7 O Lord my God, in you do I take refuge;
save me from all my pursuers and deliver me,
2 lest like a lion they tear my soul apart,
rending it in pieces, with none to deliver.3 O Lord my God, if I have done this,
if there is wrong in my hands,
4 if I have repaid my friend with evil
or plundered my enemy without cause,
5 let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it,
and let him trample my life to the ground
and lay my glory in the dust. Selah6 Arise, O Lord, in your anger;
lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies;
awake for me; you have appointed a judgment.
7 Let the assembly of the peoples be gathered about you;
over it return on high.8 The Lord judges the peoples;
judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness
and according to the integrity that is in me.
9 Oh, let the evil of the wicked come to an end,
and may you establish the righteous—
you who test the minds and hearts,
O righteous God!
10 My shield is with God,
who saves the upright in heart.
11 God is a righteous judge,
and a God who feels indignation every day.12 If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword;
he has bent and readied his bow;
13 he has prepared for him his deadly weapons,
making his arrows fiery shafts.
14 Behold, the wicked man conceives evil
and is pregnant with mischief
and gives birth to lies.
15 He makes a pit, digging it out,
and falls into the hole that he has made.
16 His mischief returns upon his own head,
and on his own skull his violence descends.17 I will give to the Lord the thanks due to his righteousness,
Psalm 7:1-17
and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord, the Most High.
Jesus commands us to love our enemies. The Old Testament tells us that the greatest commandment is that we love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, and might 1 and our neighbor as ourselves. Sometimes our neighbor is an enemy. At first blush, the prayer of Psalm 7 appears to violate these commands to love our neighbors, including those who are our enemies.
Arise, O Lord, in your anger;
Psalm 7:6
lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies;
awake for me; you have appointed a judgment.
There are many Psalms with language like this. We even find it in the New Testament.
But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. 9 As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.
Galatians 1:8-9
I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves!
Galatians 5:12
When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. 10 They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”
Revelation 6:9-10
Is it ethically proper for a Christian to pray this way?
I am attempting to introduce an aspect of prayer that is generally not taught or addressed in the church today but needs to be because it is Biblical prayer. We are supposed to preach/teach the whole counsel of God, which includes what is known as imprecatory prayer, prayers that call for judgment and justice on our enemies. If you want to delve deeper into this kind of prayer, I recommend the book, Cursing with God The Imprecatory Psalms and the Ethics of Christian Prayer by Trevor Laurence. Unfortunately, it isn’t the easiest book to read; too much unnecessary theological jargon and complex sentences. It could be much more readable. But with that said, it is the best and most thorough treatment of the subject I know of.
Since this is a “how to” article, let’s see how David approached this kind of prayer. First, David lays out his petition to be saved from his enemies. The next phase of his prayer is not where most of us go when we are complaining about being mistreated.
3 O Lord my God, if I have done this,
Psalm 7:3-5
if there is wrong in my hands,
4 if I have repaid my friend with evil
or plundered my enemy without cause,
5 let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it,
and let him trample my life to the ground
and lay my glory in the dust. Selah
David lays himself bare before the Lord and his enemies and opens himself up to the same judgment that he is calling for against his enemies. David understands himself as being innocent. Only the innocent can properly pray imprecatory prayers. Elsewhere David prays for the Lord to search him and see if there be any wicked way in him. This practice precedes his imprecations. David does what he can to have a pure heart. He avoids entering this kind of plea for justice with hatred and animosity driving his actions.
Rather than the destruction of his enemies, David prays for their repentance. (Ps 7:9,12) The goal of his prayer is for righteousness to prevail in the society where David is King.
This kind of prayer is not a curse. “…it is essential to recall that the cursing Psalms are not curses proper; that is, they are not unmediated, inherently effectual speech acts aimed at harnessing and directing power for ill against a human being. The imprecatory Psalms are rather prayers directed to God that petition God to act on the basis of his covenant commitments to judge the wicked…The cursing psalms ask God to bring his covenant curses to fruition; they do not curse the enemy directly.” 2
Who are the proper subjects of imprecatory prayer?
