Catholic Commentary
Invocation of the God of Justice
1Yahweh, you God to whom vengeance belongs, you God to whom vengeance belongs, shine out.2Rise up, you judge of the earth. Pay back the proud what they deserve.
Psalms 94:1–2 opens with an urgent call to the covenant God, Yahweh, to exercise divine justice against those who have violated moral order. The psalmist declares that vengeance and judgment belong exclusively to God, renouncing self-justice and appealing to God's universal judicial authority over all creation.
The psalmist's first move when faced with injustice is not to retaliate but to cry out to God, renouncing vengeance before the Judge of all the earth even speaks.
Together, these two verses establish the entire structure of Psalm 94: the invocation of vv. 1–2 frames the lament of vv. 3–7 and the wisdom instruction of vv. 8–15. Without the theological conviction expressed here — that justice belongs to God — the rest of the psalm collapses into mere complaint. The opening verses are therefore not preamble but foundation.
Catholic tradition illuminates these verses on several levels.
The Wrath of God as an Attribute of Love. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that God's justice and mercy are not competing attributes but two faces of His singular love (CCC §§ 210–211). St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 21) explains that God's justice is inseparable from His goodness: He rectifies disorder not out of wounded pride but because evil is a privation of the good He wills for His creatures. The "God of vengeance" of Psalm 94 is therefore the same God of love revealed in 1 John 4:8 — His vengeance is the active dimension of His love refusing to let wickedness have the last word.
The Renunciation of Personal Vengeance. The Fathers consistently read verse 1 as a model of Christian surrender. St. John Chrysostom (Homilies on Romans) cites this psalm to argue that Christians who pray for divine justice rather than exacting their own revenge actually demonstrate more trust in God's governance of history. Pope Benedict XVI, in Verbum Domini (§ 42), acknowledged the "imprecatory psalms" as an honest schooling in prayer: they teach the faithful to bring raw human anguish into dialogue with God rather than acting on it destructively.
Eschatological Horizon. Patristic commentators, including Origen and Cassiodorus, read "Rise up, judge of the earth" through a Christological and eschatological lens. The risen Christ is the one Judge of the living and the dead (Acts 10:42; 2 Timothy 4:1). The psalmist's cry thus becomes, in the New Covenant, an anticipation of Maranatha — "Come, Lord Jesus" (Revelation 22:20). The Church prays these verses in the Liturgy of the Hours as an orientation toward final justice, trusting that every unrectified wrong will be addressed at the Last Judgment (CCC §§ 1038–1041).
Contemporary Catholics often find themselves facing injustice — in workplaces, families, civic life, or the Church itself — where wrongdoers appear to escape accountability and victims are left without redress. Psalm 94:1–2 offers a spiritually disciplined response: bring your grievance explicitly and urgently to God before doing anything else. This is not passive resignation; it is an act of fierce theological trust.
Concretely, the Catholic who has been wronged is invited to pray this text — not to suppress anger but to direct it. The imperative "Rise up" gives permission to pray with intensity. At the same time, the attribution of vengeance to God alone dismantles the temptation to retaliate, gossip, or manipulate outcomes. Pope Francis, in Gaudete et Exsultate (§ 76), reminds us that the hunger and thirst for righteousness (Matthew 5:6) is a mark of holiness — but it must be satisfied by God's action, not our own schemes. These verses are a daily formation in that virtue: cry out loudly, but hand the outcome over.
Commentary
Psalms 94:1 — "Yahweh, you God to whom vengeance belongs"
The opening verse is structurally an address, not a complaint: the psalmist speaks to God before speaking about the situation. This ordering is spiritually significant — the psalmist's first instinct is not analysis but prayer. The divine name Yahweh (the covenant name revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14) anchors the appeal in the history of Israel's relationship with God. The psalmist is not calling on an abstract principle of justice but on the personal, relational God who has bound Himself to His people.
The phrase "to whom vengeance belongs" (Hebrew: El neqamot Yahweh) is theologically precise. The Hebrew neqamah (vengeance, retribution) is not vindictiveness but the restoration of right order that has been violated. Crucially, the psalmist does not claim this right for himself — he attributes it entirely to God. This is the biblical paradox that Paul will later distill in Romans 12:19: "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." The psalmist's very cry is an act of renunciation of self-justice. By handing the matter to God, he refuses to take it into his own hands. The double use of El neqamot (God of vengeance) in the Hebrew, rendered here as an emphatic singular, stresses the uniqueness of God's judicial authority — no other power shares it.
The Septuagint renders this verse with ho Theos ekdikēseōn ("God of recompenses"), a phrasing that deeply influenced the patristic reading of this psalm. St. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, notes that the "vengeance of God" is not passion or wrath in a human sense, but the perfect, impassible act of a Judge who rights every wrong — the flip side of His mercy.
Psalms 94:2 — "Rise up, you judge of the earth"
The imperative "rise up" (nasa, or in the Septuagint hypsōthēti — "be exalted") is a classic call-to-arms formula found throughout the psalter (cf. Psalm 7:6; 82:8). It does not imply that God is passive or absent; rather, it expresses the urgency of the psalmist's distress and his longing for God's manifest intervention. The judge who is always just is being called to act visibly in history.
"Judge of the earth" (shophet ha-aretz) places God's judicial authority on a universal, not merely national, stage. This is not a tribal deity who favors Israel against outsiders; this is the moral sovereign of all creation. The title deliberately echoes Abraham's intercession in Genesis 18:25: "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Both Abraham and the psalmist appeal to God's own character as the ground of their prayer. The logic is bold: You are the just Judge,