We may well find curious the way the psalmists can abstract, out of all the ambiguities of lived experience, this unambiguous portrayal of the glories of the created order. The psalmists knew famine, disease, violence, and death. And yet, in some of the psalms at least, no trace of evil of any kind is part of the picture. ... To dismiss such texts as naive would only show our own naiveté. Rather, they are an affirmation that ultimately, fundamentally, creation is good, and the Creator deserving of universal praise; that the reality of evil is not ultimate, but secondary and parasitic, a disorder brought about by inappropriate responses to the goodness of the fundamental order.
Stephen Westerholm, A Preface to the Study of Paul (Eerdmans, 1997), p. 15
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