Imprecatory Psalms



Psalm 5
1Give ear to my words, O Lord; consider my groaning.
2Give attention to the sound of my cry, my King and my God, for to you do I pray.
3O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch.
4For you are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with you.
5The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers.
6You destroy those who speak lies; the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.
7But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house. I will bow down toward your holy temple in the fear of you.
8Lead me, O Lord, in your righteousness because of my enemies; make your way straight before me.
9For there is no truth in their mouth; their inmost self is destruction; their throat is an open grave; they flatter with their tongue.
10Make them bear their guilt, O God; let them fall by their own counsels; because of the abundance of their transgressions cast them out, for they have rebelled against you.
11But let all who take refuge in you rejoice; let them ever sing for joy, and spread your protection over them, that those who love your name may exult in you.
12For you bless the righteous, O Lord; you cover him with favor as with a shield.

So five psalms into our study of this book of prayers and we are faced with David’s pleas to God to deal fiercely with his enemies. If we’re going to truly study the Bible we have to deal with all of it. And so we face those Psalms that deal with the hatreds of man and our ability to damage one another along with God’s wrath over that behavior. There are 16 Psalms that are labeled as Imprecatory Psalms with Psalm 5 being the first. This group of psalms stands in stark contrast to the message of the Gospel; God is love and wants the world to be saved. But holding to that understanding alone places an unbalanced emphasis on the love of God at the expense of his holiness.

First of all, I do hold to the fact that these prayers to God are honest expressions of human emotions. The writers (most frequently David, as is the case with Psalm 5) don’t seem to hold back when talking with God and I applaud that honesty. What kind of relationship would it be if we only tell God our “happy thoughts”? It would be shallow and false. That shallow relationship is not what we’re looking for and neither is God. And so we have several psalms that deal with negative and hateful thoughts. Psalm 5 is mild by comparison to some of our future readings.

This Psalm seems to have an up and down flow. The tenor starts out strong and positive and then moves into a place of accusation against the wicked. It then returns to the positive, stating benefits of a worship lifestyle but then returns to words of disgust against those who do not love God. And for me, that can be a perfect description of our emotional lives. We can ride a roller coaster of positive to negative feelings that can leave us dazed and confused. But God the Father is never confused. He has lost sight of neither His abundant grace nor His perfect righteousness. While it may be easy to see the faults of our enemies, all of us deserve His wrath as the sinful beings that we are. But the blood of Jesus allows us to come before Him as grateful worshipers instead. If you’ve never experienced a time when the bullies in the playground (or at work, or in your family, or even at your church) cause you to ask God for vengeance then I envy your life. The Imprecatory Psalms are worth reading because we can all relate even though it may not always be pleasant.

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