NOTES for Psa 11:1-9

Pleas to God for help in the face of enemies occur frequently in the Book of Psalms. This is understandable: everyone has enemies, and in confronting them each person considers himself to be in the right. Turning to God in such a case presumes confidence that God too is on the side of the one who calls upon Him.

It follows that the person who calls upon God perceives his own rightness as absolute, as reaching to heaven. What lies behind such confidence? On the one hand, a concrete situation. The statement of one of Dostoevsky's characters that "everyone is guilty before everyone for everything" sounds beautiful, but in practice "everyone, before everyone, and for everything" essentially means "no one, before no one, and for nothing."

Sin is always concrete, and in a concrete situation a person's sinfulness likewise always manifests itself in a perfectly concrete way. In a concrete situation, in relation to another person, each one is either right or at fault, at least when confrontation is involved. This concrete reality is not absolute; it does not at all exclude the possibility that everything will be different a minute later. But here and now, between two people confronting each other, one is always in the right. Such concrete rightness is absolute insofar as every here and now is absolute.

Yet this is not all. Something greater also lies behind the concrete rightness of a concrete person here and now. Besides the temporal present, there is also the eternal present of God's being. A concrete person can be right here and now only because the eternal present of God is projected into a concrete moment of the temporal present. There, in God's eternal present, the momentary rightness of a concrete person in a concrete situation becomes absolute.

Here, of course, everything depends on the fullness of that person's spiritual life: on how temporal and how eternal his existence is at each concrete moment of his life, and on the extent to which each of these moments belongs to eternity and to time. This determines how relative the rightness of the person who is right here and now remains: how far it is rightness only before himself and other people, and how far it is rightness before God.