my righteous Judge

God is a righteous judge,

and a God who feels indignation every day.

Psalm 7:11

I believe this. I believe God is the ultimate righteous Judge over all human activity and that I answer to Him. I believe that as a holy, righteous Judge, God is grieved over the sinful choices, thoughts, and actions I make and that every person can and will make in all of humanity. God is the judge. As a judge He evaluates and declares guilt and punishment. He never does so arbitrarily or incorrectly. There is nothing that escapes Him, either. Sin moves Him to indignation and to action as the Judge.

Yet from our limited perspective we may not feel that sin is being dealt with by Him. And we tend to want leniency on our own sins and we want God to throw the book at the sins of those who hurt us! The psalm here is obviously written because human oppression and injustice have encroached upon David in some way. He has been slandered by a man known only here as Cush the Benjamite (perhaps a relative of the house of the previous king, Saul) and David called out to God to right this wrong. When David knew an obvious injustice, he appealed to God, the only final authority, to find resolution. David still felt the oppression... that much is clear in this psalm. But his heart trusted and passionately pled with God to remedy it.

This leads me to conclude that many times in human experience we will know injustice. And the more people, the more injustice. Billions of people create exponentially greater wrongs among themselves. We will experience the awful things humans can do to one another. We will be abused by the whim of someone else. We will also struggle not to act in kind when we are hurt in this way, and at times our response can be also quite wrong. What saves us from the worst of these experiences is the faith we have in God’s justice. He is a righteous Judge and He knows when we are suffering wrongly. He is upset by all the ways that humans hurt each other. He will render justice in His way, in His time, in completeness. We must simply trust and appeal to our Judge. And in Jesus we have an Advocate before the Judge of all people Who pleads on our behalf and Who offers forgiveness to all Who believe.