The Bible is full of horrifying and lurid images of what divine judgement will be like. So Psalm 21, for example, begins innocuously enough. If, like me, you are a Psalm skimmer-overer, you will have skimmed this one many times without noticing it properly, lying as it does in the rainshadow of the majestic Psalm 22 and the world-famous Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my Shepherd”). The Psalmist writes:

To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David.

O Lord, in your strength the king rejoices,
  and in your salvation how greatly he exults!
You have given him his heart's desire
  and have not withheld the request of his lips. Selah

(Ps 21:1-2)

Yep, yep. We know where this one is going. Jesus is the great king, to him be all glory and honour and power; this Psalm (like all Psalms) is really about him—great King David's greater Son. So we could be forgiven for zoning out a bit at this point, pulling out the guitar and composing another quickly forgettable chorus.

But on maybe the third reading through, I noticed these words:

Your hand will find out all your enemies;
  your right hand will find out those who hate you.
You will make them as a blazing oven
  when you appear.
The Lord will swallow them up in his wrath,
  and fire will consume them.
You will destroy their descendants from the earth,
  and their offspring from among the children of man.
Though they plan evil against you,
  though they devise mischief, they will not succeed.
For you will put them to flight;
  you will aim at their faces with your bows.

(Ps 21:8-12)

Here are three dreadful images in the space of five verses: the enemies of God are thrown into a blazing oven (one); they are swallowed up by the fire of the Lord's wrath (one and a half, because, let's say, the oven, the fire and the wrath of God are all really the same idea); their children are destroyed (two); and someone—God himself—is aiming at their faces with a bow (do you think he will miss? Anyway, three.)

Now to apply this whole Psalm in general terms to the Lord Jesus, who is the eternal king who sits on David's throne, is not wrong. If you were skimming the Psalm and reached this conclusion, or if you went to church and the preacher said it, you would have heard a most basic and fundamental truth. But the distinctive three images of judgement put this Psalm into a terrifying class of its own.

Notice that the harshest language is reserved not for smug religious insiders. If it were, we might even possibly feel a bit more comfortable about these anticipations of hell, because at least we could point the finger at the hypocritical religious first of all.

But no, in this Psalm as in so many others, the judgement talk is aimed fair and square at the enemies of God. It's like a gun in the face, you might say, if you were bringing the Psalm up to date and making it relevant. It holds out for those enemies a horrible end of burning fire. Even that suffering could be handled, maybe, if the enemies knew that their children would survive. But the next generation's hope is extinguished as well. So the person who suffers burning inside the oven knows that what he is going through serves no purpose that could possibly give him even the tiniest drop of comfort.

If we believe that this is true about the people around us who don't know God, it gives our speaking and preaching about God's salvation a terrible urgency. And there is, indirectly, a warning to us not to drift into complacency, as Israel did in the wilderness.

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