War Psalms of the Prince of Peace

Lessons from the Imprecatory Psalms

James E. Adams

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781629952734
• eBook ISBN: 9781629952741
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Are you dismayed by seemingly vindictive passages in the Psalms? Do these requests to harm others come from God—and can we pray them today? Adams explains their ultimate purpose.

1

Those Puzzling Prayers from the Psalms

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN PUZZLED BY THE PSALMS? Many of these beautiful Hebrew poems are obviously prayers, and it doesn’t seem natural to most of us merely to read them as if we were listening in on someone else’s conversation with God. In times of joy or deep sorrow and confusion, don’t you frequently enter into the spirit of the Psalms and pray them as your own? But then, with your heart fully engaged in prayer, you come upon those phrases that seem so shocking—so diametrically opposed—to all you’ve been taught in Christian love and forbearance.

How are you to understand a prayer from Scripture that says, “Break the teeth in their mouths, O God” (Ps. 58:6) or “Let death take my enemies by surprise; let them go down alive to the grave” (Ps. 55:15)? That’s strong language!

Have you wondered whether the psalmists’ prayers, “May all my enemies . . . be ashamed and dismayed. . . . May they perish in disgrace” (Pss. 6:10; 83:17) are an expression of sinful revenge, as some writers say? Are they guilty of expressing worldly sentiments of revenge as in a newspaper classified ad I saw recently?

Jilted? Stood up? Divorced? Fired? Whatever your meaningless memory, now you can wilt ‘em away with a wilted bouquet! Just call Wilted Flowers, your therapeutic floral consultants, and put a little happiness in your hurt.

Do you think the psalmists are indulging such spiteful feelings?

Too many sincere Christians rush past such expressions as if shielding their faces from the heat of hatred, quickly moving on to other sections where they find more comfortable language. (There are so many soothing phrases in the Psalms!) But can that be a proper response to any part of God’s Word? Or is it merely a cop-out?

The problem is bigger than many realize! The more carefully we look at the Psalms, the more we see that the prayers for vengeance are not a handful of side comments. They are not found in just a few isolated places so that we can overlook them and decide that it may not be worth our time to try to understand them. They pervade the book! Then we begin to recognize that other portions of the Old Testament express similar ideas. We even find them restated by our Lord and His apostles in the New Testament!

Have you who accept the Scripture as the only rule of faith and practice grappled with these issues? Have you who are called to handle correctly the Word of Truth sought to apprehend the truths taught here so as to be able to break this bread for God’s people?

Serious Bible students have puzzled over these problems for centuries, so if you find yourself mystified, don’t be surprised. Some people have found it so difficult to understand these perplexing prayers that they have concluded that these segments were mistakenly included in the Word of God. But our doctrine of inspiration must lead us to expand our knowledge of God and His ways as we seek solutions to these deep questions. There are answers, and it is our business as followers of the Most High God to apply ourselves to understanding His Word so that we will find them. What an exciting assignment is now set before us!

The Uniqueness of the Psalms

The book of Psalms is unique among the sixty-six books of the Bible in that it is a prayer book given to us by God. Later we’ll discuss in more depth our need for this prayer book from God and how we are to use it in our Christian lives and preaching. For now, let’s recognize that giants of the church through the ages have found deep mines of truth here and that the hearts of New Testament believers today beat a responding “Amen” to its expressions of comfort, contrition, and praise.

John Calvin, the great theologian of the Reformation, wrote a very extensive commentary on this prayer book of the Bible. In the preface to his classic volumes on the Psalms, the Reformer speaks of the heavenly doctrine in these prayers and stresses their importance for entering into “genuine and earnest prayer.” His own experience of drawing near to God through these prayers is evident as he says,

In short, as calling upon God is one of the principal means of securing safety, and as a better and more unerring rule for guiding us in this exercise cannot be found elsewhere than in the Psalms, it follows, that in proportion to the proficiency which a man shall have attained in understanding them, will be his knowledge of the most important part of celestial doctrine.¹

These God-given prayers become, in effect, the pathway on which God leads us upward to himself.

Our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles used the Psalms constantly in teaching men to know God. The New Testament directly quotes the Old Testament approximately 283 times. An astounding 41 percent (116 of the 283) of all these Old Testament quotations are from the Psalms. According to the gospel records, Christ himself alluded to the Psalms over 50 times. To know God truly and to be equipped to lead others to a knowledge of Him, we must read, learn, and inwardly digest these prayers.

My own experience with these prayers has brought me many times to sense God’s very presence. As my understanding of them deepened through much study, comparing Scripture with Scripture, my prayer life has begun to enter into the very prayers of Jesus Christ. I’ve also been enabled to preach these psalms with great joy. It is my earnest desire to help you to learn how to rejoice in praying and preaching the Psalms of the Prince of Peace.

