Psalms 10:17

"Jehovah, thou hast heard the desire of the meek:

Thou wilt prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thine ear to hear;

To judge the fatherless and the oppressed,

That man who is of the earth may be terrible no more."

Looking beyond the ravages of lawless men and the sufferings of the poor and oppressed of earth, the Psalmist here promises the ultimate victory of the righteous. God indeed will judge the fatherless and the oppressed and righteousness and truth shall prevail.

"That man of the earth may be terrible no more." Who is this terrible man of the earth? He is the carnal, unredeemed sinner, the typical son of rebellious Adam, for whom the primitive sentence still stands, "Thou shalt surely die." Why does not God destroy him at once? The answer lies in the fact that God is still redeeming men from the posterity of Adam's rebellious, sinful and doomed race; and as long as God's true purpose in that redemption is being realized, we may not expect the ultimate Judgment and Destruction of Adam from the face of the earth to be executed. Our total ignorance of the true status of that progressive redemption is assurance enough that we can never know the day nor the hour of the Final Day.

As Delitzsch noted, "`The earth' is not referred to in this passage as the material out of which man is formed."[16] The wicked is described as, "a man who is of the earth," in the sense that the earth is the home of all his hopes and aspirations; heaven with its salvation and promise is no concern whatever of the wicked.