Psalms 112:10, commentary and pictures

Psalm 112 closes with the awful fate of the wicked set in direct contrast to the blessed people described at its beginning. The wicked may look prosperous and happy, yet they are not truly blessed and not truly happy. Their end is grief and wasting away, with everything they desire coming to nothing.

The verse is fulfilled at the close of the day of the Lord after the thousand years, when the wicked dead are raised and Satan is loosed to deceive and gather the nations before the city of God. In that final scene the city of God comes down to the earth and the wicked are gathered by Satan from the four corners of the earth as Gog and Magog to surround the city. Christ and the saints appear above the city with the Ten Commandments in full view, and the lost behold the reward of the righteous and the reward of the wicked and have one final view of each other. Then the earth opens and swallows them and fire in the earth joins fire from heaven to burn the earth, the wicked are no more, and a new heaven and a new earth come forth from its ashes in the last act of the judgment.

The verse describes the final gathering of the whole human race together for the first and last time for separation. At that gathering the book of life is publicly produced not to find out whether the names of the righteous are there but to show to the universal race of mankind that their names are there. The wicked are made to see the righteous saved inside the city and themselves given over to burning flames. They behold with amazement those given superlative honor by Heaven, the very ones they had esteemed as the filth and offscouring of the earth and had reviled, defamed, persecuted and destroyed. Seeing the justice of God, seeing the absence of their own names from the Lamb's book of life, and beholding the infinite reward of the righteous, they are grieved with angry despair and waste away as their desire perishes. When the realization that they are lost comes over Satan and the wicked, they break into one bitter wail of agony in grief and gnashing of teeth.

The perishing of their desire and their melting away means they will be consumed and destroyed forever, not merely suffer temporal loss. Their cravings and hopes will fail and come to nothing. The strong natural desire of men to keep living does not prove that man has life in himself or is naturally immortal. That desire, when it trusts Satan's Edenic falsehood that men shall not surely die and shall be as gods, and builds pagan idolatry, Spiritualism, adoration of saints and worship of Mary, the orthodox hell, and purgatory on the belief in inherent life, is a false carnal hope that will perish. True immortality belongs to God alone and there is life only in Christ, to be bestowed when He comes again on those who seek it by patient continuance in well-doing.

The grieving, gnashing of teeth, and melting away as desire perishes also applies to abuses, wrongs, and errors whose pretensions are stripped away by ridicule. They suffer and wither among their worshipers, while truth does not suffer. Cheerful, hopeful ridicule may likewise be directed at small obstacles to Christian progress.