John Calvin Commentary Psalms 75:2

"When I shall find the set time, I will judge uprightly." — Psalms 75:2 (ASV)

When I shall have taken the congregation. The Hebrew verb יעד, yaäd, signifies to appoint a place or day, and the noun מועד, moed, derived from it, which is here used, signifies both holy assemblies, or a congregation of the faithful assembled together in the name of the Lord, and festival, or appointed solemn days. As it is certain that God is here introduced as speaking, either of these senses will agree with the scope of the passage.

It may be viewed as denoting either that, having gathered His people to Himself, He will restore to due order matters which were in a state of distraction and confusion, or else that He will choose a fit time for exercising His judgment. In abandoning His people for a season to the will of their enemies, He seems to forsake them and to exercise no care about them, so that they are like a flock of sheep which is scattered and wanders here and there without a shepherd.

His object, then, being to convey in these words a promise that He would remedy such a confused state of things, He very properly begins with the gathering together of His Church. If any choose rather to understand the word מועד, moed, as referring to time, God is to be understood as admonishing His people that it is their duty to exercise patience until He actually shows that the proper time has come for correcting vices, since He alone has the years and days in His own power and knows best the fit juncture and moment for performing this work.

The interpretation to which I most incline is that to determine the end and measure of calamities, and the best season for rising up for the deliverance of His people—matters, the determination of which men would willingly claim for themselves—is reserved by God in His own hands and is entirely subject to His own will.

At the same time, I am very well satisfied with the former interpretation, which refers the passage to the gathering together of the Church. Nor should it seem absurd or harsh that God is here introduced as returning an answer to the prayers of His people. This graphic representation, by which they are made to speak in the first verse while He is introduced as speaking in the second, is much more forcible than if the prophet had simply said that God would at length, and at the determined time, show Himself to be the protector of His Church and gather her together again when she should be scattered and rent in pieces.

In short, the point is that although God may not succor His own people immediately, yet He never forgets them but only delays until the fit time arrives the redress which He has in readiness for them.

To judge righteously is simply to restore to a better state matters which are embroiled and disordered. Thus Paul says,

Seeing it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you; and to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels (2 Thessalonians 1:6–7).

God, therefore, declares that it is His office to set in order and adjust those things which are in confusion, so that, entertaining this expectation, we may be sustained and comforted by means of it in all our afflictions.