Psalms 83:13

What does he mean by this? As I take it, that goodness can with difficulty gain a hold on human nature, like fire on green wood; while most people are ready and disposed to join in evil, like stubble, I mean, ready for a spark and a wind, which is easily kindled and consumed from its dryness. For a person will engage more quickly and fully in evil with the slightest inducement than in good with only little encouragement.

My God, set them like a wheel. Let them not be stable, but forever uncertain: that they may have no seat, and be forever rolled about unstably. For just as a wheel is not of itself stable, so also the heretics do not stand firm in their opinion, but forever change their doctrines. Like stubble before the face of the wind. Eleven punishments he asks against them, because they have denied the mysteries of the eleven apostles. But let the prudent reader say: How will you divide one verse into two? And you do violence to the Scripture: you say eleven apostles, when we know that the Lord and Savior had twelve disciples. For this reason, then, we set down the number eleven, because Judas the traitor, who had been the twelfth, departed from the number. My God, set them like a wheel. You have one plague: count therefore more carefully the rest that follow. Like stubble before the face of the wind: behold the second. Like fire which burns a forest: behold the third. Like a flame burning the mountains: the fourth. So will you pursue them in your tempest: the fifth. And in your anger you will confound them: the sixth. Fill their faces with shame: the seventh. And let them seek your name, O Lord: the eighth. Let them be ashamed and troubled forever and ever: the ninth. And let them be confounded and perish: the tenth. And let them know that your name is Lord: the eleventh. You alone are the Most High over all the earth. Thus far it is wrath: what follows is now mercy. And in your anger you will trouble them. He did not say, kill, but, trouble them, that they may return to you: behold the sixth. Fill their faces with shame: not with punishment, lest, shut out by death, they be unable to return to the Lord. Fill their faces with shame, not with punishment. Why then do you not kill them? The divine word explains: That they may seek your name, O Lord. […]

But what follows? "My God, make them like a wheel" [Psalm 83:13]. This is fitly taken as meaning that they should be constant in nothing that they think; but I think it may also be rightly explained, make them like a wheel, because a wheel is lifted up on the part of what is behind, is thrown down on the part of what is in front; and so it happens to all the enemies of the people of God. For this is not a wish, but a prophecy. He adds: "as the stubble in the face of the wind." By face he means presence; for what face has the wind, which has no bodily features, being only a motion, in that it is a kind of wave of air? But it is put for temptation, by which light and vain hearts are hurried away.

This, in the singing of it, we may apply to the enemies of the gospel-church, all anti-christian powers and factions, representing to God their confederacies against Christ and his kingdom, and rejoicing in the hope that all their projects will be baffled and the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church.

Or, as some think, that they might be broken by the judgments of God, as the corn is broken, or beaten out, by the wheel which was then used in threshing. Thus, when a wise king scatters the wicked, he is said to bring the wheel over them, Prov. xx.