"Who Holds the Sword?" Psalm 58 Sunday Evening Worship Service

Good evening.

Would you please open your Bibles to Psalm 58 as we conclude our study in the second book of the Psalms with perhaps one of the most challenging poems in the Bible?

Psalm 58.

To the choir master, according to Do Not Destroy, a mictam of David.

Do you indeed decree what is right, you gods?

Do you judge the children of men uprightly?

No, in your hearts you devise wrongs.

Your hands deal out violence on earth.

The wicked are estranged from the womb.

They go astray from birth, speaking lies.

They have venom like the venom of a serpent, like the deaf adder that stops its ear, so that it doesn't hear the voice of charmers or of the cunning enchanter.

O God, break the teeth in their mouths.

Tear out the fangs of the young lions, O Yahweh.

Let them vanish like water that runs away.

When he aims his arrows, let them be blunted.

Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime, like the stillborn child who never sees the sun.

Sooner than your pots can feel the heat of thorns, whether green or ablaze, may he sweep them away.

The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance.

He will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked.

Mankind will say, Surely there is a reward for the righteous.

Surely there is a God who judges on earth.

While German bombers raided southern England, the Church of England raided Psalm 58.

It was the summer of 1917 in the midst of World War I when the Church of England decided to undergo some updates to their Psalter.

And one of those updates was to remove from it essentially all of the prayers for judgment, what are called imprecations, imprecatory prayers.

And one psalm was removed in its entirety.

Psalm 58.

This edit came just days after German Gotha Plains had rained bombs over London and parts of southern England, killing hundreds of men, women, and children.

And the bishops of the Church of England said that part of their decision was in order to keep the Christians in England from using such prayers as reprisal refrains against the Germans.

They justified this edit this way.

One writer said that these impregatory psalms include, quote, wild screams of barbaric rage, in which reason, morality, respect for humanity, and reverence for God seem alike forgotten.

The Psalms were regarded as, quote, unchristian, unfit for the age of the gospel, an affront to the peace and love of the bleeding Savior belonging to a time of primitive, warlike, and unrefined Jewish religion.

They were called, quote, little short of an insult to the divine majesty.

Well, the public didn't feel the same way.

Just days after the edit came through, newspapers carried headlines like Ban on Reprisal Psalms, David's Wicked Ideas of Vengeance.

One columnist wrote that the Church of England, quote, revenges itself upon the psalmist.

Another, not mincing words, called this action the, quote, Nambi Pambiism of the bishops, whom another called, quote, those mollycoddling ecclesiastics.

One column boldly stated, It will be a bad day for England and for democratic civilization when the righteous shall not rejoice when he seeth the vengeance.

The bishops, however, were unmoved, and the Psalms stayed out.

Apparently, World War I was not violent enough to warrant Psalm 58.

Let me ask you this question.

Is Psalm 58 in your Psalter?

I mean, I know it's in your Bible.

Is it in your Psalter?

Would you be willing to sing this song?

Like if Jesus got up there and put a tune to it?

Would you be willing to pray it?

Do you even agree with it?

I think the impregatory psalms are one of the more challenging parts of the scriptures, and for many they remain untouched because of that challenge.

But I want to ask you, when you see injustice in the world, when you see unrighteousness reigning and innocence murdered.

Let me more put it more specifically.

When sixty-three million unborn children are legally slaughtered in the United States, when sixty-two thousand Nigerian Christians are murdered by Boko Haram in the last two decades.

When Hamas captures Israeli women and rap them while making them watch them burn their children alive in an oven.

Can you pray, Psalm 58?

Now you should be careful.

Of course, it is possible to pray this kind of prayer wrongly, right?

There have been those throughout church history who have taken these words on their lips, parading them around as a justification for sinful hatred and spite and vindictiveness.

And God's words must never be a servant of sin.

Amen?

But there's another way that Christians have reacted to a psalm like this, and it's to repudiate it entirely.

Like, for instance, God love him, C.S.

Lewis, who had some choice words about what he called the quote, devilish, diabolical, and naive psalms.

Lewis went on to write, quote, It is monstrously simple-minded to read the cursings in the Psalms with no feeling except one of horror at the uncharity of the poets.

Another author calls the imprecatory psalms, quote, the undisguised gloating and the cruel vindictiveness of an intolerant religious fanaticism.

My guess is that you probably don't respond to the imprecatory Psalms, Psalm 58, and others like it, with either of those reactions.

Probably.

Probably you take a third road, because this is what it seems like most Christians do.

