The Blame Game
Because of Your indignation and Your wrath; for You have lifted me up and thrown me away. Psalm 102:10 NASB
Because – Who’s fault is all this? Who’s to blame for the tragedy of human living? When Heschel remarks “history is a nightmare,” we know precisely what he means. Humanity has produced escalating moral entropy since the Garden. The tsunami of violence in the name of God is appalling. When we add the atrocities justified by greed and government, it’s a wonder that vomiting isn’t a daily occurrence. The psalmist doesn’t have the luxury of eschatological justice. He isn’t holding his moral breath until some distant divine agent shows up to balance the scales. He lives in our world—a world where wickedness works, where evil is excused, where the good perish for lack of a voice. Just ask the 60 million aborted babies in the United States. Despair seems inevitable. The psalmist isn’t dealing with the modern world’s appetite for moral indifference. He has enough on his plate, even in the tenth century B.C.E. Tyranny is a ubiquitous human addiction. In the pagan world, all of this can be explained by the combative nature of the gods, the inevitability of fate, and divine indifference. But it isn’t so easy for Israel.
“The pagan, faced with undeserved suffering, can suppose that the gods envy man and, therefore, injure him; or out of caprice, they destroy him, or stand aside, indifferent to his fate. Pagan man complains, becomes embittered, and reviles the gods, or resigns himself in despair to their decrees. It was otherwise in Israel. On the one hand, there is no evil principle; good and evil came from YHWH. On the other hand, Israelite religion tolerated no fault or blame in God. He was altogether good and just. When harsh reality challenged the conventional view of divine justice, concern for the honor of God violently disturbed the devout. They could not break out into insults or surrender to despair; they could only complain and question and go on seeking an answer. At bottom, it is not so much the human side of undeserved suffering that agitates the Bible as the threat it poses to faith in God’s justice. Hence the tremendous pathos of Israelite theodicy that has no pagan parallel.”[1]
“What distinguishes the faith of later Judaism from that of the Bible is not, then, the idea of immortality. It is rather that the biblical age had not yet succeeded in forming a conception of a judgment of the soul and its deliverance from death that would not be vitiated by the images of an infernal god, a dying god, or the apotheosis of the dead. Having surrounded death with impurity, it was unable to find a way to introduce holiness into that realm. And because the holy, the divine, has no place among the dwellers in Sheol, there is no judgment, no reward, and no punishment there. It was not the belief in immortality that came later, but the breakthrough of the soul to God from the realm of death. This transformation occurred only after many centuries.”[2]
“One way or another, biblical man justified his belief in a morally ordered world. Because he knows of no judgment after death, only this world could serve as the scene of divine justice. If the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper, he prays to God and entreats him to manifest his judgment.”[3]
Three thousand years have passed since the psalmist cried to God for an explanation and an intervention. Three thousand years of theology, syncretism, and moral outrage. Today we push the answer into the “not yet” world of the afterlife, the Great White Throne, the Judgment. We hope and pray that all will be right—someday, somehow. We hold on to the promise that “He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.” But there are days when we echo the psalmist’s distress. “Because”—min—because You are the God of all, because there is no other, who really is responsible?
Topical Index: min, because, evil, guilt, Psalm 102:9
[1] Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel, pp. 332-333.
[2] Ibid., p. 316.
[3] Ibid., p. 332.
