How to Pray Imprecations
Today I want to talk to you about asking God to do harmful things to bad people.
And if you’re wondering if you just heard what you think you heard, you did, I think.
There is a biblical way of praying called “imprecation” and it’s when the one praying is asking God to do harmful things to bad people. The one praying is asking God to curse their enemies. That’s the central theme of Psalm 58. David is asking God to judge the wicked by intervening to disarm them and destroy them.
And this morning we’re gonna look closer at this and consider whether we should ever pray this way. But before we get there — and before we start into Psalm 58 — I want to lay down some train tracks that will help us understand this psalm.
So imagine, for a minute, an old train track. I know you’ve seen this before. There’s two basic parts: there’s the ties, and the the two rails. The rails are what the train sits on; they’re what keeps the train moving and what keeps the ride smooth.
And well, when it comes to Psalm 58, there are two rails, as it were, beneath it.
And, if, when we read this psalm, things feel a little bumpy for us. If something is just not sitting right, if we’re uncomfortable, the problem is not the psalm — it’s us … and it means we need to check the rails. 1 and 2.
Rail #1 is the fact that this psalm is ancient poetry.
And we get the poetry part; I think it’s the ancient part we can more easily forget. So just to remind you, the psalms were written a very long time ago. Psalm 58 was probably written around 1010 BC — and that’s so old that really we should be amazed just by that. Sometimes I think we can take the ancientness for granted.
This occurred to me in a fresh way a couple weeks ago. I had some time away on vacation and so I was reading a book for fun that was about a myth/fairy tale story that reportedly goes back to a thousand years before Jesus was born. It was an ancient Celtic story that was passed down orally until it was later written down, and here I was, holding a book, reading it.
And seriously, I could not get over how old this thing was. Every sentence I read, I was giddy by the thought that this thing I’m reading has been retold and read for around 3,000 years. “I can’t believe how ancient this is!” Meanwhile, I read from the Psalms every morning … and at one point I was like: “Wait a minute.”
See, sometimes I think we’ve become so spoiled by the accessibility of this Book that we lose sight of the wonder of its ancientness.
And one of the glories of its ancientness is that it was written in the context of a mythologized world. In other words, it wasn’t just the psalmists and biblical writers who knew the world was enchanted, but everybody at that time knew the world was enchanted. In the biblical world, every human understood that there were invisible forces outside of themselves that were always active. And one of the negative side-effects of our modern, technological, scientific age, is that we’ve bleached our imaginations of this reality.
An example of this, my favorite, is in parenting. When our kids wake us up at 2am and say, “Dad, there’s a monster under my bed!” we say, “There’s no such thing as monsters. Go back to sleep.”
But hold on now. If you believe in a spiritual world and the reality of evil, you can’t say that. It would be more accurate for us to say:
“Child, there might be a monster under your bed, but Jesus is stronger than monsters … and he has angels who will do whatever he tells them to, and they’re also in this room!”
And we say that because it’s true. And when we’re immersed in the Bible, we begin to see the world the way the Bible does, which is different than how our culture sees it. David knew there were deeper layers to reality than what we’re able to perceive, and he wrote from that knowledge. It’s part of the ancientness of this Book. And we need to remember it. It’s rail #1.
Rail #2 is that the fact that God is holy.
And to say that God is holy is to start with what Pastor Joe said last week, that God is beyond what we can fathom. Speaking of the James Webb telescope, I just read a few days ago that because of this telescope, NASA has discovered a small gas-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star … 700 light years away. And if 1 light year is about 6 trillion miles, do the math. It’s a lot. The point is that the known universe is always becoming more than we thought.
And if what we can fathom about the known-universe is increasing, it’s helpful to remember that God is greater than what we can fathom.
I appreciate Anselm’s 11th-century description that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined. Which means that whatever we can imagine or think or see (which the telescope increases), God must be higher. However far we can go, God is still beyond that. And, like Joe said, we must bow before him.
God is so outside of us. That’s what the Bible means by “holy.” R. C. Sproul says,
“when the Bible calls God holy, it means primarily that God is transcendently separate.”
He is beyond category and comparison. He is the Unactualized Actualizer. He is the Unmoved Mover. He is self-determining, which means he doesn’t depend on anything to be who he is, but instead all things are dependent upon him. That’s what it means that God is God, and we are not — he sets the rules, and he is never subject to anything outside himself. And when we get this, it means we just have to shut our mouths.