You just ignore it.

In fact, some have institutionalized that.

Just gone.

Can't find them anywhere in their Psalters, anywhere in their books of prayer.

I mean, ask yourself, when was the last time you heard someone pray an imprecatory prayer?

Like 58 verse 8, oh God, may they become like an aborted fetus?

Can you pray Psalm 58 or any of these so-called vengeance psalms, the imprecatory psalms?

I think it depends on how you answer one question.

And that question is, who holds the sword?

Who holds the sword?

Before we look at Psalm 58, I need to spend a good chunk of time talking about imprecation in general.

Talking about impregatory psalms and what they're doing here and how we make sense of them as new covenant believers, because I'm sure that your reaction to this, like many, is mixed.

It may make you uncomfortable when you read this, and you may think this is inappropriate even for a prayer for a Christian.

And so I'm going to spend some time talking about imprecation in general, and then we'll get to Psalm 58.

So we're going to consider this topic of imprecation in three headings.

The first of which is imprecation in the Bible.

First of all, what is an imprecation?

What do I mean?

That's an old school kind of sounding word.

What do we mean we say imprecation?

It's very simply, it's just a prayer for God to judge the wicked.

That's all it is.

An imprecation is a prayer for God to judge the wicked.

And there are lots of imprecations in particularly the Old Testament, and I'm not going to survey all of them.

It would take too much time, but just a couple of examples.

Numbers chapter 10, verse 35, Moses prays an imprecation on the enemies of Israel.

Numbers 10:35

2 Samuel 3, David against his enemies.

Jeremiah 17 and 18, Jeremiah prays imprecations even against the people of Israel who have gone astray.

Nehemiah chapter 4 against Sanbalat and Tobiah, the enemies of Israel.

Nehemiah 4 · chapter mention

A very common kind of prayer in the Old Testament.

Oh God, smite the enemy, bring them down, may they be destroyed.

But the place where you see the most of these prayers is undoubtedly in the Psalter.

And I want to put up on the screen all of the imprecations that you find in the Psalter.

I'm not doing this so you'll copy it down.

I'm doing it so that you will get the sense for how many there are.

There's 40 by my count.

40 individual sections of imprecation.

Depending on how you count it, some people would say that there's between 12 and 18 what they call imprecatory psalms.

It just means a psalm that they associate more with the imprecations, that have that as a characteristic strongly.

So it just sort of depends on how you categorize these things.

But there's a handful of psalms that are called impregatory psalms, but there's lots of psalms that have imprecation in them.

The psalms are largely characterized by this kind of prayer.

And because of the prevalence of these kinds of prayers in the Old Testament, some Christians have taken to say, well, see, that's an old covenant thing.

That's part of the previous religion, the Jewish religion.

That's not part of New Testament reality until you open up the New Testament.

And all of a sudden that road runs out pretty quickly.

There's several imprecations, in fact, in the New Testament.

Jesus himself prays imprecations on the Pharisees in Matthew chapter 23, Mark chapter 11, a not-so-veiled imprecation against the nation of Israel as he curses the fig tree.

Matthew 23 · chapter mention Mark 11 · chapter mention

He talks about the elect praying for justice in a parable that he tells in Luke chapter 18.

Luke 18 · chapter mention

Peter quotes from Psalm 69 in impregatory prayer in Acts chapter 1, verse 20, may his camp be desolate, speaking of Judas.

Acts 1:20

Acts chapter 8, verse 20, talking about Simon Magus, may your money perish with you.

Acts 8:20

Paul in Romans chapter 11 quotes also from an impregatory Psalm, 1 Corinthians 16, 22.

Romans 11 · chapter mention

May anyone who doesn't love the Lord be accursed.

Galatians chapter 1, verses 8 to 9.

Galatians 1:8–9

If anyone preaches a different gospel to you, may he be accursed.

And even the souls of Christian martyrs in heaven, underneath the altar in Revelation chapter 6, verse 10, are praying, how long, O Lord, until you avenge our blood.

Revelation 6:10

So from those examples, I take it that Christians are not only permitted to pray in precatory prayers, but in fact are expected to, according to the scriptures.

That these prayers, violent as they are, should be a useful, sanctified part of our prayer lives, of our relationship with the Lord.

And given Paul's unqualified command in Ephesians 5 and Colossians 3 to sing the Psalms, he doesn't say except for those nasty ones, he just says, sing the Psalms.

I take it that he thinks we should be singing those kind of psalms, too.