Questions for Thought and Discussion

1 In what ways are the Psalms unique?

2 What is the attitude of Christ and the New Testament writers toward the Psalms?

3 What comments and reactions have you heard others express with regard to the imprecatory psalms?

4 Begin to think how you may answer those who question the cries of vengeance found in the Psalms.

Perhaps there is no part of the Bible that gives more perplexity and pain to its readers than this; perhaps nothing that constitutes a more plausible objection to the belief that the psalms are the productions of inspired men than the spirit of revenge which they sometimes seem to breathe and the spirit of cherished malice and implacableness which the writers seem to manifest.

Albert Barnes
Notes, Critical, Explanatory
and Practical, on the Book of Psalms

To some minds, these imprecatory psalms and passages are perhaps a more difficult obstacle than any other in the way of a settled confidence in the Divine inspiration of the Scriptures.

J. Sidlow Baxter
Explore the Book

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Paul the apostle
2 Timothy 3:16-17

2

Are These Prayers the Oracles of God?

THE TITLE OF THIS CHAPTER asks a fundamental question that must be settled before we can proceed: Are such prayers really from God? It is essential that we always approach Scripture with a biblical theology of inspiration. To examine any portion of Scripture with a reservation regarding its divine origin is perilous. We must see that we cannot base our acceptance of these psalms as the true Word of God upon our own response to them. Too many Christians have allowed instinctive feelings of repulsion or shock at the language to cause them to reject these words as Scripture.

Of course, many people do reject the Bible as the inspired Word of God. Some choose to blame their unbelief on the “inconsistencies” they find in its pages, and they often cite the difference between the language of these psalms and the “spirit of love in the New Testament” as a case in point. When openly declared infidels repudiate the Psalms, we are hardly surprised. What does alarm us is that professing Christians do the same. Let’s look at what a few of them have said. You’ll recognize some well-known and highly regarded names among the objectors, so be prepared!

What Some Have Said

Bible scholars whose understanding of inspiration has been determined solely by human standards do not unduly alarm us when they call into question the divine origin of these particular prayers. When a person’s criterion for determining the canonicity of a certain passage is his own sense of good or evil, he will very likely reject at least some of the Psalms, along with other passages of Scripture. So when faced with the difficulties presented by the strongly worded curses of the Psalms, he or she may matter-of-factly conclude with John Bright that “we cannot demand that the Bible give us nothing but correct teachings and safe moral instruction and be offended at it when it does not.”¹ Or as another, John J. Owen (not the Puritan), said of the psalms of imprecation: these “forms of expression are of such cold-blooded and malignant cruelty, as to preclude entertaining the idea for a moment that they were inspired of God.”²

It stuns and saddens us, however, to see evangelical theologians whom we respect begin to whine and stumble when they approach the “justice psalms.” But our belief in inspiration must not be shaken even when we hear “accepted authorities” attacking God’s Word. On the contrary, we must certainly call into question the doctrine of Scripture held by anyone who reduces inspiration to mere religious insight. J. I. Packer helpfully points out the tragic fact that in modern theology

Scripture is allowed a relative authority, based on the supposition that its authors, being men of insight, probably say much that is right; but this is in effect to deny to Scripture the authority which properly belongs to the words of a God who cannot lie. This modern view expressly allows for the possibility that sometimes the biblical writers, being children of their age, had their minds so narrowed by conditioning factors in their environment that, albeit unwittingly, they twisted and misstated God’s truth. And when any particular biblical idea cuts across what men today like to think, modern Protestants are fatally prone to conclude that this is a case in point, where the Bible saw things crooked, but we today, differently conditioned, can see them straight.³

We should be appalled in this light to learn that Halley’s Bible Handbook, a standard Christian reference work, states unapologetically that these psalms “are not God’s pronouncements of His wrath on the wicked; but are the prayers of a man for vengeance on his...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Those Puzzling Prayers from the Psalms
• 2 Are These Prayers the Oracles of God?
• 3 Who Is Praying These Psalms?
• 4 Are Jesus' Prayers Contradictory?
• 5 May We Pray the Imprecatory Psalms?
• 6 How Can We Preach These Prayers?
• 7 Marching to War in God's Kingdom!
• Epilogue The Psalms—Christ's Prayer Book
• Appendix 1 The Christian's Duty Towards His Enemies
• Appendix 2 Two Sermon Summaries
• Appendix 3 The Messianic Cup of Wrath and Joy
• Appendix 4 Index to Psalm Imprecations
• Appendix 5 New Testament References to the Psalms
• Notes
• Bibliography—Help from Good Books
• Gratitude