Imprecatory Psalms

Jesus tells us to love our enemies, but in the Psalms, David prays for God to bash in the teeth of his enemies. How can we as Christians understand curses for one’s enemy as seen in the Imprecatory Psalms against the love that Jesus teaches? And how does this all fit with Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine?

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Message:

Previously in our “Greatest Hits” series we have looked at one chapter of Psalms at a time. Today we will study portions of several psalms with a common emphasis.

• Psalm 56:6-8

Break the teeth in their mouths, O God; 
Lord, tear out the fangs of those lions!
Let them vanish like water that flows away;
when they draw the bow, let their arrows fall short.
May they be like a slug that melts away as it moves along,
like a stillborn child that never sees the sun.

• Psalm 109:6-10

Appoint someone evil to oppose my enemy; 
let an accuser stand at his right hand. 
When he is tried, let him be found guilty, 
and may his prayers condemn him. 
May his days be few; 
may another take his place of leadership. 
May his children be fatherless 
and his wife a widow. 
May his children be wandering beggars; 
may they be driven from their ruined homes. 

• Psalm 137:8-9

What do you think of these psalms? Are you reading them before you go to bed at night and committing them to memory? Are you creating your own prayers against your enemies because you’ve seen it in the Bible?

Or do these verses make you highly uncomfortable? Do you quickly scoot by them and attribute them to the Old Testament God you never can fully understand?

These are interesting verses! As a collection, along with several other examples, these are called “Imprecatory Psalms.” The word “imprecatory” is based on the verb “to imprecate, which means “to invoke judgment, calamity or curses upon one’s enemies or those perceived as the enemies of God.”

The author of these psalms is David, the often sweet shepherd boy turned king; and he is calling down curses on those he views as enemies of God. “Bash in their teeth” and “dash their infants on the rocks” are two of the more troublesome verses. You may be wondering “Why in the world are you preaching on that?”

This weekend I made a quick trip home to see my parents, and my mom asked me what I planned to preach on today. I told her about the verses I have read to you, and she said, “Why on earth are you preaching about that?

I’ll tell you the same thing I told her: As Christians we read these verses and don’t fully understand them, but we trust that God is good; and so we gloss over them, move along, and don’t worry much about them. But when a non-Christian or a new Christian or a curious seeker comes across these verses, they hit the brakes and very quickly ditch any beliefs in Christianity. They can’t justify following a God who answers prayers for killing infants.

While we may want to sweep these difficult verses under the rug and move on to more comfortable psalms – like Psalm 23 – we must examine and scrutinize carefully even the most difficult parts of scripture. We must be ready to explain it to people who might try to use it to prove to us that our faith is naïve or even dangerous.

Bad Answers

Before we unpack how to understand these curses and difficult passages, we first have to look at some common, yet unsatisfying and incorrect explanations that are often given.

Old Testament God of Judgment

I can’t tell you how many Christians I have spoken to over the years who view the God of the Old Testament as a fierce God of Justice but who see Jesus as almost the antithesis – a free-loving, grace-filled hippie. They explain the difference as a change in covenants. However, the covenants did not change the very character of God! The God of the Old Testament was filled with loving kindness, and Jesus is also a Man of justice for the oppressed. We can’t differentiate cleanly between them; they are part of the Trinity – the Three in One.

We find imprecatory passages in the New Testament as well as the Old:

• Acts 13:10-11 – Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked straight at Elymas and said, ¹⁰ “You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right!… ¹¹ Now the hand of the Lord is against you. You are going to be blind for a time, not even able to see the light of the sun.” 
• Galatians 1:8 –  But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse!
• Revelation 6:9-10 – ⁹ When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. ¹⁰ They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?”

I can see how some people would say, “But Jesus would never want us to look for curses and judgments on people. After all, He told us to love our enemies.” Yet even Jesus talks about the wrath that is to come to certain people.

• Luke 10:10-12 – ¹⁰ But when you enter a town and are not welcomed, go into its streets and say, ¹¹ ‘Even the dust of your town we wipe from our feet as a warning to you. Yet be sure of this: The kingdom of God has come near.’ ¹² I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town. 

Based on these verses, we cannot dismiss the “Imprecatory Psalms” as being an Old Testament phenomenon. The same God who was in control in the Old Testament was in control in the New Testament and is still in control today!

Imperfect Prayers of Imperfect People

Many believe these prayers have nothing to do with God but are simply sinful prayers of sinful people seeking revenge on their enemies. They say, “Well, we’ve always said the Bible is honest; and here we see the hatred in human hearts.” They dismiss these verses as the opposite of what we are to think or pray, just as many of the Old Testament stories actually show us the wrong way of living.

When studying the Imprecatory Psalms, it is important to note that they were not written out of vindictiveness or a need for personal vengeance. David was the man who twice could have killed Saul and taken over the kingdom, but he knew that was not what God wanted; so he never took revenge on Saul. Yet David is the primary author of the Imprecatory Psalms. They are always against a nation or group of people who are living as enemies of God, never about a personal vendetta with a single individual. These prayers are about something much bigger than himself.

The danger in the “imperfect prayers and people” argument is that it picks and chooses which parts of the Bible are inspired and instructional as opposed to parts we can write off as being human, sinful, and not a model for us. As soon as we start cutting out parts of scripture because they “couldn’t be what God wants for us,” we find ourselves on a slippery slope where we decide which portions of scripture are or are not for us.

Human Hopes, not Divine Directive

Others believe that these imprecatory prayers are legitimate prayers by thoughtful, God-honoring people but that God has no intention of actually answering any of them. Instead, God allows people to blow off their anger by sharing their deep desire for vengeance in a safe place, in prayer, with God. They believe this enables the person to move forward because God will simply dismiss the petition – rather like a “smash room” session with God to get out all your anger without hurting anyone else.

However, again, if that is the case, then why do we continue to see imprecations in the New Testament? Why do we, in fact, see Paul curse the sorcerer to blindness? This is much bigger than a therapy session with God!

Rooted in God’s Justice

Now that we’ve ruled out the common bad answers, how do the Imprecatory Psalms fit with everything our Bible says about God being slow to anger and abounding in grace? How does this fit with Jesus telling us to love our enemies?

No matter how much we want to emphasize the LOVE of God, we must always recognize that His love cannot be separated from His JUSTICE. He loves the oppressed and wants to rescue them; and He will judge the oppressors and make them pay for their actions. When people seek Him they will find Him; but if you make little children stumble, it is better for you to be thrown into the sea with a millstone around your neck! Humanity has an incredible propensity for evil, and that evil must be addressed and eliminated. Otherwise it will continue to torment the ones God says He loves.

As we recognize that the God of the Old and New Testaments is a God of justice, then we must recognize that these Imprecatory Psalms actually line up with the very justice God has spoken to the Israelites about. They aren’t praying about anything God hasn’t already told them about. In essence they are praying, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done” because their prayers against those who oppose God and oppress Israel line up with what God said would happen to Israel’s enemies.

These prayers are not only against Israel’s enemies. God is an equal-opportunity rewarder of sin.

In Deuteronomy 27, the Levites were commanded to call down curses on the Israelites if they did not follow God’s law. The following chapter explains this.

• Deuteronomy 28:45 – All these curses shall come upon you and pursue you and overtake you till you are destroyed, because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to keep His commandments and His statutes that He commanded you.

God’s people are not immune to His judgment, and imprecatory prayers should not be uttered without a sense of humility and repentance on the part of the person speaking them.

To truly come to terms with these difficult passages in Psalms, you must recognize God’s righteous justice. He rewards those who walk the way of the righteous and punishes the wicked. When the writers of Psalms pray for those outcomes, they are simply aligning their prayers with what God has already spoken. Even Psalm 137, which seeks to dash Babylonian infants against the rocks, is written because that is the very wickedness the Babylonians had perpetrated against Israelite children! Israelite law called for “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” These psalmists were simply asking God to carry out His own law.

So – should we pray down curses on our enemies? Here’s the real reason I’m preaching this sermon today. When the war in Ukraine began, a popular Christian website posted an article based on the Imprecatory Psalms and encouraging Christians to pray for the untimely death of Vladimir Putin. As you might expect, this caused all sorts of controversy. I went digging through many articles and commentaries to learn about this dark, buried part of our Bibles that we speak about so rarely.

After learning how to understand these passages and to see them through the lens of God’s righteous justice, am I supposed to pray a curse on those I perceive to be opposed to God?

Two verses came to mind:

• Ephesians 6:12 – For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
• Romans 12:19-20 – Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” ⁿ says the Lord. ²⁰ On the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.”

In Matthew 23, Jesus called the Pharisees whitewashed tombs and chastised them for their legalism; yet the chapter ends with Jesus lamenting that they would not come to Him. Acts 7 tells of Stephen, who was stoned to death for his faith in Jesus. He followed Jesus’s example and prayed for those with stones in their hands, asking God not to hold their sin against them.

The clear teaching here is that with our actions we are never to take revenge on an enemy. Instead, we are to trust the perfect Judge to carry out justice. Our only role is to love our enemies. This is easier said than done, but there is no gray area here.

This also reminds us that God’s wrath is very real. Not every person is going to get a gold star and entry into an eternal home with God. Some will receive punishment in the next life. Some may even face the wrath of God in this life, but that is up to God and His perfect timing, and not to us.

With those verses as my framework, here is where I land. I think it is perfectly acceptable for us to pray to God the promises we know line up with His will. But I am unwilling to go so far as to pray curses on individuals. I leave that up to God.

Throughout this war in Ukraine, my prayer is that God would protect the innocent and bring an end to the evil and suffering. If that means ending a person’s life or causing destruction for one military unit or another, I leave those details up to God.

What about your situation? Maybe you have a troublesome family or work situation, or maybe you are focused on the political situation here in America. Would I be so bold as to pray for God to bash in the teeth of my perceived enemy? Nope. What if I thought for sure someone was God’s enemy? Probably still no. God cares about that person, and only He knows the path that person is on. Might wrath and judgment be in that person’s future? Yes. And so I pray for their salvation and that they would turn from evil and find the truth.

Conclusion

The Imprecatory Psalms can be used as examples of how to pray God’s promises in our world. If we were God and had to make all the detailed decisions, we’d probably make a bigger mess than what we began with. But we worship a faithful God, a good God, a loving God, and a just God; and our role is not to get into the nitty-gritty of how God should wipe out our enemies. Instead, we should pray the promises of God and trust Jesus to work out the details.

Go ahead and pray for sinners to turn from their wickedness. Pray for bad friends to be removed from your kids’ lives. Pray for the evil in our nation and our world to be defeated and for righteousness to prevail. But stop short of thinking you know exactly what that might look like and how God must do it. He is God; we are not!

God has a plan, and He will work His good plan until the last day – the day we reunite with Jesus in the sky. At that moment we can be assured that justice and vengeance will be served. Until that day, God is giving everyone a chance to turn from their sin – the same chance he gave to you and to me.