We should be putting those on our lips.

So the natural reaction then is to come up with some objections, and maybe you have some in your mind.

And so I've categorized some of the objections to using the imprecatory psalms as Christians in five kind of headings here, and I'll just go through them quickly.

First, one objection to using imprecation as a Christian is hey, imprecation is just sinful.

It's just wrong, it's just vindictive and evil and hateful.

And like I said, it's certainly possible to pray them that way.

Of course it is.

To pray these kinds of prayers vindictively, spitefully, in sinful anger, sadistically.

The Germans even have a word for taking pleasure in someone else's pain.

It's possible to pray that way.

However, it's inclusion in Scripture alongside statements of innocence in many of the Psalms.

Look at my clean hands, look at my righteousness, and judge according.

And then the very next verse will be an imprecation.

By that I take it to mean that it's possible to pray these prayers in a way that's not sinning.

And really, what I think this objection gets to is it's an attack on the character of God.

Because God Himself, Jesus Himself, is willing to pray this way.

The idea that God is not allowed to judge people, or it's unkind, or mean-spirited, or vindictive for God to bring vengeance on the wicked.

That's an attack on the character of God.

One of the impregatory psalms begins in Psalm 94, verse 1.

Psalms 94:1

Oh God of vengeance, oh God of vengeance, arise.

That's God's name in that psalm.

So, no, I don't think imprecation is necessarily sinful.

Jesus does it.

Souls in heaven are doing it.

There's some sin in heaven.

So I don't think it's inherently sinful.

Another objection might be imprecation is absent in church history.

Well, yeah, sure, there's a lot of it in the Psalter, but you don't see hardly any of it in church history.

And that would just be factually incorrect.

There actually is quite a bit of it going on throughout church history.

I'll just give you a couple of examples.

Imprecatory psalms are included in many of the Psalters, including the Psalter that came over on the Mayflower to found America, the Genevan Psalter.

They would have sung some of these prayers.

Miles Coverdale wrote a series of hymns in the 1500s for Christians to sing, one of which was entitled Let Go the Whore of Babylon.

Wow, can you imagine that being sung on a Sunday morning?

Martin Luther prayed quite a few impregatory prayers in his day, particularly against false teachers.

And in response to a papal bull that he received, excommunicating him from the Roman Catholic Church, he wrote the following: quote, O Christ my Lord, look down.

Let the day of thy judgment break and destroy the devil's nest at Rome.

Martyrs throughout church history have prayed impregatory prayers even up to their very moment of death.

A call for God to bring justice where there is injustice.

So, church history, even if recently, is absent, these kind of imprecatory prayers is not absent them entirely.

A third objection might be imprecation belongs to the old covenant.

We've kind of already covered this.

Well, there are quite a few in the New Testament, so it's proven false by citing those instances.

Another objection might be that imprecation was only for inspired authors.

Basically, this is a way of arguing that when you see a text like Psalm 58, oh, break the teeth in their mouths.

When you see that kind of text, it is not meant to be prescriptive for Christians.

It is simply descriptive of something that that author did, David did, in that moment in time.

It's just supposed to tell you what he was thinking and feeling.

It's not necessarily supposed to commend it to you.

It's just telling you that that happened under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Well, for one, I think it's a little bit of a misunderstanding of how inspiration works, but more so, I think this is a problem in logic because it forgets that Psalm 58, like all the imprecatory psalms, are part of a hymn book.

They're the hymn book of Israel.

The whole point of the Psalter is that these words would be taken and put in the mouths of the people of Israel, like our hymn book.

That they would sing from it.

So the idea that there were psalms in there that weren't supposed to be put in someone's mouth, that doesn't make any sense.

No, they were supposed to be sung.

And the New Testament quite often quotes from imprecatory psalms.

We are commanded to imitate Jesus and Paul, and they both prayed imprecatory psalms.

So I don't think it was just for inspired authors.

The last objection is probably the strongest, and that's that imprecation contradicts the New Testament.

Particularly the New Testament ethic of love.

The two passages often cited here, Matthew 5, 44, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

And Romans 12, 14, bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse them.

So, a couple things to note.

One, when Jesus commands love of enemy, that is not new in the New Testament.

Enemy love was commanded in the Old Covenant as well.

If you look at Exodus chapter 23, verses 4 to 5, Proverbs 25, 21 to 22, Leviticus 19, 18, all of it is commanding love not only to people that you liked, but even people you didn't like, people who hated you, people who were at war with you.

