David Saw the Wicked as Smoke Before the Wind

The fire had burned low, and the smoke above it could not hold a shape. David sat watching it, a man with enemies pressing every border and a harp within reach, and the smoke rose, thinned, and tore apart on a wind so slight it did not even stir the coals. He had watched a thousand fires die in the fields outside Bethlehem when his only enemies were the lion and the bear. Smoke had always struck him as the strangest thing in the world. It climbed with such confidence. It vanished with such ease.

A verse was forming in him that night, a war prayer. Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered. But scattered how? Like what? Not like a wall pulled down, for stones remain. Not like an army routed, for survivors remain. He needed an image for an enemy that left nothing behind at all. The wind moved again, the gray column came apart in the dark, and David had his line. As smoke is driven away, so You drive them away (Psalm 68:2).

The Smoke That Cannot Cling

There are two kinds of smoke, and David meant only one of them. There is smoke with substance, the heavy haze of green wood and wet leaves, smoke that fills a room, sinks into wool, and stings the eyes long after the fire is out. That smoke has presence.

David meant the other kind, the thin ashan, smoke without body, the wisp that the slightest breeze scatters, already dissolving before the eye has finished following it upward. This was his claim about the wicked, and it was a harder claim than fire and sword. They are not a force waiting to be conquered. They are insubstantial from the start, here and then simply not, and the wind that ends them does not even have to try.

The King in the Upper Palace

A king dwells in his upper palace, high above the noise of the city. Below him, in the lower palace, his servants kindle a fire. The smoke rises. It drifts up the stairwells and past the columns, and at last it reaches the king himself.

He notices it. A nuisance, perhaps. But it cannot threaten him, and it cannot harm him. He does not summon an army against it. He waves a hand, and the air clears.

So it is with the wicked. Their schemes rise from below toward heaven, climbing with the illusion of significance, and from the ground the column looks tall enough to darken the throne. From the throne it is only smoke. It arrives already coming apart.

Wax Before the Fire

David did not stop at smoke. The same verse carries a second image, as wax melts before fire, so the wicked perish before God (Psalm 68:2). Wax does not fight the flame. It does not have to be struck, or pierced, or thrown down. It loses its shape in the mere nearness of heat, sagging, softening, running into nothing that resembles what it was.

That word, before, carries the whole image. The wicked do not perish under God's blows. They perish before Him, in His presence, the way wax perishes in front of a fire it never touches. Smoke before the wind, wax before the flame, an end that comes not as a battle but as a disclosure of what was never solid.

Isaiah Reaches for the Same Praise

Generations after David, the prophet Isaiah stood in Jerusalem and opened his mouth on the same note. David had sung, "I will exalt You, my God the King" (Psalm 145:1). Isaiah declared, "O Lord, You are my God, I will exalt You, for You have done wonders" (Isaiah 25:1). Two men, centuries apart, the same first movement of the voice.

Neither of them praised in a vacuum. Isaiah's exaltation comes only after he has seen what the wonders are, and they are vast. God will punish the host of heaven on high and the kings of the earth on the earth (Isaiah 24:21). The moon shall be confounded and the sun ashamed (Isaiah 24:23). A great horn will be blown, and the lost and the dispersed will be gathered home from Assyria and from Egypt to worship on the holy mountain (Isaiah 27:13). Only then, after the reckoning above and the ingathering below, does Isaiah say, "I will exalt You."

His praise is the praise of a man standing in cleared air. The smoke has been driven off, the haze that hung between earth and heaven is gone, and what he sees, he names.

Sons Like Saplings

David's exaltation rests on the same ground. His I will exalt You is not a reflex of the pious tongue but an answer to a promise, a vision of what Israel looks like once the insubstantial things have blown away. "Our sons are like saplings, grown tall in their youth, and our daughters are like cornerstones, carved in the fashion of a palace" (Psalm 144:12).

Set the two pictures side by side. The wicked are smoke, rootless, climbing, gone at a breath. The children of the promise are saplings, slow and low to the ground, but rooted, growing toward a height the smoke only pretended to have. The wicked are wax, losing form before the fire. The daughters are cornerstones, carved and weight-bearing.

The fire in front of David sank to red coals. The last of the smoke went wherever smoke goes, which is nowhere. Above the fields the stars held their places, and the shepherd who would be king took up the harp and gave the night its verse, that the enemies of God scatter like smoke, and that what is rooted, remains.