NOTES for Psa 10:3

When we look around, we see the obvious injustice of the order, or almost disorder, reigning in the world; we see the clear "dislocation" of the criteria by which people evaluate their behavior. Finally, we look into ourselves and cannot help being horrified by our motives and thoughts. The psalmist gives all this a diagnosis: the foundations are destroyed. The philosopher Merab Mamardashvili spoke of an "anthropological catastrophe" consisting of the very same thing: the foundations are destroyed, the foundations of what is humanity in a human being. The age of the explicit or implicit dominance of materialism in the human worldview has replaced the true, spiritual foundations of the human person with material, bodily, fleshly ones. Even in comparison with pagan times, this is a catastrophe, because then true spirituality was replaced by false spirituality, while now there is an actual rejection of spirituality altogether, since ideology cannot be counted as spirituality. A person no longer sees meaning in the concepts "God," "truth," "sin," "salvation," and so on. And not seeing meaning, he seeks neither truth nor salvation and does not turn from sin to God.

What then can the righteous person do in this situation? Perhaps simply "be not of the world," be unlike everyone else, preserve faith and faithfulness, and thereby be a "channel" through which God's grace still reaches this world, and, according to the word of the prophet Ezekiel, "stand in the breach of the wall" so that this land may not perish. In general, all this means living the life of Christ.