Psalm 9:35

the day of judgment is not a day of sloth

Thou seest it, for thou considerest labour and sorrow: that thou mayst deliver them into thy hands. To thee is the poor man left: thou wilt be a helper to the orphan. (Psalm 9:35 DR)

The final judgment of the wicked that the Psalmist has been working towards in his prophecy concerning the Antichrist and those who follow him is finally in full view. For in their prosperity and iniquity the wicked had imagined that God either did not know of their deeds or did not care, but the Psalmist now prophetically retorts: Thou seest it.

This simple statement comprises both the hope of the righteous and the dread of the wicked on the Day of Judgement. For the righteous, all the assaults and blows and persecutions for righteousness’ sake were not unknown to God but rather became the source of their blessedness (cf. Matthew 5:10) and their entrance into the eternal kingdom, as the prophet speaks:

But the souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of death shall not touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure was taken for misery: And their going away from us, for utter destruction: but they are in peace. And though in the sight of men they suffered torments, their hope is full of immortality. Afflicted in few things, in many they shall be well rewarded: because God hath tried them, and found them worthy of himself. (Wisdom 3:1-5 DR)

But for the wicked the fact that God sees becomes the source of eternal misery, for the recompence for their wickedness may have been delayed but it is not therefore abated, as St. Cassiodorus explains:

He will find that He Who he hoped was forgetful is mindful, and he will come to the realization that his innumerable actions, which he thought were not remembered because his sins were so many, are taken into account. (St. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, 10.34., ACCS.)

The labor and sorrow of the next passage are given as being the cause of the wicked being delivered into God’s hands for judgment. St. Chrysostom considers that the forbearance of God is in view here, in that He refrains from immediate judgment so as to allow for repentance:

What is the meaning of “up to the point of their being given into Your hands?” It is a rather human expression, but what it means is this: You bide Your time, You are forbearing, with the result that the wicked are given over to the excess of their wickedness. You are capable, of course, of destroying and subduing them from the outset; yet beyond telling is the ocean of Your forbearance, observing them, not pursuing them but awaiting their movement to repentance. If, however, they prove unresponsive, then You will punish them when they profit nothing from Your long-suffering. (St. Chrysostom, Commentary on the Psalms, 10.11., ACCS.)

This forbearance is thus the ultimate cause of the dreadful judgment, for every time the wicked refuse to repent they treat God’s mercy and kindness with contempt and further thumb their nose at Him. They have innumerable opportunities to reform their hearts and take the right way, but the perversion of their sin allows them to (in their minds) presume upon God’s mercy and take advantage of His long-suffering so that with every unrepented sin their hearts are emboldened to sin further and more greatly. The prophet speaks of their futility and end:

But the wicked shall be punished according to their own devices: who have neglected the just, and have revolted from the Lord. For he that rejecteth wisdom, and discipline, is unhappy: and their hope is vain, and their labours without fruit, and their works unprofitable. (Wisdom 3:10-11 DR)

St. Augustine takes a slightly different approach to this passage in noticing that the wicked project their human limitations and fecklessness onto God, in that the labor and sorrow in view is God’s judgment, which they presume to be too difficult or troublesome to God for Him to bother with:

For thus has the ungodly said in his heart, God will not require it, as though God regarded toil and anger, to deliver them into His hands; that is, as though He feared toil and anger, and for this reason would spare them, lest their punishment be too burdensome to Him, or lest He should be disturbed by the storm of anger: as men generally act, excusing themselves of vengeance, to avoid toil or anger. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 9, 30.)

There is the Christian approach to vengeance which relents from it by leaving it to God (cf. Romans 12:19), but there is also that which comes about by human weakness and sloth. The paradigmatic example in the Old Testament is during the conquest of the Promised Land when the people of Israel did not accomplish that which God set for them to do and did not fully drive out the nations and their idols and wickedness, which constantly plagued them in succeeding generations, as the Lord warned (cf. Numbers 33:55-56; Psalm 105:34-36). This failure to accomplish justice because it was difficult or would cause sorrow was not the forbearance of God that leads to repentance but rather a lack of faith in God’s promise of assistance.

