Poetic justice

We live in the age between the promise of the new heavens and the new earth -- where perfect peace, righteousness and justice will reign -- and the fulfillment of that promise. Glass-is-half-empty guy that I am I tend to focus on the injustice, or justice delayed, that we see all around us. But there's a principal of justice at work even now. You see it at work when the terrorist's bomb prematurely detonates, killing the terrorist instead of the innocents he's targeting. It's what we might call "poetic justice." Why things like this don't happen all the time is part of the mystery and tension that goes with living in this in-between age, but I think it happens more often than we/I might think.

You run into this principal of justice a lot in the Hebrew poetry of the Old Testament. I love these two examples from David.

Behold, the wicked man conceives evil
  and is pregnant with mischief
  and gives birth to lies.
He makes a pit, digging it out,
  and falls into the hole that he has made.
His mischief returns upon his own head,
  and on his own skull his violence descends.

Psalm 7

The nations have sunk in the pit that they made;
  in the net that they hid, their own foot has been caught.
The Lord has made himself known; he has executed judgment;
  the wicked are snared in the work of their own hands.

Psalm 9