Exodus 23:4–5

Jesus was just articulating that in a new way.

Another question to ask would be: do you think Jesus loved his enemies?

Do you think Jesus loved even the enemies that he pronounced judgment on?

And what we're getting at here is that there is a complexity in the heart of God that we must mirror in order to be faithful as Christians.

I am not saying that praying an imprecatory prayer is an act of love, though some people have tried to argue that.

That seems strange to me, but I get the idea.

What I am trying to say is that it's possible to both love an enemy and pray for his destruction.

In fact, that's exactly what we see in the Psalms themselves.

Psalm 109, 4 to 6, David prays, In return for my love, they accuse me, but I give myself to prayer, so they reward me evil for good and hatred for my love.

And then the very next verse, appoint a wicked man against him.

It's a prayer for judgment.

David loves some of these personal enemies who he is praying for judgment on.

For God to be angry with the wicked all day is not to say that he cannot also love those who are wicked.

God so loved the world and some perish.

Those are true at the same time.

David is able to love his enemies and pray against them.

The two are not identical, but they are compatible.

And with respect to Romans 12 14, where it says Bless and do not curse.

Seems like an open and check case.

Well, to be precise, an imprecation is not a curse, it is a prayer for a curse.

And that is a very important distinction that gets at the heart of the glory of these so-called cursing psalms.

What's happening in an imprecation is that the psalmist is entrusting judgment to God.

He is not taking that judgment into his own hands, he is instead relinquishing the cause of justice to the hands of the Almighty.

Which is why Paul says later in Romans chapter 12, verse 19, beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God.

Romans 12:19

So the New Testament ethic does not just turn all Christians into silent doormats.

What it does do is it commands that we tangibly love persecutors, even while we may pray for their destruction.

You say, okay, so how does someone even go about doing that?

That seems fraught with all kinds of peril.

Well, let me give you a couple principles then for how to think about imprecation.

A couple principles for imprecation from the Bible itself.

First, if you're going to pray in impregatory prayer, the anger has to be righteous.

The anger must be righteous.

And of course, I'm implying by that that imprecation is produced by an emotion of righteous anger.

David prays in Psalm 139, God, I hate those who hate you.

I hate them completely.

That's what's behind his imprecation.

Judge the wicked.

You see a heinous evil and you desire that God would judge it.

And typically the way the commentators deal with this is that they say, well, we should not pray imprecations with respect to, they would say, personal matters.

The problem with that is that you look at, as you look at imprecations in the Psalter, many of them are very personal for David.

Lots of them are close, intimate friends who've spoken directly against him.

So I don't know that the solution necessarily is to say, let's not make it personal.

I think sin is often very personal.

I think some people think this is this is like, well, if someone cuts you off in the church parking lot and you you throw up a quick prayer, you know, may their engine explode.

Like that kind of.

What's wrong with that?

Is it that it's personal?

No, think about it.

If if a hotel cancels your reservation because they double booked, and you would try to call down fire from heaven on them, what's wrong with that?

Jesus rebuked his disciples in Luke chapter 9 for doing that exact thing.

Luke 9 · chapter mention

You're going through a Samaritan town and they wouldn't let him stay there, and so they say, Hey, you want us to call down fire?

And Jesus rebukes them for that.

Why?

What's wrong with that?

Is it that it's personal?

I don't think so.

The problem is that the motive for the prayer is not righteous anger, but unrighteous anger.

So the question then, of course, would be, how do you tell the difference?

What's the difference between righteous anger and unrighteous anger?

First, anger can only be righteous if it is in response to actual unrighteousness.

You know, like if the person cut you off in the parking lot, they'd necessarily do anything unrighteous.

They may not have even seen you.

So, like an example of this unrighteous anger would be Luke 15, the older son who's waiting in the field with his arms crossed.

What's he angry about?

Compassion.

That's what he's angry about.

So that's not righteous anger, because he's angry about something that is itself righteous.

Second, anger can only be righteous if it is slow.

This is how God identifies his own anger, isn't it?

Yahweh, Yahweh, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love.

It is not an itchy-trigger finger.

Someone says something mean about you, boom, I'm gonna pray to God about that.

No, that's that's not how this works.

Slow, patience, long-suffering, forbearing.

I think it matters that Jesus' woes to the Pharisees are in Matthew 23 and not Matthew 7.

He is slow to anger.

Our anger should be slow as well.

We don't want to move forward.

We should seek alternatives first when possible.

Third, our anger or desire for justice is only ever righteous when we place the enacting of that justice into the hands of the Almighty Judge.