On the spiritual level progress in the spiritual life must avoid this same sort of sloth, for if we leave attachments to sin and unrepented sin in our hearts and lives, they will come back to trouble us in the future. Like the command given to the Israelites to purge the Promised Land of wickedness, so we must purge our souls through penance of all sin and attachment to the things of this world.

St. Augustine thus notes that the wicked think that God is like this, that He finds vengeance against sin as too bothersome to deal with. They therefore project this human limitation on God and imagine He does not see, and if He does then He does not care.

Such a silly caricature might seem to be relegated to the ancient world, but it is perhaps more prevalent in our times than ever. A common argument against objective morals—especially those involving sexuality—is that they cannot imagine that God cares about our sex lives. After all, so the argument goes, the universe is trillions of light years across with trillions of stars, millions of galaxies, countless planets, etc. Why would God care about this one tiny rock in the midst of all that and how someone on that spinning rock gets his jollies?

It is easy to see, of course, just how closely this current sort of argument tracks with what St. Augustine draws out here, and how we are wont to project our own limitations or ideas of goodness or truth or whatever onto God. We do not want to be held accountable for certain things or actions, and so we imagine that God doesn’t care about them; He has more important things to worry about. Or we lack the fortitude to confront evil in the world and thus project on God the same squeamishness about punishing or confronting evil, which really means deep down that we do not want our evil to be confronted or punished.

But this is what I like to call the God-too-small fallacy. For the reality is that God’s attention is not distracted or bifurcated or even allocated from one object to the next in a linear or temporal manner as ours is. Rather, God is present in every moment to everything that exists as if (from our perspective) it is the only thing that exists. Whether the most expansive galaxy or the smallest possible subatomic particle or quantum whatever, God sees and knows all at once and immediately.

Conversely, this is precisely why the poor and orphans of the second half of the passage can be confident in their vindication on the Last Day, for they are left unto God who sees and encompasses all in this manner. The poor and the orphans have the same referent, which is the righteous man, but the parallelism draws out different aspects.

The poor are the poor in spirit (cf. Matthew 5:3) who may or may not in fact be materially poor but are principally poor in that they have rejected the attachments and allures of this world. They thus become rich towards God (cf. Luke 12:21), for though in their hearts they abandon all desire for the things of this world, their hope rests in God alone and thus they possess all that is good (cf. Matthew 6:33). As St. Didymus says:

The poor abandon themselves to You. You will care for his deliverance so that You may make him rich in heavenly goods. (St. Didymus the Blind, Fragments on the Psalms, 10.12-15., ACCS.)

The orphans are those who have come to salvation through repentance, for while they are no longer orphans (cf. John 14:18), they have becomes estranged from the world and the devil, who is their father:

It is important to understand here that the orphan is one whose father is the devil because of iniquity but who has cast him out through the practice of repentance. (St. Didymus the Blind, Fragments on the Psalms, 10.12-15., ACCS.)

St. Augustine concurs:

“You will be a helper to the orphan,” that is, to him to whom his father this world, by whom he was born after the flesh, dies, and who can already say, “The world has been crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” [Galatians 6:14] For of such orphans God becomes the Father. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 9, 30.)

The contrast between the wicked and the righteous on the Day of Judgment is thus laid out in stark relief, and their motivations and desires set against each other with as much clarity as between darkness and light. God’s forbearance in judgment is specifically that we should repent, become orphaned from this world and poor to its allures and goodies, and finally brought to hope in His loving-kindness and judgment and vindication when the hearts and deeds of all will be made manifest. While it is “today” we have yet the opportunity to take the right way:

Take heed, brethren, lest perhaps there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, to depart from the living God. But exhort one another every day, whilst it is called to day, that none of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. For we are made partakers of Christ: yet so, if we hold the beginning of his substance firm unto the end. While it is said, To day if you shall hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in that provocation. (Hebrews 3:12-15 DR)

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I wanted to go with something text-based for this animation, and found a great font with a fantastic ampersand (&) and decided to use that. I basically laid out the text as I wanted and used the text layers as mattes for some textures, and then applied some wiggle hold animation to the text layers.

I then duplicated the text layers, and since wiggle generates a random seed for the effect on every layer, it created an animated offset which was also nice. I then applied Shadow Studio 3 to the bottom text layers and linked the Source Point to an animated Null to get the shadows to move. I added in some background textures and color correction and called it done.

Enjoy.

View a higher quality version of this gif here: