There is an astonishing amount of evil in the world today. Our society kills the unborn in countless numbers, in the name of freedom. Children are abused in the name of progress. Corrupt and violent men put on the uniform of protectors and commit violence which often goes unpunished. The response to that violence is more violence. Livelihoods are destroyed, people are shot, police and children are killed.
Meanwhile, China is committing genocide against the Uighurs, and persecuting Christ’s church and the world shrugs its shoulders. After all, there is money to be made.
The world is often silent in the face of evil, but the word is not. God speaks and gives his children words to express the fullness of human emotion.
He gives us Psalms of sorrow and lament, Psalms of joy and praise. And he gives us Psalms of imprecation. It is those last that I want to look at now.
On the imprecatory Psalms
These are the ‘cursing’ Psalms. Imprecation is literally ‘to speak curses’. And they are tough to read, and to listen to. This isn’t what your grandma thinks is cursing language. No, it’s comments like this:
Break the arm of the wicked and the evildoer;
Psalm 10
call his wickedness to account till you find none.
Let them be like chaff before the wind,
Psalm 35
with the angel of the LORD driving them away!
Let their way be dark and slippery,
with the angel of the LORD pursuing them!
May his children be fatherless
Psalm 109
and his wife a widow!
May his children wander about and beg,
seeking food far from the ruins they inhabit!
May the creditor seize all that he has;
may strangers plunder the fruits of his toil!
Let there be none to extend kindness to him,
nor any to pity his fatherless children!
May their camp be a desolation;
Psalm 69
let no one dwell in their tents.
For they persecute him whom you have struck down,
and they recount the pain of those you have wounded.
Add to them punishment upon punishment;
may they have no acquittal from you.
Let them be blotted out of the book of the living;
let them not be enrolled among the righteous.
O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
Psalm 137
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!
God said: Blessed are the meek. And God said: Blessed will be the one who takes a Babylonian baby and smashes their head on a rock. You can’t skip over one and keep the other. Both are in the Bible and both are God’s word to us.
But it’s hard to hear. If you didn’t wince a bit when you read those quotes, you either skimmed over or you’ve been watching too many trashy action flicks and become desensitised. Break their arms, orphan their children, take their property, blot them out of the book of life?
Is that a Christian attitude?
Or a relic of harsher times?
Note as well that these Psalms aren’t just describing what God will, or has, done to the wicked. There is plenty of that in the Bible, including in the Psalms (e.g. in Psalm 3 the Psalmist writes, “you break the teeth of the wicked”). But the imprecatory psalms are specifically calling down God’s judgement on sinners.
On the Fundamental Problem
Before we dig in, it is worth spending a few paragraphs talking about what we do when we come across difficult Bible passages. Because it is important to remember what we are reading. The Bible is God’s book, and therefore a difficult part of the Bible is a difficult part of God. It was God who inspired it, God who preserved it, and God who is saying it to us today.
This blog post was not written to ‘justify’ the imprecatory psalms. It is a common reaction in the church today, people see a difficult part of the Bible and they jump to thinking “how can I justify this”. But that is completely backwards. After all, it is God who justifies. He justifies and pardons and ‘explains’ us. Not the other way around.
So, we won’t justify the imprecatory psalms. We won’t go through a list of ‘5 reasons the imprecatory Psalms aren’t that bad (#4 will inspire you)’. Instead, we’ll sit under them, learn from them who God is and how he views sin. And hopefully we will realise that maybe if we struggle with this part of the Bible, maybe the problem isn’t with the Bible – it’s with us.
Because I think that is the fundamental problem. The reason we don’t like the imprecatory Psalms is simple: We aren’t holy enough.
We are unholy – so we want to judge, we don’t want God to judge us, and we don’t understand why judgement is needed in the first place.
Let me unpack that a little bit. It’s a bit like one of those “only one point today” sermons but it’s actually four separate points, with subpoints, and a point of application and we’ll be here all day if we don’t get cracking.
We are unholy, so we want to judge
This is a key thing to remember about the imprecatory Psalms. None of them are about the Psalmist judging and taking vengeance on his enemies. Rather, they are about God’s people calling down God’s covenant curses on the enemies of God and the enemies of his people. And there are two aspects to that (here come the subpoints).
Sub-point 1: It’s God’s covenant curses – so that means no to vigilante justice (sorry, Batman). You don’t get to break the teeth of your enemies or chase them down slippery paths in the dark.
Sub-point 2 is the one that I think is more of a problem in our cultural context. It’s the enemies of God and his people – so that means we don’t get to decide who is judged and who is not.
We often forget that the reason that the Bible says not to take vengeance is not because vengeance is bad – but because vengeance is God’s. God is not a fluffy hearted softy who says “Oh, punishment isn’t nice, we shouldn’t do that”. No, God says “Don’t take vengeance because vengeance is mine”. God will repay the wicked, so we should not.
God has promised judgement, on his terms. So that means that whatever our society says, God will judge the killers of innocent children in the womb, those who sleep around, those who put their own judgement over and above that of the bible. God does not limit himself to NBA-approved social causes. He will judge middle class sins as well as working class ones, Western sins as well as those of the rest of the world and modern sins as well as those of the past.
Which means we’ve already mostly covered our second point.
We are unholy, so we don’t want to be judged
Without the grace of God, when we read the imprecatory Psalms – we are not the Psalmist in that story. We are the wicked ones, deserving of judgment. We hate the judgement of God, because we know where it should fall.
We are unholy, so we don’t understand why judgement is needed
One of the things that we learn from the imprecatory psalms is how bad sin is, how angry God is at it, and how the righteous should react to sin and injustice.
When you see sin and evil in the world around, you should be furious. But you’re not, I’m not. Because I’m not holy enough. I see people lie, cheat, fudge their timesheets or plagiarise their essays and think ‘meh, whatever’. I watch that TV show where there’s a love triangle with everyone committing adultery with each other’s spouses and it’s played for laughs and I laugh. It’s hilarious. But it’s not hilarious to God.
Stepping it up a notch, when we see sex trafficking gangs operating out of our cities, when we see terrorism claim innocent lives, when we see ISIS desecrating, raping and murdering their way across the middle east, when we see millions of innocents slaughtered in the name of ‘freedom’, when we see the beginnings of genocide in China then we should react with fury.
We should cry out with the Psalmist for the wicked to be blotted out from the book of living, for the angel of the Lord to drive them away. Because there is real evil out there. But let’s just come back to that in a minute, because that is the application portion of our one point.
Jesus is holy, Jesus will judge, and Jesus hates sin
Before we get to that, one last subpoint. Some people like to dismiss the imprecatory Psalms as outdated, Old Testament stuff. All that judgement and wishing death on the wicked. Yet it was Jesus who said of the Pharisees:
You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?
And of one who caused children to stumble that it was:
better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea
If anyone really doubts that Jesus wouldn’t approve of the imprecatory psalms, then they only really need to read Revelation and the Gospels. After all, he even quotes them about Judas, saying that it would have been better for him if he had never been born.
Because Jesus is holy, Jesus will judge, and Jesus hates sin.
Praying the imprecatory Psalms
But before you think “great”, and go praying down judgement on all and sundry, two things.
First, notice that the Psalms are not calling down judgement on specific individuals (and where they seem to use specific language, it’s mostly as an example of the type rather than a named person). Because for every individual, God extends the offer of mercy. But for unbelievers (those who reject mercy) as a category, they will face judgement.
Secondly, remember who the enemy is.
I don’t think it is sinful to pray the imprecatory psalms against our spiritual enemies – but never forget who that is. Your enemy is not the guy who cut you off in traffic, or the girl who slacked off in the group assignment. Your enemy isn’t even your unbelieving friend or the ardent atheist who turns up to every evangelism event to cause trouble. The enemy is Satan. The enemy is the powers of hell that want to win those people for themselves and stop them ever coming to Jesus.
It would not be wrong, say, for you pray that God would destroy his enemies and bring justice and judgement to the earth. But what you can’t do is to pick out a particular person and call for God’s judgement on them. I can’t pray for God to break the teeth of the designers of the wardrobe I spent 4 hours building on Friday only for it to collapse and shatter under its own weight. More’s the pity. More seriously, we cannot call for God to break Xi Jinping’s arm, or plead for Derek Chauvin to die and his fatherless children to beg in the street.
Because even for them, we must be willing to forgive.
So in summary: you can’t just pick someone who has wronged you and call down teeth-breaking judgement on them. No. Not okay. Forgive, turn the other cheek. Pray for God’s mercy to save them and lead them to repentance and restoration.
But for everyone who rejects God and follows Satan, the Christian should rejoice that they will be destroyed in the end. That God will judge justly and make right the wrongs. And we absolutely should pray for God to crush the serpent’s head, to answer evil with covenant curses and to fulfil his promise to judge the world and make it new.
Editor’s note: the above is a lightly edited and updated version of a talk I gave at Trinity Aberdeen’s student ministry. There is a lot more that could be said, but it was a short talk and this is already a chunky post.