God's Daily Indignation

Psalm 7:11

God is a righteous judge,
and a God who feels indignation every day.

...............

Whenever the Bible makes these kinds of blunt characterizations of God, we should stop and think about it for a while.

God is love.
Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
I am that I am.

These statements should give us pause to consider who God is in Himself. And this Psalm is inescapably about God's character as Judge.

Two points to note in this Psalm. One, this is a great example of David calling upon God for justice against his enemies, while also vindicating himself in light of his own integrity. This is a theme throughout the Davidic psalms. For instance:

The LORD judges the peoples;
judge me, O LORD, according to my righteousness
and according to the integrity that is in me (7:8).

You begin to realize what a very bold statement David is making by the time you get to the end of the Psalm. Indeed, the second point in the psalm is that God's wrath is incredibly serious, unstoppable, and completely fair. We see in the verse at the top that God feels, that God not only feels love and joy, but also wrath, and that God feels this wrath everyday! This is very serious. "If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword; he has bent and readied his bow; he has prepared for him his deadly weapons, making his arrows fiery shafts" (7:12-13). So, we see that God feels indignation against sin, and that this wrath is serious and deadly. But, let's not forget that it is also fair. As David describes the targets of God's anger, he makes this statement:

His mischief returns upon his own head,
and on his own skull his violence descends (7:16).

While it is not common in devotional life to dwell on the wrath of God, we must stop and consider this part of God's feelings. I'm not so sure that wrath is "essential" to God's nature, as He surely had none in eternity past, when He lived in perfect harmony within the love of the Trinity. But, because of the Fall, He has justly responded to man's sin by first cursing us and then eventually bringing all thoughts and deeds into judgment. There will be a final separation, and God will be entirely just in letting man's mischief return "upon his own head."