Beast Slayer

Psalm 7

The psalmist takes to the Lord his plight of being wrongly accused, apparently by the leader of a group of people, given that there is mention of “my enemy” in verse 5 and “my enemies” in verse 6. The intensity and aloneness of the experience of being wrongly accused or – more often for most of us, probably, just being misunderstood – evokes the image of a beast (verse 2). There are, naturally, intense feelings in such an experience.

The beast image is a trigger to be on guard against how we allow such an experience to work inside us. This can be extremely difficult. I can’t imagine, for example, what must go on in the heart of someone who spends years in prison, wrongly accused of something, especially if there is someone on the outside who set it all up. Yet the psalmist, undergoing something like this, ends up expressing that those who are responsible for willful false accusation against him will have their evil come back on them without any doing on his part (verse 16).

The lesson in this is critical. It’s not, in what we would say, ‘so there,' but rather, ‘Even in this obvious injustice against me I must leave the judging to God.’ Or from another angle, ‘What I have responsibility for is my own feelings, and to see that this does not cause the beast in me to rise up to destroy me from within.’

Well OK, I’m doing a lot of paraphrasing. I invite you to find your own way of inserting yourself in the kind of setting the psalmist is experiencing, because we all face it, maybe even today.

Prayer:
God, when I say, ‘take charge of my life,’ let me not hold back what I relinquish to you. It’s tempting to hold on to things to hold against someone. Let me recognize that when I think that something is unfair, I am in danger of taking your role as judge for myself, and I may already have done so in thinking it. Renew me in the grace of your Son. Amen.