Hence the title, Who Holds the Sword?

Unrighteous Anger says, I want justice my way now.

The kids aren't doing what you told them to do?

Get flustered, you get angry, your spouse says something you don't like.

I want this to be fixed right now.

That's because you think you're holding the sword.

Or maybe you imagine that the enemy, they're holding the sword.

No, in pregatory prayers, recognize there is one who holds the sword.

And it is to him that we entrust justice.

Vengeance is mine, thus saith the Lord.

If you entrust the sword to the perfect will of God and submissively pray for his justice, then that's righteous anger.

The thing to appreciate about the imprecations is that they are prayers.

They're not actions.

Like David was a man of action.

He knew how to go to war.

He knew how to smite an enemy if he wanted to.

And yet, he prayed.

They're a phone call to 911, not street justice.

They trust God to do what's right.

Another principle here would be that judgment must be just.

If you're going to pray in imprecatory prayer, the judgment must be just.

The thing that you're praying for itself has to be a just judgment.

It wouldn't make any sense to pray anything contradictory to the character of God, so you shouldn't pray for an unjust judgment to a just judge.

Like if the barista at Starbucks writes the wrong name on your cup and you say, May you never see the light of day.

That would be disproportionate.

Proportionality matters.

And we know this because the Bible tells us this.

The Bible sets up what our expectation of justice should be.

It's starting all the way back in Genesis 3.15, the seed of the woman's going to crush the head of the serpent, which we're going to see lots of echoes of in Psalm 58.

When God promises judgment through the covenant curses, Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28.

When in Exodus he gives the law to his people and gives them the principle of what people call lextalionus, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, there's a commensurate kind of judgment.

The principle, particularly of lexalionis, shows up over and over in the imprecatory Psalm, Psalm 109, he loved to curse, let curses come upon him.

He did not delight in blessing, may it be far from him.

Do you see the pairing?

This isn't like someone has some minor infraction and you're calling down the hordes of angels on their heads.

This is eye for an eye.

Psalm 35, 8, and let the net that he hid ensnare him.

Let him fall into it.

You hear that all the time in this altar.

The fact that so much of the language of the imprecatory psalm sounds so harsh to us, I think, is in large part because we are sheltered, generally speaking, in the developed world, from the kinds of sins that are commensurate with these prayers.

If you were surrounded, say, Christians in Somalia today, one of the most persecuted countries on earth, if you were surrounded by wickedness, such that you were in a jail cell in Somalia and you read Psalm 58 on a scrap of paper that was smuggled into you inside of a piece of bread, which is a story that I actually heard, I don't think you would have the same confusion about these prayers that we do.

David's not asking for the death penalty for shoplifters.

He's asking God to turn the sword of the wicked, which is stained with the blood of the innocent, back into their murderous hearts.

And then the last principle for praying an impregatory psalm or prayer is that the purpose must be worship.

The aim of all life, of course, is the glory of God, and no less so in impregatory prayers.

And you see this show up in the impregatory psalms.

Psalm 83.

Fill their faces with shame that they may seek your name.

O Yahweh, let them be put to shame and dismayed forever.

Let them perish in disgrace, that they may know that you alone, whose name is Yahweh, are the most high over all the earth.

Our prayers should be seeking for God to be exalted, whether through the conversion of the enemy or through his destruction.

Every knee will bow one way or another.

That's our prayers that God would be exalted, whether in the conversion or destruction of the enemy.

Do you realize there is only one hallelujah in the New Testament?

Do you know where it is?

Revelation 19.

Hallelujah.

Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for his judgments are true and just, for he has judged the great prostitute who corrupted the earth with her immorality and has avenged on her the blood of his servants.

God is worshipped for bringing justice.

And he should be as a God of justice.

So I hope I've made it clear that these Psalms should be in your Psalter.

You should be able to pray a prayer like this.

Maybe you never have in your life, but you should.

Not in every circumstance.

This is, I think, extreme language to match extreme circumstances.

But you should be able to pray these with all your heart on your lips and in your prayers.

To be sure, there are, of course, a lot of ways to pray them wickedly, pray them wrongly, but all of Scripture can be perverted.

The wrongful abuse of scripture should not keep us from the rightful use of it, right?

So with that, as my introduction, let's look at Psalm 58 and see what it has to hold for us just quickly in terms of helping us pray, particularly an imprecation having to do with wicked rulers.

Wicked rulers.