We actually don’t have the right to disagree with God or to dislike his ways … now I’m not saying we never do. That’s part of our human experience. We see it in the Psalms. But I’m saying, however much we are bothered by God, we can never actually assume a position that makes him the object of our scrutiny.
So when you read the Bible and something rubs you the wrong way, first, know that’s a good sign. To be bothered by God means you’re actually reading his revelation and you’re not just making up your own god. You’re reading an ancient book about God. What do you expect?
And so, in Psalm 58, for example, if (or when) you’re bothered by the fact that, according to God’s will, we as the people of God will bathe our feet in the blood of the wicked (verse 10), consider it, first, a grace to be bothered, and then, second, remember that we’ve really got no business being bothered. Because God is God and we are not. Our disapproval of his will does not injure his untouchable moral purity. God is holy, holy, holy. And sometimes we just need to stop. That’s rail #2.
Rail 1: this book is ancient. Rail 2: God is holy.
If Psalm 58 is a rocky ride for us, my first guess is that we’re missing something to do with those rails. So that’s why we start here. We wanna get the two rails. And now we can look closer at this psalm.
Not a Normal Prayer
And as I already mentioned, central to Psalm 58 is a series of imprecations. David is asking God to curse his enemies, and to be clear, this is not something that David is doing lightly. This is not a normal way to pray. And I say that because there are 150 psalms, and most of them are not like this. Now we’ve seen imprecations before. We’ve read several imprecatory lines here and there over the last few years, like way back in Psalm 5:10. David prays:
“Make them bear their guilt, O God; let them fall by their own counsels.”
Or, just a few weeks ago, Psalm 54:5,
“He will return the evil to my enemies; in your faithfulness put an end to them.”
We’ve seen single lines like this before, but it’s seldom that we find longer passages of multiple imprecatory lines back to back. There’s only a few psalms that do this, and Psalm 58 is one of them. So this is not normal, but it is legitimate. It’s in the Bible. And David, remember, in this section of the psalms, is meant to be a model for us of faithfulness to God. So he’s teaching us how to pray, including prayers like this.
And in that light, in Psalm 58 I think we find three guiding principles for how to pray imprecations — and we’re going to spend the rest of our time on this. These are three guiding principles that David models when it comes to asking God to curse the wicked.
1) The wicked are truly wicked.
It’s important that we see who David is talking about here. He is referring to a highly sophisticated enemy that has power and authority. Look at verse 1.
David starts by addressing his enemy. Verse 1:
“Do you indeed decreed what is right you gods? Do you judge the children of man uprightly?”
And the word for “gods” there could also mean “rulers.” It’s also translated as “Mighty Ones.” Most commenters agree that David most likely has human rulers in mind, but the main idea is evil rulers. These are individuals who are wicked and who have authority to act wickedly for the harm of others. That’s the second line there in verse 1. They do not judge the children of man uprightly. These rulers are devising wrong and dealing out violence.
So hear the sophistication in that: this is pre-meditated harm. They are calculating how they might obstruct justice and mistreat the innocent. This enemy, in high-handed rebellion against God, intends to ruin things. That’s what they’re doing, and then in verses 3–4 David goes on to describe what they’re like.
Verse 3:
“The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray from birth, speaking lies.”
David says this enemy — “the wicked” he calls them here — they are estranged before they’re even born. The wicked are, right away, even as infants, “lost and ruined by the fall.” The wicked bear the curse of original sin…
Like we all do.
Which makes this interesting. David is describing the wicked in verse 3, but it’s a description that is fitting for every human. Because we’re all born in sin; we’re all bent away from God; and we all lie.
The latest research on lying (which apparently is a thing) says that the average human hears around 200 lies every single day. That’s counting big lies and “little” lies, both of which humans start doing at an early age. I can remember the first big, blatant lie I ever told. I think I was 4 or 5.
One morning for breakfast, I told my dad I wanted a glass of milk. He poured the milk but then I decided I didn’t want it. He said, “Son, you gotta drink it.” So I said, “Okay dad, I’ll drink it, but I gotta go to the bathroom, and I’m gonna drink the milk in there.” So I took the milk in the bathroom with me, walked out in about 3 seconds, glass of milk emptied. And my dad said, “Did you drink that?” And I told him — not even with a milk mustache — “Yeah, Dad. The milk was great. Yum. I love milk. Milk’s the best. Got milk?” My dad goes into the bathroom to check … and I forgot to flush. Then I received what was called in the ancient world a whoopin’… which is why I remember it.
