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Psalms 10 — The prayer you're afraid to pray out loud
5 min read
fresh.bible editorialThis is one of the rawest in the Bible. No warm-up. No polite opening. The psalmist looked around at a world where the powerful were crushing the vulnerable, where the corrupt were thriving, and where God seemed... nowhere. And instead of keeping that frustration private, they turned it into a prayer.
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What makes it remarkable is the turn. It starts as a complaint — an honest, almost accusatory question aimed at God. But by the end, it lands somewhere completely different. The psalmist doesn't get answers. They get something better: clarity about who's actually in charge.
The psalmist opens with the kind of honesty most people are afraid to bring to God. No softening. No disclaimer. Just the raw question:
Lord, why are you standing so far away? Why do you hide when everything is falling apart?
The wicked are hunting the poor with arrogance — let them be trapped by their own schemes.
They brag about what they crave. The greedy curse you and walk away from you entirely.
Their pride has blinded them — they don't even look for you. Every thought in their head says, "There is no God."
Here's what's striking: the psalmist didn't this up before bringing it to God. They didn't phrase it carefully or wait until they felt more spiritual. They said what they felt. God, it looks like you're hiding. That's not a lack of — that's the kind of honesty that only comes from someone who actually believes God is listening. You don't yell into an empty room. If you've ever sat in the silence after a and wondered if anyone heard it, this was written for you.
The psalmist keeps going, painting a portrait of someone we all recognize — the person who seems to get away with everything:
Everything he does works out. Your justice is so far above him he can't even see it. He scoffs at anyone who stands against him.
He tells himself, "Nothing will ever shake me. Generation after generation — I will never face consequences."
His mouth is full of lies, threats, and cruelty. Underneath every word — trouble and destruction.
Sound familiar? It's the person who's built a life on exploiting others — and it's working. The numbers keep going up. The reputation stays intact. They look at the people they've stepped on and feel nothing. And the hardest part isn't that they exist. It's that they seem to be proving their own point. No consequences. No accountability. Just more success. The psalmist isn't pretending that doesn't sting to watch.
Now the imagery gets darker. The psalmist isn't describing a selfish person anymore — this is a predator:
He hides in the shadows of neighborhoods, murdering the innocent from his hiding place. His eyes are locked on the helpless.
He crouches in secret like a lion in the brush — waiting to seize the poor, dragging them into his net.
The helpless are crushed under his weight. They collapse. They fall. And no one stops it.
He tells himself, "God has forgotten. He's looked the other way. He will never see this."
That last line is the key to the whole portrait. Every act of cruelty in this is built on one belief: nobody is watching. Not "God doesn't exist" in some philosophical sense — but the functional conviction that there is no accountability. No record. No reckoning. It's the same logic behind every abuse of power, every exploitation that happens behind closed doors, every system designed to protect the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable. The operating assumption is always the same: no one will ever see this.
Here the pivots. The psalmist stops describing and starts demanding. This isn't polite. It's urgent:
Rise up, Lord. God, lift your hand. Don't forget the ones who are suffering.
Why does the wicked person dismiss you — telling himself, "You'll never hold me accountable"?
But you DO see. You take note of every act of cruelty and pain so you can take it into your own hands. The helpless trust themselves to you. You have always been the defender of the fatherless.
Break the power of the wicked. Hold their evil accountable until there is nothing left of it.
There's something powerful about the shift happening in real time. "But you DO see." The psalmist starts by reminding God — or maybe reminding themselves — that God isn't actually absent. He sees. He notes. He holds the record. And then, with that confidence building, they ask for what actually requires: not just awareness, but action. This is what it sounds like when moves from frustration to trust without skipping over the hard part.
The psalmist ends not with a question, not with a request, but with a declaration:
The Lord is king forever and ever. The nations that oppose him will vanish from his land.
Lord, you hear what the afflicted are longing for. You will steady their hearts. You will listen closely — bringing justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that no one who is merely human will terrorize them again.
Read that last line one more time. The psalmist just spent seventeen verses describing people who seem invincible — prosperous, powerful, untouchable. And then in one sentence, they put it all in perspective. These people are "of the earth." That's it. Dust with an expiration date. And the God they assumed wasn't watching? He's the King. Not temporarily. Not conditionally. Forever. The that started with "where are you?" ends with the quiet certainty that he never left.