A Chinese pastor remarked that “many of my people are only one unanswered prayer away from leaving the church and resorting to Buddhism or animism to solve their problems” (William Edgar, “Are We Really Secular?” in The Pastor and the Modern World, 34). That is, many profess faith in Jesus, but only just. A small-to-medium bump in the road, just one unanswered prayer, and they are done with the Christian experiment. This is not hard to imagine, is it? Though there are certainly better ways to put this, but Christianity, at least some doctrines of Christianity, are not always easy to believe. Sovereignty. Predestination. Hell.
At the end of Psalm 93 the poet lists two: God’s law and God’s call for holiness (Ps. 93:5). A decree of God, in Hebrew, can be a divine testimony, a statement of fact, a legal code of some sort, or even an unquestionably authoritative decision from an unquestionable authoritative source. The poet is using a word that is broad, but it is appropriate to assume a decree of God is not something we can squirm away from. The reference to holiness is more explicit. To say that “holiness befits your house” is to affirm that because He is holy and set apart and separate, so too are we. That is, we do not belong to ourselves, but to Him. To belong to ourselves is to be whoever we want, or whoever others want us to be. To belong to Him is to be set apart from others and, oddly, set apart from our own will, desires, thoughts.
To be subject to God’s judgement (not our own), and to be set apart for God’s own purposes (not our own), is a tough sell for our day and age. It was a tough sell for the poet’s day and age, as well. These two doctrines may as well be a corollary to the unanswered prayer that may very well compel a person away from faith.
How does the poet counter this? It may be that the description of God in verses 1 to 4 are there for this very reason.
