The Divine Laughter and the Coming Checkmate
Introduction: Two Kinds of Laughter
We live in a world that is full of laughter, but it is a nervous, brittle laughter. It is the laughter of the fool in the book of Ecclesiastes, like the crackling of thorns under a pot, a lot of noise and flash signifying nothing. It is the cynical, sneering laughter of the late night talk show host, the kind of laughter that seeks to tear down, to mock, to belittle. It is the laughter of those who believe they are getting away with something, the laughter of the empty, the profane, and the doomed.
But the Bible speaks of another kind of laughter. It is a laughter that is deep, resonant, and grounded in absolute reality. It is the laughter of God. This is not the giggling of a frivolous deity. It is the laughter of a sovereign King who holds all of history in the palm of His hand. It is the laughter of a Father who knows the end from the beginning, who sees the final act of the play while the villains are still preening and posturing in the first. It is a laughter that should fill the righteous with an unshakeable confidence and the wicked with a bone-chilling terror. And it is this very laughter that we encounter here in our text.
Psalm 37 is a wisdom psalm, a balm for the troubled soul of the righteous man who looks out at the world and sees the apparent triumph of evil. The wicked prosper. They hatch their plots, they gain power, they seem to have everything their way. And the righteous are tempted to fret, to become envious, to wonder if obedience is really worth it. David, writing in his old age, tells us not to worry. He pulls back the curtain of time and shows us the view from Heaven's throne room. He shows us that the frantic, furious activity of the wicked is, from God's perspective, a comedy. A dark comedy, to be sure, but a comedy nonetheless, because the outcome is not in doubt.
The Text
The wicked schemes against the righteous
And gnashes at him with his teeth.
The Lord laughs at him,
For He sees that his day is coming.
(Psalm 37:12-13 LSB)
The Impotent Fury of the Wicked (v. 12)
We begin by examining the portrait of the wicked man in verse 12.
"The wicked schemes against the righteous And gnashes at him with his teeth." (Psalm 37:12)
The first thing to notice is the sheer activity of the wicked. He "schemes." The Hebrew word here implies plotting, devising, weaving a web. This is not a man who is wicked by accident. He is a diligent, industrious sinner. He puts thought into it. He strategizes. He stays up late at night devising evil, as Micah 2:1 tells us. He is a theologian of wickedness, a philosopher of rebellion. He is trying to build his own kingdom, his own reality, on a foundation of lies. He is trying to uncreate God's world and remake it in his own twisted image.
And who is the target of this furious scheming? The righteous. Why? Because the very existence of the righteous is a rebuke to him. The righteous man, by simply living in faith and obedience, holds up a mirror to the wicked man's rebellion. The light exposes the darkness, and the darkness hates the light. This is why Cain murdered Abel. It was not over a property dispute. It was because Abel's deeds were righteous, and Cain's were evil. The conflict between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent runs through all of history, from the gates of Eden to the final judgment.
The second description is that he "gnashes at him with his teeth." This is a picture of visceral, animalistic hatred. It is the rage of a predator that cannot reach its prey. It is the sound of utter frustration and impotent fury. We see this in the New Testament when the Sanhedrin, confronted with the unanswerable truth of Stephen's sermon, "gnashed their teeth at him" right before they murdered him (Acts 7:54). This is not a cool, detached disagreement. This is a deep, spiritual, all-consuming hatred for God and for those who bear His image. It is the rage of a creature that knows, deep down, that it is fighting a losing battle against its Creator.
The Sovereign Mirth of the Lord (v. 13a)
Now, what is God's response to all this furious, teeth-gnashing activity? Does He pace the floors of heaven, wringing His hands? Does He call an emergency council of the angels? No. Verse 13 gives us the astounding answer.
"The Lord laughs at him..." (Psalm 37:13a)
The Lord laughs. This is the same laughter we see in Psalm 2. The kings of the earth set themselves, the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying, "Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us." And what is the response from the throne? "He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision" (Psalm 2:4). This is not the laughter of amusement, but of absolute, unthreatened sovereignty.
Imagine a toddler, standing at the edge of the Pacific Ocean with his little plastic shovel, screaming that he is going to stop the tide. It is a laughable proposition. The toddler's fury is real. His intent is real. But his power, when compared to the ocean, is utterly insignificant. Now multiply that disparity by infinity. That is the picture here. The wicked man, in all his scheming and raging, is a speck of dust shaking his fist at a hurricane. He is a joke.
God's laughter is the laughter of the victor who knows the outcome of the war before the first shot is even fired. He is not threatened. He is not worried. He is not surprised. All the frantic plotting of godless men, all the resolutions of the United Nations, all the blasphemies of Hollywood, all the corruptions of Washington D.C., all of it, when set against the backdrop of God's eternal decree, is nothing. It is a vapor. It is a punchline.
The Divine Foreknowledge (v. 13b)
But why does God laugh? The text gives us the reason. It is not because the wicked are not dangerous in the short term. They are. They can cause real pain, real suffering. Stephen was still stoned. The Lord laughs because He sees the bigger picture. He sees the end of the story.
"For He sees that his day is coming." (Psalm 37:13b)
God sees. The wicked man lives in the tiny, claustrophobic prison of the present moment. He sees his temporary success, his fleeting power, his pile of money. But God sees eternity. He sees "his day." Every wicked man, every wicked institution, every wicked empire has a "day." It is the day of reckoning. It is the day the bill comes due. It is the day when their time is up.
This "day" can be a temporal judgment. It can be the day a tyrant is overthrown, the day a corrupt business collapses, the day a persecutor is struck down. History is littered with the ruins of those who gnashed their teeth at God's people. Where are the Caesars? Where is the Soviet Union? Their day came. God saw it coming, and He laughed.
But ultimately, "his day" refers to the great and final Day of the Lord. It is the day of judgment when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. On that day, all the schemes will be exposed. All the proud will be humbled. All the accounts will be settled. God sees that day as if it were already here. For Him, who inhabits eternity, it is not a future possibility; it is a present reality. He is not predicting the future; He is declaring it.
Conclusion: Living in Light of the Laughter
So what is the takeaway for us, the righteous who live in the midst of this teeth-gnashing world? The point of this psalm is to adjust our perspective. It is to lift our eyes from the temporary, apparent success of the wicked and to see the world as God sees it.
First, this should cure our fretting. To fret over the prosperity of the wicked is to have a low view of God. It is to act as if God is somehow losing, as if the enemy's schemes might actually work. But if God is laughing, then we have no business worrying. Our job is to trust Him, do good, and dwell in the land He has given us. We are to be faithful, not frantic.
Second, this should fuel our confidence. We are on the winning side. The outcome of history is not a toss-up. Christ has already won the decisive victory at the cross and the empty tomb. All of history since is simply the mopping-up operation. The serpent's head has been crushed; all we see now are the death throes of its tail. We can therefore live with boldness, with joy, and with a deep and abiding peace, even in the face of opposition.
Finally, this should lead us to evangelism. God's laughter is a comfort to the righteous, but it is a terrifying warning to the wicked. Their day is coming. The only escape from that day of wrath is to flee to the cross of Christ. The only way to avoid being the object of God's derisive laughter is to be found in His Son, who bore the full force of that wrath for us. Our message to the scheming world is not one of triumphalism, but of gracious invitation. Flee from the wrath to come. Bow the knee to King Jesus now, in repentance and faith, before you are made to bow the knee on that final day, when it is too late. For on that day, the laughter of God will cease to be a warning and will become the final, unalterable verdict.