Some psalms need a run up. Psalm 109 is one of them.
I’d go further and say that if Psalm 109 is the first Psalm you’re thinking of praying through, let me suggest some others!
You can’t just hop in and get going. In fact, it’s farily natural to read it and think: “When Paul wrote to Timothy that all scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, reproof…so that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work, did he mean to include this Psalm as part of that??”
I remember facing similar questions a few years back when I was memorising Psalm 139. It’s a magnificent Psalm: affirming God’s character, assuring me of my worth in his eyes…and then you hit verse 19. Suddenly, from a Psalm of adoration and worship, David gets feisty. “Slay the wicked”, he says, “I hate my enemies with the utmost hate” he goes on. I ended up resolving that perhaps I wouldn’t miss out on too much by memorising v1-18 and 23-24!
But Psalm 109 is there for us to read. Psalms like these are labelled ‘impracatory psalms’ – a word we don’t use a whole lot. They reflect a desire to invoke judgment, calamity, or curses upon one’s enemies or those perceived as the enemies of God.
To make things a little trickier, they’re not the sole domain of the Old Testament either. Trickier still, Jesus uttered imprecations directly to the Pharisees (take a look at Matthew 23:13).
So, we’ve established they’re problematic, what now? Well, let’s start where David starts, because 109 isn’t all imprecatory – it doesn’t start that way and it doesn’t end that way. Where David starts is with praise to God in worship. God is the object of his praise. He also declares in v4 that love is his reponse to their hate and prayer is his reponse to their wickedness and deceit.
Like David, we should first remember that those who seek God’s wrath on the guilty should be innocent. Imprecations are only effective against the guilty. In this context and many others, their guilt is the offense of the tongue. God takes our words seriously, and so should we.
So, from verse 5, things head south. But let’s be clear: David starts with prayer and praise, not petition.
I read somewhere that David comes up with 20 different ways that he’d like God to deal with his enemies – none of them are too cheery.
I’m not going to dwell for too long on the nature and severity of the curses that David calls down, but say a few things about them more generally.
1. He’s not the activist, he’s calling on God to be the activist. He begins with God and asks Him to do the heavy-lifting. His personal engagement with the enemy seems motivated by love.
2. While he’s asking God to deal severely with the enemy, he leaves it in God’s hands.It’s not his personal crusade or vendetta, nor does it seem there’s a desire to harbour bitterness, but pass it over to God. It’s an appropriate response to our job and the sovereignty of God. Paul writes in Romans 12: Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave itto the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”
3. Get it out in the open…with God. When someone is openly hating/defaming you with no cause, the natural reaction is not to love! Indeed, the best we can often do is to suppress our feelings of anger and hostility. So we take it to God and we let him know about it. It helps to get it out…it helps even more to get it out before a God who knows us and brings clarity to the fullness of our situation.
One of the commentaries I was reading on Psalm 109 summarised it in a way that captured our problem with imprecation so well. Perhaps it cuts to the heart of the deal.
Imprecatory psalms are far more relevant and applicable to Christians today than we would like to admit. Why then are we so uneasy about them? Essentially I think the answer is that we have a distorted view of God, perverted by our own sin. We want to think of God only in terms of love and mercy, but not in terms of justice and judgment. We are soft on sin. I think we have become entangled in a satanic conspiracy. We have adopted the thinking summarized by the expression, “I’m O.K., You’re O.K.” If you will pardon me for doing so, I could entitle Psalm 109, “I’m O.K., but You’re Not.” Such was the conviction of the psalmist. Most of us know that we are not O.K. Therefore we respond by going easy on others, hoping our laxity will make things easier on us. Let me tell you that if we had the courage and the conviction to pray as David did, we would be very ill at ease in regard to our own sins. Our greatest problem with imprecatory psalms is that the psalmist takes sin much more seriously than we do.
For those of us who like their psalms tied with a neat bow (I think I may be one!) David doesn’t stop with wrath and judgement, he comes back to God. That’s right thinking. The same God he’s been petitioning for wrath on the enemy, he praises once more. He places the problem in God’s hands and says ‘help me, save me…let them know that You have done it’.
Here’s the thing: I think it’s fine/right/proper to take our whinging and wining to God. I think it’s ok to say (if it’s true): God, I’ve been spotless before you and here’s what I want you to do with those who have reponded to my purity with hatred”. But make sure you take it to Him, and make sure that your sin is as vivid to your eyes as those against you. Because he is merciful, he is forgiving and he is loving…but wrath is also His.
– Simon Elliott