W. Brueggemann classifies this psalm as one of the “psalms of orientation” (The Message of the Psalms [Augsburg Old Testament Studies; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984], p. 45), which he believes reflect “a satisfied and assured assertion of orderliness” that “probably comes from the well-off, from the economically secure and the politically significant” (p. 26). But a closer reading of such a psalm reveals the reverse. Order needs to be affirmed most strongly in times of disorder, and there are indications of current disorder in this psalm and of a tension between what the world should and will be and what the world is now. We are unfair to this psalm if we assume the writer believes he is actually describing the visible reality of his own world (so cf. Ps. 1, whose opening verses closely para…