Psalm 94 is yet another example of an urgent plea for God to address injustice that goes unpunished. God is described as the God of “vengeance” and lest we think that the New Testament somehow reverses or mitigates this description, 2 Thessalonians tells that when Jesus returns he will “inflict vengeance on those who do not know God.” This psalm is a stark reminder that God will do something about those that neglect or mistreat the stranger/foreigner, widow, and orphan.

If you are like me, this immediately sets you rushing to self-justification. I don’t personally know any widows. There are no foreigners or strangers around me that I’ve mistreated. No orphans are starving at the door of my house begging bread. This may all be true, but I want to urge you to ask the Spirit to help you stop self-justifying and allow God to do the justifying instead. When wrong is asserted, and we clamor to “cover our butts” and make sure we’re OK, we miss an opportunity to allow the Spirit to lead us into walking in his righteousness.

So, a better response to such psalms might be to ask God “who are the wronged, the powerless, the weak that I might defend?” It is worth remembering that there are various kinds of orphans. Most orphans these days don’t look like something out of a Charles Dickens novel. Often, today’s orphans have material resources but are missing something key; a mother and a father. What children are you around who lack fathering and mothering and what might you do about it? We, likewise, probably need to stretch our conceptions of widowhood and being a foreigner. I certainly am not recommending a particular course of action with regard to the immigrant question of our day when I remind us how stridently God taught his people that he would judge them based on how they treated “strangers” (Leviticus 19.34).

Let’s not be like the self-justifying lawyer in Luke’s gospel trying to get himself off the hook. At the end of the parable Jesus essentially dismisses the question “who is my neighbor?” by challenging the lawyer to be the neighbor to all he encountered. If we follow Jesus’ advice, along with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we can avoid falling into the trap David did. When a tale of exquisite injustice was told to him, he was indignant. His indignation was proper, but then he found out he was its perpetrator.