A God Who feels indignation every day

O Lord my God, in You do I take refuge;

save me from all my pursuers and deliver me,

lest like a lion they tear my soul apart,

rending it in pieces, with none to deliver.  Psalm 7:1-2

Last night I read Kathleen Norris’ introduction to The Psalms in which she lays out an impassioned rationale for reading the Psalms in the King James version of Scriptures.  The wide range of expression in the Psalter–the anger and pain of lament, the anguished self-probing of confession, the grateful fervor of thanksgiving, the ecstatic joy of praise–allow us to bring our whole lives before God.  For her, this translation is a story about the power and primacy of vivid language and pleasurable speech, words that hold the attention of the ear and provide physical imagines pleasing to the mind’s eye...and something about King James’s English cuts across the human constructs of cultural and theological barriers–a cure for literalism, a bracing reminder of poetry’s ability to counter ideology in any age. 

And while my daily pursuers do not bear swords and spears, the effect is the same.  So very much in my world is set upon soul destruction–empty distractions, broken communication, careless selfishness, unnamed fears–in Him I must take refuge.  

And in His justice.  Or my soul would be torn apart. Because wicked man conceives evil and is pregnant with mischief and gives birth to lies, myself included.  

My shield is with God,

who saves the upright in heart.

God is a righteous judge,

and a God who feels indignation every day.

And the depth of Truth of the Psalms.  In the Psalms we find a genuine community with our human past.  The realism of the Psalms flies in the face of much contemporary spirituality that presupposes a golden age in the past to which only the enlightened may aspire in the present.  C. S. Lewis says, No historical readjustment is required.  We are in the world we know.

And when it is all said and done.  When my soul is done listing its grievances and inequities to the God who sees, who grieves deeply at the brokenness of His beloved world and who will stop at nothing to bring redemption and restoration, I can at that moment step into His righteousness, the shadow of His wings and release.

I will give to the Lord the thanks due to His righteousness,

and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord, the Most High.