I’m working through the Psalms right now and we are on Psalm 7. David is the author of this Psalm and in it, he cries out for justice. David is beseeching God to deal with the evil in the world. Unfortunately, I’ve seen God depicted in two misleading ways when it comes to justice. On the one hand, I’ve heard about the passive grandfather God that’s not a fan of evil, but doesn’t really do anything about it. The woes of this world just aren’t that big of a deal to him. On the other side of the spectrum, I’ve heard about the mean, wrathful and vengeful God who is to be feared, but certainly not loved and adored.

The Bible doesn’t affirm either of these two extremes. Instead, God is shown to be both loving and just. He’s not OK with evil and is capable of great anger and wrath. That being said, God also reveals himself as “slow to anger and abounding in love.” (Psalm 103:8). Most of us would probably affirm that there is something in us that desperately wants to see this world made right. We know that there is brokenness in us and in the world around us, and we don’t want the story to end this way. We love the stories that have happy endings because they resonate with something deeply embedded in our souls.

In this Psalm, David is calling out to God to bring justice on the earth…to deal with evil and usher in righteousness. We should not assume that because God doesn’t vanquish all evil in a moment, that he is somehow OK with it. Scripture depicts God as being deeply concerned with our plight. The entirety of scripture is actually a story about how God created the world in peace, but things went wrong through the freewill of created beings. God didn’t just leave things that way, but instead he concocted and is currently executing a rescue mission to bring back the grandeur of the original creation. The glorious ending of the story has not come yet, but scripture affirms that it will.