The first enemies of innocent believers, who are God’s temple and kingdom, are their spiritual enemies, Satan, and his demonic forces of the kingdom of darkness. Although the Lord Jesus has disarmed, shamed, and triumphed over the rulers and authorities in his death and resurrection 3, the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour4. Paul exhorts us to be “praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication.”5 “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”6 Through Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection, the Kingdom of God has been inaugurated but not consummated. In this post-resurrection and pre-parousia period, we are in a battle to protect and advance the Lord’s Kingdom. Prayers calling for the curses promised to the serpent are required.
The church has to battle not only with spiritual forces but human beings as well. New Covenant examples are of specific people. Jesus’ parable of the widow crying out for justice, 7 Paul’s anathema against false teachers in Galatia who teach another gospel,8 and the martyrs in heaven praying for vengeance against the blood-shedding humans who “dwell on the earth.”9 It may seem weird to pray like Paul since we are always told to be “nice” and “winsome.” These kinds of prayers don’t seem to fit our current culture. But this is what the Scripture teaches us to do.
In addition to individual humans, there are human systems that can and often do become enemies of the church and her Lord. It seems to me that this has become a much more serious problem in recent years. “In the book of Revelation, Babylon, the beast, and the false prophet symbolically represent the systems and structures of the world in their idolatrous, coercive, repressive, brutal opposition to God’s reign and people.”10.
In the realm of commercial interests who are enemies of God, consider those who promote, sometimes coercively, agendas like LGBTQ ideology, ESG – Environmental, Social, and Governance, and DEI – Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Think Meta, Twitter, Blackrock, Vanguard, JP Morgan Chase, and a very many other monopolistic or near monopolistic companies that can wield considerable anti-christian coercion.
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!
Revelation 18:2-3
She has become a dwelling place for demons,
a haunt for every unclean spirit,
a haunt for every unclean bird,
a haunt for every unclean and detestable beast.
3 For all nations have drunk
the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality,
and the kings of the earth have committed immorality with her,
and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxurious living.”
Also, our governments are forcing anti-Christian values on the population. One current example in California is SB 407, introduced by Senator Wiener (Coauthors: Assembly Members Lee and Low) on February 9, 2023. This bill, if it becomes law, will require all foster parents to swear allegiance to raise children who claim LGBTQ status in accordance with their chosen status. These foster parents would be required to go against their Biblical beliefs in order to continue as foster parents. Another example of government coercion is the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic order of Nuns who objected to the requirement that they offer employees insurance coverage that would include abortifacients. After years of litigation, the US Supreme Court backed the Sisters. But, they were forced to spend thousands of dollars on litigation that should never have been necessary.11
To quickly sum up, the subjects of imprecatory prayers are spiritual evil, human evil, and systematic evil by governments and commercial interests.
What does it look like to adapt imprecatory Psalms to a current application?
Here is an example from Psalm 137:7-9
Remember, O Lord, what the oppressors did
the day they turned us into refugees
Happy is the man who pays you back
for what you have done to us —
who takes your rotten system of apartheid
and mashes it against a rock12
Here is a partial list of imprecatory Psalms. Psalm 7, 10, 12, 35, 58, 69, 70, 74, 83, 94,109,129,137, and 140. Meditate on these for application in your prayer life.
I pray this article will have stimulated you to new areas of prayer, fleshing out what Jesus taught, Your Kingdom come Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Footnotes
- Deuteronomy 6:5; Matthew 22:36-40
- Trevor Laurence, Cursing with God, Baylor University Press 2022.
- Colossians 2:15
- 1 Peter 5:8
- Ephesians 6:18
- Ephesians 6:12
- Luke 18:3
- Galatians 1:6-9; 5:12
- Revelation 6:10
- Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Gook of Revelation, New Testament Theology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) quoted in Cursing with God.
- The Heritage Foundation, Little Sisters of Poor Win Big at Supreme Court, but Fight Isn’t Over, January 9, 2020 https://www.heritage.org/religious-liberty/commentary/little-sisters-poor-win-big-supreme-court-fight-isnt-over accessed May 3, 2023.
- Zephania Kameeta, Why, O lord? Psalms and Sermons from Namibia (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1986) quoted by Cursing with God.