I had lied. At 4 years-old. I had lied and nobody taught me how. I just knew. Because I was born a sinner. I was born a speaker of lies — like all of us. So verse 3 hits close to home. Sounds like me.
Are “Worse Sinners” Possible?
And so we have to ask: is there any difference between the wicked in Psalm 58 and any typical human sinner?
Yes and no. And we need to be very careful here.
The answer is yes because we are all sinners. We are totally depraved creatures from the start. Every part of us is tainted by sin, and apart from God’s grace, our hearts are bent away from him in rebellion. That is true of every human, and because of that, every human deserves God’s judgment — which is why we need Jesus! We all need to be saved by Jesus from our sin and its consequences. Amen.
And at the same time, although everyone is a sinner and totally depraved, nobody is depraved totally or even as depraved as others.
In other words, we could be worse sinners than we are, and there are worse sinners than us out there.
Now I realize that such a statement might make us bristle a little. Because we’re uncomfortable at the thought of any kind of inequality. We just want everything equal: “We’re all just equal sinners. Nobody is worse. We’re all just equally bad.”
But look, you know that’s not true. Nobody really thinks that. Again, we are all sinners and we all deserve God’s wrath, but there are some humans more wicked than others, and I had to turn to a pre-modern commentary to spell this out. John Calvin, writing in the 1500s, comments on Psalm 58 and says, Yeah, these are especially wicked people. And then Calvin goes on to list out three classes of unregenerate sinners:
He says everyone comes into the world stained with sin, but there is a,
“secret restraint upon most men which prevents them from proceeding all lengths in iniquity” (371).
That’s what it means to be totally depraved, but not depraved totally. We are not as bad as we could be.
He writes,
"The stain of original sin cleaves to the whole human family without exception; but experience proves that some are characterized by modesty and decency of outward deportment."
This is Class 1: these are “decent” sinners; they’re still dead in their sins and facing God’s judgment, but they’re decent folks. They’re not horrible people; they’re just lost.
Then Calvin says,
“others are wicked, yet, at the same time, within the bounds of moderation”
This is Class 2: these are wicked sinners who do a lot of sinful things, but still they are not excessively vile. There’s a line they won’t cross.
But Calvin says there is a,
“third class that are so depraved in disposition as to be intolerable members of society.”
Calvin calls them “monsters of iniquity.” (These are the ones they make Netflix documentaries about!)
And Calvin says that’s who David is talking about. They have venom like a poisonous snake. They’re like an adder (or a cobra) that refuses any kind of outside influence.
In other words, the wicked on whom David prays these curses are truly wicked. And one of the reasons I think this kind of praying is rare is because it’s not every day you encounter this kind of evil enemy.
This is probably not your boss; it’s not your grumpy neighbor; it’s not the guy in traffic who cut you off. These are not people you disagree with or maybe not even even people who have harmed you. David is not just walking around dishing out curses. These are truly wicked people.
That’s the first principle when it comes to praying imprecations.
2) God has the power and authority to condemn the wicked.
Verse 6 is the center of this psalm. Psalm 58, like Psalm 57 last week, has a chiastic structure. It’s like a cheeseburger, remember, and the meat is in the middle. That’s verse 6. And verse 6 itself is even chiastic. Look at verse 6:
“O God, break the teeth in their mouths;
tear out the fangs of the young lions, O Lord!”
Do you see how it begins and ends with “O God” and “O Lord”?
This is meant to emphasize what David is praying here. The volume is cranked up.
Break their teeth!
Tear our their fangs!
David is asking for God to disarm them. Remove their power to cause harm.
Evaporate them. Blunt them. Disintegrate them. Frustrate them. Sweep them away!
And the reason David is asking God to do this is because he knows he lacks the power and authority himself to do it.
Quickly here: remember the difference between power and authority —
Power is the strength to do something. Authority is the right to do something. And David knows that in this case he has neither. He does not have the strength to defeat his enemies, but even if he did, he doesn’t have the right to condemn them. Only God can do that.
God has the power and authority to condemn the wicked; David does not; which is why David prays. And it means that this prayer is from a deep faith in God.
