Hate What God Hates

“My flesh trembles for fear of You, and I am afraid of Your judgments.” (Psalm 119:120)

The psalmist sees God and he “trembles.” This is absolute fright! In Job 4:15 the term is used to describe making the hair stand on end because of fear. The psalmist fears the judgment of the God who is his protection and security. That is what we see here. He doesn’t want to disobey any of God’s commandments and he is “scared stiff” of the consequences of doing so.

The psalmist really shows his opposition to evil because he knows the weight of God’s opposition to it as well. He feels the weight of God’s disdain for evil.

We live in a society that believes God to be weightless. Let me explain.

In my 1^st year of college at Masters, I was required to read a book entitled No Place for Truth by David Wells, who is a professor of theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. Wells is very gifted at giving a commentary on modern culture and showing the vast differences between orthodox theology and how people actually live. Anyway, in his book, he speaks about one his great concerns in modern America of that being too many who think God to be weightless. He writes,

“It is one of the defining marks of our time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that He is ethereal but rather that He has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life.

“Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God’s existence may nonetheless consider Him less interesting than television, His commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, His judgment no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and His truth less compelling than the advertisers’ sweet fog of flattery and lies.

“That is weightlessness. It is a condition we have assigned Him after having nudged Him out to the periphery of our secularized life. . . . Weightlessness tells us nothing about God but everything about ourselves, about our condition, about our psychological disposition to exclude God from our reality.” (No Place for Truth, pg. 88)

This is certainly our society. We, by nature, want to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where we can use Him.

Not the psalmist, he adjusts his life to God. He sees the weight of God opposing evil and he opposes it with the same disdain.