Psalms 79:10

"Wherefore should the nations say, Where is their God?

Let the avenging of the blood of thy servants which is shed

Be known among the nations in our sight."

The desire of the psalmist that he and his contemporaries might indeed live to see God's vengeance executed upon the pagan nations which God in their great calamity was using as his instruments in the punishment of Israel -that desire, alas, could not be realized. No short term punishment of rebellious Israel would have done any good. The wicked nation would be required to suffer in Babylon until the last vestiges of their conceit and false pride were purged away.

Another intention of God, it appears, was that Israel might be weaned away from their mad attachment to an earthly kingdom, but in that intention, the will of God was most certainly frustrated; because even in the times of Christ, racial Israel desired nothing in either heaven or upon earth quite so much as they desired the restoration of their evil earthly kingdom.

God did indeed execute the judgment of his righteous wrath upon Babylon and all of the pagan nations of that period; but he did not choose to do so "in the sight of" that generation. We believe that we can understand why.

In God's finally being compelled, through moral necessity, to destroy Israel's evil kingdom, the pagan nations of the whole world believed that Israel's God had been defeated and that they no longer should honor him. Therefore, the great accomplishment of God achieved in the plagues of Egypt and the delivery of Israel into Canaan after driving out the wicked nations before them, was in a measure lost through the necessity of Israel's destruction. It was for that very reason that not merely Babylon, but Egypt, and Tyre, and all the other pagan nations of the world were required to suffer God's punishment, some of which, no doubt, might have been unnecessary if it had not been for Israel's wickedness. Thus, the Israelites certainly did not deserve to witness God's judgment upon pagan nations.