcionism, named after a Roman priest named Marcion who was excommunicated around A.D. 144 for teaching that there was a radical disjunction between the Old and New Testaments precited on Gnostic tendencies, such that the God of the Old Testament was an evil Demiurge whereas the God of the New Testament was the true God. This led to a complete rejection of the Old Testament as sacred Scripture as well as a truncating of what would become the New Testament; Marcion seems to have accepted only a redacted form of the Gospel of St. Luke (which is associated with St. Paul) and St. Paul’s epistles, although it must have been somewhat awkward for Marcion that St. Paul often quotes from the Old Testament.
There are various reasons for Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament, but at base he imposed a contradiction between the teachings of our Lord in the New Testament and the Old Testament. As G. K. Chesterton noted in Orthodoxy, heresies arise by taking a truth and isolating it to too fine a point, and become madness:
Such is the madman of experience; he is commonly a reasoner, frequently a successful reasoner. Doubtless he could be vanquished in mere reason, and the case against him put logically. But it can be put much more precisely in more general and even aesthetic terms. He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point. (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 12.)
Such was the case with Marcion, who was purportedly enamored with St. Paul’s doctrine of grace and likewise sharpened it to one painful point so that the God of the Old Testament was not God at all but rather a wrathful being and the God of the New Testament was only love and goodness. This antithesis between love and justice, between goodness and wrath of course a fundamental error in attributing parts to God, as if He possesses attributes severally.
Sadly, even though Marcionism met its intellectual match with writers like Tertullian and was ultimately condemned, it is alive and well and likely forms the intellectual backdrop for a large percentage of Christians in the western world today. Like Chesterton’s madman we have sharpened God’s attributes to being that of “love” only, which is further compounded by our penchant for equivocating on the term to entail affirmation for whatever vices we deem needful, which has the religious effect of enlisting God’s support for the indulgence of our appetites. Nonsensical notions such as “love is love” follow closely in its wake, for if even God no longer calls sin to be sin (as we suppose in our implicit Marcionism), then who are we to do so?
The Psalmist, on the other hand, provides a needful corrective, as he states that the Lord will be known when He executes His judgments. This is a startling pronouncement, for it entails that one of the primary manifestations of God’s existence is that He brings judgment. And while the Marcionist in each of us moderns might bristle at this, St. Paul agrees:
For the justice of God is revealed therein, from faith unto faith, as it is written: The just man liveth by faith. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those men that detain the truth of God in injustice: Because that which is known of God is manifest in them. For God hath manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable. (Romans 1:17-20 DR)
Here St. Paul notes that God’s wrath is revealed because that which is known of God is manifest in men. They understand in their hearts the natural law of the world which God created and thus have a sufficient conception of God and His law so as to be without excuse:
For when the Gentiles, who have not the law, do by nature those things that are of the law; these having not the law are a law to themselves: Who shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness to them, and their thoughts between themselves accusing, or also defending one another, in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel. (Romans 2:14-16 DR)
In this manner St. Paul is merely restating what the Psalmist did centuries earlier, as the parallelism in this passage brings out. The Psalmist notes that God is manifested in the executing of His judgments, and these judgments are seen when the sinner is caught in the works of his own hands. That is, his own works and actions condemn him because he knows that they are against God’s law and thus accuse him as St. Paul mentioned and become the manifestation of God’s judgement against him. St. Paul elsewhere declares God’s patience with humanity in the past before Christ:
And God indeed having winked at the times of this ignorance, now declareth unto men, that all should everywhere do penance. Because he hath appointed a day wherein he will judge the world in equity, by the man whom he hath appointed; giving faith to all, by raising him up from the dead. (Acts 17:30-31 DR)
Here in his disputation with the Greek philosophers of Athens, St. Paul’s selling point—as it were—is that our risen Lord is the one who will judge the world. God’s graciousness towards humanity is displayed in His indulgence of man in his ignorance, but also in calling him to penance through our Lord who is Himself the just judge. Thus, judgment and and grace coalesce in the very Person of our Lord Jesus Christ, who unifies the Old and New Testament.
The irony for the Marcionite error is that St. Paul attributes the very goodness and patience and love of God to the God of the Old Testament prior to Christ’s coming, but then identifies the judgement of God with the God of the New Testament after Christ’s Incarnation.
Of course, this forced disjunction is completely artificial as St. Paul doesn’t dialectically harmonize the two Testaments but rather locates them both in our Lord Jesus Christ as a harmonious and seamless whole which is ultimately consummated in the eschaton:
Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man. He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross. For which cause God also hath exalted him, and hath given him a name which is above all names: That in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth: And that every tongue should confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:6-11 DR)
To bow the knee before our Lord Jesus Christ is itself an image of Him as judge and Lord over all, and the submission of all things to Him (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:24-28) is the culmination of His judgment of all things (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:10) and the manifestation of Himself in His rendering to their due for their works.
The Psalmist speaks of the wicked receiving their recompence, especially as it relates to their persecution of the righteous. In the previous passage the works of the sinners were seen to be, in a sense, their own punishment. However, on the other side the unjust suffering that the righteous undergo for righteousness’ sake is inversely the cause of their eventual glorification, as well as the judgment of the wicked who perpetrate it:
So that we ourselves also glory in you in the churches of God, for your patience and faith, and in all your persecutions and tribulations, which you endure, for an example of the just judgment of God, that you may be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which also you suffer. Seeing it is a just thing with God to repay tribulation to them that trouble you: And to you who are troubled, rest with us when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven, with the angels of his power: In a flame of fire, giving vengeance to them who know not God, and who obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Who shall suffer eternal punishment in destruction, from the face of the Lord, and from the glory of his power: When he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be made wonderful in all them who have believed; because our testimony was believed upon you in that day. (2 Thessalonians 1:4-10 DR)
In this manner St. Paul links the hope of the Catholic to that of God’s divine judgment upon the wicked as seen specifically in their rejection of the gospel of our Lord. Their persecution of the righteous—what the Psalmist relates as the works of their own hands—becomes the cause of their destruction and the manifestation of God’s justice.
Sometimes I have a random desire to make an 80’s themed design, and this was one of those cases. It ended up being pretty simple. I used Trapcode Mir to create the grid lines and then just animated the offset to have them infinitely move. I then added in the text and triangle and added in a bunch of glows to create the overall vibe. I added in some particles using Trapcode Particular and called it a day.
Enjoy.
The Lord shall be known when he executeth judgments: the sinner hath been caught in the works of his own hands.
(Psalm 9:17 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: