Imprecatory Psalms

Imprecatory psalms make me uncomfortable. Imprecatory psalms, by the way, are those psalms that contain curses or prayers for the punishment of the psalmist's enemies. Allow me to share a few examples of imprecatory psalms, and you will, perhaps, understand my discomfort:

• "For the cursing and lies that they utter, consume them in wrath; consume them till they are no more..." (Psalm 59:12-13a).
• "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" (Psalm 69:27-28).
• "Pour out your anger on the nations that do not know you, and on the kingdoms that do not call upon your name!" (Psalm 79:6).
• "Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!" (Psalm 137:9).

As to this last psalm, there is perhaps no greater expression of pathos and retributive justice in all of Scripture. In either a sort of twisted irony or wonderful example of divine justice the German pop band Boney M scored a huge hit in 1978 with their song "By the Rivers of Babylon." It is a wonderful song, but perhaps not in the way you might expect. Displaced Africans exploited and commodified for the sake of a hit dance song? There is something very right and psalmic about this disconnect.

What are we to do with the imprecatory psalms? There are three good principles to keep in mind when we read and pray these psalms:

1) Justice belongs to God. It is one thing to take justice into our own hands with a sort of vigilantism. It is quite another to leave to God (Rom. 12:19). The imprecatory psalms acknowledge this.

2) Given room to lament and cry out to God, I believe we are in a far better position to recognize God's majesty, our sinfulness, and God's gracious forbearance towards our sin. Against whom have we sinned that such imprecatory psalms might be leveled against us? We have surely sinned against God and neighbor, yes? Prayer has a way of doing this, of directing our attention to God in what Eugene Peterson calls "answeringly attentive" awareness. As we pray, the trajectory of our prayer inevitably leads to us praying for our enemies (Matt. 5:44).
3) Trusting that God is the God of justice, we believe that "God will turn back [our enemies], and cause to fall upon their own heads, all the evil which they had devised against us" (John Calvin's Commentary on the Psalms). Trusting thus in Principle 1, and then acknowledging Principle 2, the imprecatory psalms then serve "as a kind of restraint upon us, that we may behave ourselves compassionately and kindly towards our neighbors" (Calvin).

Even the imprecatory psalms, then, are a teacher by which we learn to "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind...[and] love your neighbor as yourself" (Matt. 22:37-39).