How do we read the imprecatory psalms in light of Christ’s command to love our enemies?
Question 01156
The imprecatory psalms are those passages in the Psalter that call down divine destruction on enemies — “Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow” (Psalm 109:9); “O daughter of Babylon… blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock” (Psalm 137:8-9). The discomfort these verses produce in careful readers is appropriate. They are hard words, and the question of how to read them alongside Jesus’ command to love enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44) is a genuine one that deserves a serious answer rather than avoidance in either direction.
What the Imprecatory Psalms Actually Are
The foundational thing to establish is that these psalms are prayers, not prescriptions. The psalmist is not inciting action; he is bringing his deepest anguish before God and asking God to act. This distinction is not a theological escape hatch — it is the key to understanding the whole. The Psalter is Israel’s prayer book, and it demonstrates that the practice of honest prayer includes the expression of emotions that would be sinful if acted upon independently. God is not shocked by the content of these psalms. He already knows what is in the human heart. What He invites His people to do is to bring even their most violent and distressed emotions into His presence rather than nurse them privately until they produce destructive behaviour.
There is something spiritually healthy in the fact that the psalmist takes his desire for vindication to God rather than acting on it himself. 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'” — is essentially what the imprecatory psalms do in practice. They hand the matter over. The psalmist who cries for destruction on his enemies is simultaneously refusing to take that destruction into his own hands, which is exactly what the New Testament principle requires.
The Context of Extreme Suffering
The specific context of these prayers also matters greatly. Psalm 137 was written by people who had watched Jerusalem burn, seen the temple razed, and been marched into exile. What sounds like vindictive fury in a comfortable reading chair has a different character when it comes from someone who has witnessed the killing of children. The psalmist does not pray for permission to kill Babylonian babies himself; he prays that God would do to Babylon what Babylon had done to Jerusalem. That is not the same thing. The prayer is a cry for proportional divine justice from a position of utter powerlessness, not a war cry.
The psalms in this tradition were written by people who genuinely believed that wickedness deserves punishment, and who had not been shaped by the modern cultural tendency to regard the concept of deserved retribution as itself morally problematic. They were right about the moral logic, even where the emotion is raw. God takes wickedness seriously. The destruction of Jerusalem was an atrocity. The people who committed it deserved to face justice. Praying for that justice is not incompatible with moral seriousness; it may, in fact, be an expression of it.
The Eschatological Dimension
The imprecatory psalms have an eschatological dimension that must not be overlooked. The New Testament itself contains imprecatory language. The souls of the martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6:10 cry out: “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” This is imprecatory prayer offered by people who have died for their faith and are now in the presence of God, and God does not rebuke them. He tells them to wait a little longer. The answer to the imprecatory psalms is not that God repudiates them but that He answers them at the final judgement. Paul pronounces an anathema on false teachers (Galatians 1:8-9). Jesus warns of millstones and deep seas for those who harm children (Matthew 18:6). The New Testament is not as far removed from the imprecatory spirit as is sometimes assumed.
How This Relates to Loving Enemies
The tension with Christ’s command to love enemies is real but resolvable. To love one’s enemies does not mean pretending that evil is not evil or that injustice is not unjust. It means refusing to let hatred of the enemy govern one’s own behaviour, and it means genuinely wishing the enemy’s good — which includes, and perhaps especially, their repentance. This is not incompatible with also praying that God would deal with those who persist in evil and refuse to repent. The church is not called to moral indifference in the name of a sentimental universalism that has removed justice from its vocabulary. What the Christian is specifically forbidden is personal revenge (Romans 12:19); what the Christian is invited to do is to bring everything, including the demand for justice, before the God who sees and who will act.
Reading the imprecatory psalms as a Christian means reading them through both the cross and the final judgement. At the cross, the justice they cry for was absorbed by the Son on behalf of all who would trust in Him. At the final judgement, every cry for justice that has not yet been answered will be answered. The psalms do not demand that we feel comfortable praying every word in them for every situation in our lives. They demand that we understand what they are doing and why, and that we take the same emotional honesty into our own relationship with God.
So, now what?
Reading the imprecatory psalms honestly requires resisting two equal pressures. One is the pressure to excise them from a sanitised spirituality that cannot cope with their emotional intensity. The other is the pressure to use them as cover for personal grudges dressed up in religious language. They teach that the church is permitted — indeed, encouraged — to express its deepest experiences to God without pretence. They teach that justice matters to God, that the cry of the oppressed is heard, and that the final resolution of evil is in God’s hands rather than ours. In a culture that has lost its nerve about the reality of deserved judgement, these psalms are a bracing and necessary part of the biblical witness to the holiness and justice of God.
“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.'” Romans 12:19