Psalm 58 says to the choir master, according to do not destroy, it's a heading, it only heads four Psalms.

There's only one other place in the Bible that has the same exact phrasing, and it's Deuteronomy 9.26, when Moses prays that God would not destroy the people of Israel because of their golden calf incident.

And so I take that to mean this is a kind of tune that's associated with a prayer for God to not destroy the people of Israel, in this case by destroying their enemies in some way.

This is written by David, who prays more in precatory prayers than anyone in the Bible.

This psalm is highly structured.

There are parallels between verses 1 and 11.

I hope you see them.

Earth, God, God's righteous, righteous, judging, judging.

And every line is a couplet with synonymous parallelism.

It centers on the verse 6, the beginning of the imprecation, which is itself a kind of kiasm.

Oh God, break the teeth in their mouths, tear out the fangs of the young lions, O Yahweh.

David here is intentionally pulling his language from Genesis 3.15, the seed of the woman's going to crush the head of the serpent.

And he's pulling a lot of his language from Deuteronomy 32.

It's often called the Song of Moses, where Moses teaches to Israel the song about their discipline from the Lord, but the eventual judgment that God will bring on Israel's enemies.

And that's in the background of all of this.

In summary, David looks out at a world full of ungodly, violent, lying men using their positions of authority to plunder and murder, and he puts those men on trial before God and then pronounces a judgment.

And this trial breaks down into three parts the guilt of the gods, a prayer for punishment and the reward of the righteous.

So let's look at the first part, the guilt of the gods.

He says, Do you indeed decree what is right, you gods?

This phrase, you gods, it's variously translated, congregation, silence, very hard to understand to know exactly what's being meant here.

I think the right rendering is gods, and that would be similar to the spelling in Exodus 15, 11.

And I think it's supposed to be a reference to world rulers.

This is the same thing that happens in Psalm 82, where you get this reference of gods.

It has to do with world rulers.

I think it's meant to be a parallel, uh, verse 1 where it says, Do you judge the children of man uprightly?

It could also be translated, do you judge uprightly, O children of man?

And I think that's that's probably a good way to translate it as well.

So there's a kind of parallel between children of man and gods.

They're the rulers, they're people who have some kind of authority on earth.

And they have wronged.

Why?

What have they done?

Look at what he says.

Do you indeed decree what is right, you gods?

Decree what is right.

The word indeed there saying, you probably think, or at least are claiming that you're doing what's right, don't you?

But you're not.

I mean, he makes it real obvious.

Verse 2, no.

No, you're not.

In your hearts you devise wrongs.

That's the opposite.

You don't judge righteously, you judge unrighteously.

Your hands deal out violence when they should be dealing out justice on the earth.

In contrast to righteous government, they devise wrongs and deal out violence.

They were supposed to protect the flock, and now they're fleecing the sheep.

Some people think maybe this is a reference to Saul and his cohort, maybe it's Moab, Edom.

It doesn't specify.

The point is, these are rulers who purport to be godlike.

I think there's some kind of sarcasm even built into that term.

Oh, oh, you're like gods, are you?

And they do the opposite of what God does.

They kill, they steal, and they have blood all over their hands.

You say, well, thank goodness we live in a more civilized time.

Do we?

I mean North Korean officials continue to imprison and execute Christians by the hundreds, all while starving their people.

Houthi rebels in Yemen, their slogan, quote, God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam.

That's like their slogan.

Put that on the banner.

In our own country, politicians put forward bills advocating for the physical mutilation of children in the name of, quote, gender-affirming care.

No, we don't live in a more civilized time.

There's still wicked rulers dealing out violence on the earth.

We live instead in the age of the sympathetic villain, don't we?

Surely, they just had a rough upbringing.

They just had a hard time of it.

It's not their fault.

That's not what David says.

Verse 3 the wicked are estranged from the womb.

They go astray from birth, speaking lies.

No, no, no.

This has been a problem their whole life.

This wasn't nurture, this was nature.

A sin nature.

David is highlighting here their culpability.

This isn't someone else's fault.

This is their own blame that they bear.

They chose from the earliest moments of their lives to run as far away from God as their hearts could.

And David identifies them as those who are like the serpent.

They have venom like the venom of a serpent, like the deaf adder that stops its ear.

They're like Satan.

They speak lies like the father of lies.

They have poison in their speech like Satan does.

And they stop their ears.

They're willfully choosing to not hear what God has to say.

They choose ignorance over humble repentance.

So that they don't hear, he says, the voice of charmers or the cunning enchanter.

