One of the psalms (73) might just be thought relevant to some of our current political situations. The Psalmist and other Prophets were not fortune tellers but people calling power to account in their own societies. Perhaps reflecting on this psalm might help some self-defined Bible-sensitive Christians find away out of the moral confusions of the Trump legacy .
2 But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled,
my steps had well nigh slipped.
3 For I was envious of the arrogant,
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
4 For they have no pangs;
their bodies are sound and sleek.
5 They are not in trouble as other men are;
they are not stricken like other men.
6 Therefore pride is their necklace;
violence covers them as a garment.
7 Their eyes swell out with fatness,
their hearts overflow with follies.
8 They scoff and speak with malice;
loftily they threaten oppression.
9 They set their mouths against the heavens,
and their tongue struts through the earth.
10 Therefore the people turn and praise them
and find no fault in them.
But praise is not biblically what they have as their due, as the Psalm goes on to make clear. So what should we do in our own day to deal with people who have pride as their necklaces? How can we live a better life than in the example given by those whose ‘eyes swell out with fatness’ (*) and have ‘hearts that overflow with follies’?
Interesting times.
(*) I think I will never be able to erase this description for my memory if obliged to look at a picture of Trump in the future.
A sidebar. King Henry VIII of England possessed a handwritten manscript including the psalms, with beautiful illustrations. Some of them depicted King David the biblically celebrated ruler and the reputed author of Psalms. In this manuscript King David is pictured as the spitting physical image of Henry. Looking eerily like Donald Trump. The manuscript has marginal notes in Henry’s own handwriting commenting on some of the psalms. I do wonder what His Majesty made of Psalm 73 And of the psychological mirror he was offered of what His Majesty might have regarded as a ‘Very Stable Genius’.