This sense of an irreconcilable conflict between the malignity of evil and the will of God, between the carnal mind and that reflection of God's will which He has implanted in the human conscience, is much to seek in our own day. We are too much inclined to minimise the reality of sin, and to imagine that it is disappearing before civilisation and the growth of gentler ways and sentiments. The Psalmists knew better—they knew that the battle was to the death, and that God alone can win His own victory; and they express, sternly and roughly perhaps, but with the utmost sincerity, their undying faith that He will; that the overthrow of malice and falsehood and treachery must one day be manifested,
God shall suddenly shoot at them with a swift arrow,
and that the part we each have played in the battle will be the true measure of our worth.
All they that are true of heart shall be glad.
(lxiv.)
In this sense we may even repeat the dreadful conclusion of the Babylonian exiles' Psalm:
Blessed shall he be that taketh thy children:
And throweth them against the stones.
(cxxxvii.)
For what are Babylon and her children but the powers of falsehood, oppression, and cruelty? and blessed still and ever is he who is afire with indignation against such things, who scorns any easy compromise with them, who burns to deal a blow at them for Jerusalem's sake!
And there is still another justification for the continued use of these Psalms, which will be understood by those who have begun to be disciples in the Church's school. The Psalms are not merely the response to revelation, they are part of that revelation themselves. The Church uses them not as mere human utterances, but as the inspired words which God Himself has given her, and which the Lord Jesus consecrated by His own personal use of them. God cannot contradict Himself. The Gospel may expand the Law, or do away with its letter in order to bring out the underlying spirit, but it cannot abrogate it. If there were a real discrepancy between the imprecatory Psalms and the New Testament, it would be scarcely conceivable that the first word of Scripture quoted in the first history of the Church would be that sentence already alluded to:
Let his habitation be made desolate:
And let no man dwell therein.
The severities of the Psalms are matched by the severities of the Gospels. There is no real difference between our Lord's sentence on the scribes and Pharisees, "Behold, your house is left unto you desolate," and the sentence which the Holy Spirit puts into our mouth against the hypocrite and the traitor, "Let his children be fatherless: and his wife a widow" (cix. 8). God is still "a God of judgment" and a "consuming fire," and there is a "wrath of the Lamb" revealed, even though He is "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world."