They're pictures from the Egyptian court in the ancient world.

God is pictured here as the one whose voice can subdue the deadly viper.

But this viper refuses to be charmed.

The wicked rulers of our day, as in David's, are themselves entirely culpable for their crimes.

They know God exists, and they refuse to listen.

The truth is obvious, but they shut their ears to it.

I mean, just think about it.

What kind of willful, intentional blindness is required to look at a 36-week-old fetus with a beating heart, functioning eyes, lungs, hands, feet, and call that a clump of cells that you are willing to rip apart and toss into a trash can like so much rotten fruit.

That is willful ignorance.

In short, wicked rulers are guilty before the Lord for the injustice that they call justice.

For example, our current government, whitehouse.gov, currently calls the slaughter of infants, quote, reproductive rights.

Right.

So there's the guilt of the gods.

Secondly, there's the prayer for punishment.

This is the centerpiece of this psalm, is David's imprecation.

David turns to seek God's intervention to stop this reign of evil.

Verse 6, O God, break the teeth in their mouths.

Tear out the fangs of the young lions.

He's saying, make them unable to harm.

Take away the ability that they have to cause this injustice.

These are dramatic images to depict the defanging of wicked governments.

He's saying they want to bite, so take out their teeth.

They want to carry us away, so let them vanish.

They would pierce us with an arrow, so make it useless.

David's prayer here initially is that the injustice would be stopped, that it would be put to an end.

And then the second half of David's impregatory prayer goes further.

Verse 8, let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime, like the stillborn child who never sees the sun.

I mean, each of these just visceral images deals not only with the death of the wicked, certainly David is calling for that, but especially calling for the soon judgment and death of the wicked.

He's saying, let this happen right away, before he sees another blink of sunlight.

End it.

David pleads with God for those wicked rulers to be eclipsed from the sun like an aborted baby.

He begs God that they would be blown away like so many thorns being lit up for the flame, like dust, like chaff, like vapor and smoke.

Let them be extinguished and dissipated before they can do any more damage.

It's been long enough.

Now, appreciate a couple things about this prayer.

This may sound harsh to us sitting comfortably in our pews, but again, if you are on the receiving end of commensurate kinds of violence, you would understand why this kind of prayer is being prayed.

Think about David.

David was in the cave, as we heard from Tom, with Saul, and he could have taken vengeance into his own hands.

And nobody would have been upset about that, would they?

And yet David doesn't.

He confronts Saul instead.

And do you remember what he says?

May Yahweh judge between me and you.

May Yahweh avenge me against you, but my hand shall not be against you.

That's the power of this prayer.

It's saying, I will not take justice into my own hands.

I leave it for the wrath of God.

Jeremiah 11 20, but O Yahweh of hosts, who judges righteously, who tests the heart and mine, let me see your vengeance upon them for To you have I committed my cause.

Romans 12, 19, Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote a book on the impregatory Psalms, said, Quote, Whoever entrusts revenge to God dismisses any thought of ever taking revenge himself.

If you find yourself at some point in your life suffering under the pangs of injustice, an immorality, and a wicked government, then your prayer should be that of Abraham when he said, Will not the judge of all the earth do what's right?

This is my father's world.

Let me ne'er forget that though the wrong seems often so strong, God is the ruler yet.

That's what this prayer is.

And that leads to the reward of the righteous.

Verse 10.

David gives way to a settled conviction that God will answer his prayer in accord with his promises, and the future will hold a glorious day of victory for the righteous.

Verse 10, the righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance.

He will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked.

I mean, this is a ghastly image for most of us, isn't it?

Walking across a battlefield, your feet speckled with the blood of the enemy.

But don't miss the point.

The righteous are rejoicing.

This is wonderful.

This is good news.

They're happy about God's judgments.

There's a complexity to this.

Of course, there is.

Of course, there's a tragedy when the wicked man gives into his own sin to such a degree that he would rather perish under the judgment of God than be reconciled.

Of course, there's a mourning and a grief in that.

But oh how there is also a joy when God brings justice to this unjust earth.

And you know this because this is how all of our stories work.

We were watching the other night uh The Lion Witch in Wardrobe.

And at the very end, spoiler alert, the Aslan shows up and with the white witch.

And when we saw that, my son looks over at me and he says, Did he eat the white witch?

Did he kill her?

And I said, Yeah, Papa, he did.

And he just goes like this.

Yes.

Like, yeah, that's how all of our stories work.

We're happy when the bad guy loses, right?