The last couple weeks, as I studied Psalm 58 and imprecations, I was surprised by those who consider this kind of praying to be a sign of bitterness in David. One person I read said that rather than David pray that God tear out the fangs of the wicked, David should have prayed that God redeem their fangs. This person said that when we read Psalm 58 we’re actually supposed to pray for people like David here who harbor vengeful desires. (Apparently this person is smarter than the Bible.)
David is not displaying bitterness here; he’s actually displaying trust in the character of God. He knows that God is good and just and mighty, and that God will always do what is right. And so knowing that, and knowing how truly wicked the wicked are, David’s imprecations in Psalm 58 is his entrusting this whole thing to God. David is actually modeling for us what the apostle Paul commands us in 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.”
In Psalm 58, David is doing that. He’s saying,
Okay, Lord, it’s yours. I’m not trying to take this into my own hands. I’m not trying to go all Liam Neeson on these guys. I can’t do that. I’m not doing that. I’m leaving it to you. Vengeance is yours.
That kind of praying is way harder than you think. Because it’s in our bones that we want to avenge. We want to make the wicked pay. We want to be God. But no. Faith in God, and Christian character, leaves vengeance to God. God is the one, the only one, who has the power and authority to condemn the wicked.
And one day he will.
That is the third guiding principle when it comes to praying imprecations.
3) One day God will condemn the wicked.
Look at verses 10-11,
"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.”
So not only does God have the power and authority to condemn the wicked, but he most certainly will condemn the wicked. There is a day in the future, there is an event that is coming, when Jesus will return with his mighty angels, in flaming fire, and he will have his vengeance on every sinner who rejects the gospel. Every class of sinner who has refused God’s grace, on that day, they will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord (see 2 Thessalonians 1:5–12).
And we, as those made righteous by Jesus — as sinners saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone — we will see Jesus’s judgment of the wicked and we will rejoice.
The scene will not sicken us … because everything about it will be right.
In fact, look at this: verses 10–11 here are the exact opposite of the situation in verses 1–2. On the Last day, the one true God will decree what is right and he will judge the children of man uprightly. And the righteousness of that judgment will be so manifest that all of mankind will acknowledge it.
That’s verse 11, which I think it’s one of the most amazing verses in the Bible. I think David is referring to end-time judgment here, and “mankind” represents all of mankind, both the righteous and the wicked.
This is the moment when, because of God’s judgment, all mankind will say, everybody will say:
God is real.
The gospel is true.
What we did in the world mattered.
One day that will be the most obvious thing there is.
See, verse 11 here describes our great vindication. This is a snap-out-of-it verse! It just cuts through all the fog. One day you will stand before the judgment of God and you will know that all of this counted. It means something. What you do means something.
See, Christian, on the Last Day, everything will have been worth it.
And I think that’s at least one of the reasons we will rejoice at this judgment…because it means our hope is reality. Our faith now will then be sight.
And we will know when we see God’s judgment, in the most literal way, “there but for the grace of God, go I.”
The difference, the only real consequential difference between us and the condemned, is Jesus Christ. It’s that Jesus was condemned for us, already, on the cross. And that’s it.
The wrath of God will be poured out on sin, but it’s not going to be poured out on you and me, Christian, because Jesus has already taken that wrath in our place. Jesus suffered the judgment we deserve for our sins. That’s what it means that he saved us. That’s what it means that he is a Savior!
Guilty, vile, and helpless we;
Spotless Lamb of God was He;
“Full atonement!” can it be?
Hallelujah! What a Savior!
We sing that today (with our poor lisping stammering tongues).
And we will sing it on the Day of Judgment with unimaginable clarity.
In order to pray imprecations, faithfully, in the way that David does in Psalm 58, we keep these three guiding principles in view:
1) The wicked are truly wicked
2) Only God has the power and authority to condemn the wicked
3) One day God will condemn the wicked
And on that day we will know his mercy more clearly and more tangibly than ever before.
That’s what brings us to the Table.
The Table
At this Table, as we eat the bread and drink the cup, we are remembering the death of Jesus for us. He gave his body and shed his blood for us, so that we can look forward to the Last Day in hope. God has been so merciful to us. And if you know his mercy, if you’ve trusted in Jesus, if your only hope is in his death and resurrection, then we welcome you to eat and drink with us.
