The Psalms

The prophets announce the Day; the Psalms make it sing. Where Joel and Isaiah describe the Day, the psalmist brings it into speech in prayer and praise — and precisely thereby he reveals its heart: it is the day on which the LORD rises up as King and as Judge, and the earth falls down at His feet. The phrase "day of the LORD" is absent here too; the event stands all the more ardently.

It begins with the second psalm, the throne-psalm that opens the whole Psalter. The nations rage, the kings of the earth take counsel together "against the LORD and against His Anointed" — and He who dwells in heaven laughs. Then He speaks in His wrath, sets His King on Zion, and gives Him the nations as inheritance and the ends of the earth as possession, to dash them in pieces with a rod of iron. It is the scenario of the Day in a single psalm: revolt of the nations, the throne of the Anointed, the iron judgment — and at the close the call to grace: "kiss the Son, lest He be angry." No wonder Revelation reaches three times for Psalm 2 when it draws the second coming (2:27; 12:5; 19:15). The Day is the day on which Psalm 2 becomes reality.

And the Psalms give the key word you now recognize everywhere. Psalm 110, the most-quoted psalm of the New Testament, sets the Lord at God's right hand and says: He shatters kings in the day of His wrath — be-jom appo, "on the day of His wrath."1 There is the Day, named by name as the day of wrath, with the exalted Lord as its executor. And the question that bears the whole field sounds here too, in a psalm: You, You are to be feared; and who can stand before You once You are angry?2 U-mi yaʿamod lefaneka — who can stand before You. It is the same question as in Malachi, Joel, and Nahum, and soon at the sixth seal; the psalmist asks it in worship. The Day everywhere poses the same question, whether it is proclaimed by a prophet or sung by a singer.

But the tone of the Psalms is not terror alone, and that is their own contribution. Where the prophets stress mainly the judgment, the Psalms let the gladness be heard that lies on the other side of the Day. In the sequence 96 to 98 the LORD comes, and creation exults: let the heavens rejoice, the sea roar, the fields and all that is in them spring up — before the face of the LORD, for He comes, for He comes to judge the earth; He shall judge the world in righteousness.3 Note the double "for He comes" — the repetition of pure expectation. For the Psalms the coming of the Judge is no disaster but the fulfillment for which creation yearns: at last justice, at last the King upon His throne. Here sounds the second face of the Day in its purest form — not terror but jubilation, because the Judge who comes is the Redeemer.

And the Warrior is not absent. Psalm 50 opens with God who comes and does not keep silent, "a fire devours before His face, and around Him it storms mightily." Psalm 75 holds out the cup that foams with wine, which all the wicked of the earth shall drink down to the dregs — the cup of Jeremiah, now in a song. Psalm 68 has God rise up and scatter His enemies. Each time the same figure: the Warrior of the Sea of Reeds (chapter 5), now sung of as King and Judge.

So the Psalms give the Day its voice. They add no new events to what the prophets already saw; they add the tone — the worship, the fear, and the jubilation. They teach the believer how he must stand over against the Day: not with the self-assurance of Amos' hearers, but with the fear of Psalm 76 and the gladness of Psalm 96. Whoever knows the Day only as terror has not sung along with the Psalms. And whoever wants it only as comfort has not read them to the end.