So it is with all of history.

The wicked will lose, and righteousness will win.

The Lord Jesus will return on a white horse and he will have his day.

And on that day the righteous will rejoice.

And they will not have some nambi-pambi compunctions about whether or not this is the right thing to do.

They will say, your judgments are just and true, O Lord.

Friends, we always celebrate when the bad guy loses in the stories we love because there is no other way for the good guys to win.

Unless evil loses.

I remember talking to an unbelieving student on campus recently who was telling me about his eschatology, and he said, I think love just kind of wins in the end.

I said, Okay, I actually agree with that.

Who loses?

And he couldn't answer it.

He had no idea.

Sort of a Pollyanish view of the future.

Everyone just kind of wins, I guess.

Revelation 21, 5 to 8.

And he who is seated on the throne said, Behold, I am making all things new.

Also he said, Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.

And he said to me, It is done.

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment, and the one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God, and he will be my son.

But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.

Can I say it in a striking way?

One of the reasons that heaven will be so good is because of hell.

To imagine that there's a joyful ending without judgment is naive at best.

God's awful justice is a glorious part of this plan, one for which we ought to praise him.

Do you realize that's what you're praying for when you say, Your kingdom come?

Your will be done.

Come, Lord Jesus.

In effect, you're saying break the teeth of the wicked.

Plummer, a commentator, says, It's impossible for good men to refrain from rejoicing at the defeat of the malicious schemes of ungodly men, even though it involves the ruin of many.

But this rejoicing must not spring from malice nor from gratified impatience.

It must be that God is honored, innocence vindicated, wickedness put down, and the cause of truth rendered triumphant.

And that's what everyone will recognize in the end.

Verse 11, mankind is gonna say, there's a reward for the righteous.

There's a God who judges on earth.

Everyone will get it on that day.

One day every tongue on earth and in heaven and under the earth will know and confess.

Every knee will bow to the one who bore God's wrath on the tree.

Do you realize that all of heaven should be praying this prayer about you?

All of heaven should be rejoicing as you are cast into the lake of fire, and the earth is stained with your blood.

But your God has sent his son, whose blood speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

Where Abel cries for justice, Christ cries for mercy, and his blood will be on your robes, so that you might find a welcome into a heaven you do not deserve.

You will find that the prayers of the wicked are not answered, the prayers of the Son of God are answered when he pleads for your righteousness before God.

When he pleads that you would not face this kind of judgment, but instead would get the kind of free welcome into eternity that only he rightly and justly deserves.

That's the glory of this message, the gospel, that we who deserve the dark abyss instead receive the light of heaven.

And we are washed in the blood of Jesus Christ.

So who holds the sword?

The wicked?

Maybe for a second.

Do you?

No.

There's one who holds the sword, and on that day it will be coming out of his mouth.

When he comes to reclaim this earth and take his people home.

So we pray for conversion, we pray for peace, we pray for justice, violent prayers for a violent world.

Are these prayers in your Psalter?

Would you be willing to pray like this?

I hope that our study of it has demonstrated there is a place for an imprecation in the life of a Christian.

Because we serve a God of vengeance, a God of justice, and a God of righteousness, who is ours in Jesus Christ.

Let's pray.

Father, it is hard after considering this for some time to not think of the wickedness in our own country.

Certainly there is much injustice around this globe, but there is injustice at our very doorstep.

And so we pray God end it.

Oh please.

Spare the unborn and destroy the wicked.

We pray for abortion clinics to be shut down.

We pray for the end of the tyranny of wickedness in our judicial system, in the halls of power of our nation.

Father, we pray that justice would be done to those who have sown injustice.

We pray for our leaders, even as we're commanded to in 2 Timothy, that we might be able to lead a quiet and a godly life.

We pray for their conversion, that they would come to Jesus Christ.

We know so many, even at this church, who are seeking to minister to those in power just down the street, and we pray that they would hear the gospel and be converted and repent of their sin.

And yet, barring that repentance, Father, we pray that you would simply end their wickedness.

We entrust that judgment to you.

We don't take it into our own hands.

And we pray for our brothers and sisters around the world, Father, who are imprisoned and even murdered for their faith in Jesus Christ.

We pray that you would be near to them and that you would end their persecution, that you would bring down the regimes that keep them locked up.

And instead you would return, Lord Jesus, and right all of the wrongs.

We thank you for the glory of your character, your love, your mercy, and your justice.

May we behold you and worship you for the God that you are.

And we ask this all in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to iBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.