Psalm 50 opens like a court convening. Asaph, the Levitical choir leader whose name heads twelve psalms, describes 1"the Mighty One, God the LORD," summoning the earth 1"from the rising of the sun to its setting," then calling heaven and earth as witnesses against his own people: 5"Gather to me my faithful ones, who made a covenant with me by sacrifice!" The technical legal vocabulary is thin, but the shape of a public, adversarial proceeding is unmistakable, familiar from disputes elsewhere in Scripture.
The appearance borrows the storm and fire of Sinai: 3"before him is a devouring fire, around him a mighty tempest." This is the God who cut the covenant at Sinai stepping forward to enforce it, and the psalm names why he can: 6"The heavens declare his righteousness, for God himself is judge!" The witnesses he summons, heaven and earth, already know the verdict, as the sky testifies to whoever made it.
The summons begins at the place of worship: 2"Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth." That is a quiet argument. The covenant being enforced was a worship covenant first, sealed by sacrifice, and the failures this psalm goes on to expose are failures of worship before they are failures of law.
To be called God's 5"faithful ones" names a covenant relationship close enough that he bothers to speak plainly and does not simply walk away. A father who has stopped correcting a child has usually stopped caring what becomes of him. This summons, unsettling as the fire and tempest around it are, is proof that the relationship called "my faithful ones" is alive.
Verse 3 sets the scene: 3"Our God comes; he does not keep silence." Christians have long heard in this line a portrait of Christ's second coming set against his first. At his first coming he was, in Isaiah's words, "like a lamb that is led to the slaughter," and "he opened not his mouth" (Isaiah 53:7), and at his trial before false witnesses he stayed silent. The voice that once let itself be silenced is the voice this psalm says will not keep silence forever. The patience now, the space before the fire and tempest arrive, is the fruit of that first silent coming.
A summons like this could read as pure threat, and part of it is meant to be felt that way. But the God who comes in fire and tempest is the same God who let himself be silenced for the very people he now summons, and the gap between his first coming and his second is patience, spent on us.
Ask what you might do with that patience today. Some people spend it arguing with the summons, and some spend it pretending it was never issued. The faithful ones the psalm describes are the ones who come when they are called, and who have made their covenant, again and again, at the altar. The gap between the comings is a gift with a purpose, and the purpose is that more people come.
Prayer
Father, thank you that Christ's silence at his trial and on the cross was silence kept for us. Thank you that the God who will not keep silence forever has already spoken his clearest word in the Son. Keep us from mistaking your patience for anything less than mercy, and gather us among your faithful ones when the silence ends. In his name, amen.