Imprecatory Psalms and Loving Your Enemies

Question 01156.

Imprecatory psalms sit among the most uncomfortable passages a preacher ever has to handle from the pulpit, because verses that call down destruction on enemies, and in one notorious case pronounce a blessing on whoever dashes Babylonian infants against the rocks (Psalm 137:9), sit awkwardly beside Jesus’s plain command to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44). I want to work through this honestly and carefully, because the tension here is genuinely real, but I do not think imprecatory psalms and the Sermon on the Mount are actually as opposed to one another as they first, quite understandably, appear.

What Imprecatory Psalms Actually Are

Imprecatory psalms are prayers, roughly a dozen scattered across the Psalter, most concentrated in Psalms 35, 58, 69, 83, 109, and 137, that call on God to judge, curse, or destroy the psalmist’s enemies. They are not private curses muttered against a personal rival in a moment of petty offence. They are formal, liturgical prayers, written for the worshipping congregation of Israel to use, addressed directly to God, asking Him to act in righteous judgement against genuine, often violent, covenant-breaking evil. David wrote many of them while fleeing Saul’s murderous jealousy or facing betrayal from trusted friends. Psalm 137 was almost certainly composed by exiles who had watched Babylonian soldiers murder Israelite children during the siege and deportation of Jerusalem, an atrocity described elsewhere in Scripture (2 Kings 8:12) as characteristic of the brutality these conquering armies actually practised, a brutality the prophet Amos elsewhere condemns explicitly among Israel’s pagan neighbours (Amos 1:13). Understanding this historical context does not remove the difficulty entirely, but it does correct the common caricature of imprecatory psalms as expressions of casual, petty, personal spite.

Handing Vengeance to God Rather Than Taking It

The single most important thing to notice about imprecatory psalms is where the action is directed. The psalmist does not pick up a sword and take revenge personally. He prays, asking God to act. This is precisely the posture Paul commends centuries later: “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), a direct quotation of Deuteronomy 32:35. Imprecatory psalms, read rightly, are actually an early and dramatic example of exactly this principle in action. Rather than repressing the very real desire for justice, which would be dishonest, or acting on it personally through violence, which would be sinful, the psalmist takes the desire to God in prayer and deliberately hands the matter over to Him. That is a genuinely different posture from personal vengeance, and it is closer to the spirit of Christ’s teaching than it might first appear.

Zeal for God’s Name, Not Simply Personal Offence

Many imprecatory psalms make clear that the psalmist’s concern is God’s honour and covenant faithfulness, not simply his own comfort or safety. Psalm 69, one of the most extensively quoted psalms in the New Testament, roots its plea in zeal for God’s house: “For zeal for your house has consumed me, and the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me” (Psalm 69:9). The psalmist’s enemies are, in his understanding, actually opposing God Himself through their opposition to His anointed servant. This does not make every use of imprecatory language automatically righteous, since it is entirely possible for a person to dress up ordinary personal grievance in the language of zeal for God, but it does show that the best of these psalms are not simply raw personal malice. They are prayers for God’s own name and covenant purposes to be vindicated against genuine, entrenched evil.

Lament as a Legitimate Biblical Category

It helps to place imprecatory psalms within the much larger category of biblical lament, which modern Western Christianity has often lost touch with far more thoroughly than the ancient Israelite worshipper ever did. Roughly a third of the psalms are laments of one kind or another, prayers of genuine complaint, confusion, grief, and protest brought directly and honestly to God rather than suppressed in favour of a more composed, socially acceptable form of devotion. Psalm 13 opens with the raw question, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?” (Psalm 13:1), and Psalm 88 ends, remarkably, without any resolution at all, closing on the bleak line that darkness is the psalmist’s closest friend. Scripture, in other words, does not require worshippers to arrive at prayer already composed and grateful. It makes extensive room for the full, unedited range of human response to suffering and injustice, and imprecatory psalms represent the sharpest, most intense expression of that same lament tradition, directed specifically at situations of grave, persistent, unrepented evil rather than ordinary disappointment.

This matters pastorally because Christian culture sometimes teaches, implicitly if not explicitly, that a mature believer should feel a kind of constant, unruffled peace regardless of circumstance, and that anger, grief, or a longing for justice against genuine wrongdoing reflects a spiritual deficiency. The Psalter simply does not support that expectation. David, described elsewhere as a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14), wrote a considerable number of these raw, unresolved, sometimes furious prayers, and the Holy Spirit inspired their inclusion in Israel’s hymnbook for ongoing corporate worship rather than quietly excising them as embarrassing lapses unworthy of a godly man. That inclusion is itself a form of divine permission, even instruction, for how God’s people are meant to process genuine grief and the desire for justice honestly rather than performing a more comfortable piety that does not actually match what they feel.

The Messianic Use of Psalm 69

This is where the discussion becomes genuinely striking. Psalm 69, one of the most severe of the imprecatory psalms, is quoted by the New Testament in direct connection with Christ and Judas. John applies Psalm 69:9’s zeal for God’s house directly to Jesus during the temple cleansing (John 2:17), and John 15:25 applies Psalm 69:4 to the hatred Jesus received without cause. Peter, in Acts 1:20, applies the imprecation of Psalm 69:25, “let his camp be a desolation”, directly to Judas Iscariot’s fate. The New Testament writers, under inspiration, treat this imprecatory psalm as genuinely prophetic and appropriate, applying its judgement language to Christ’s betrayer without embarrassment or qualification. Whatever we conclude about how believers today should use imprecatory psalms personally, we cannot conclude that the New Testament regards this category of prayer as sub-Christian or theologically primitive, since inspired apostles use it themselves in reference to the ultimate act of covenant betrayal in redemptive history.

A Word About Old Testament Ethics More Broadly

Imprecatory psalms often get folded into a broader, and I think mistaken, assumption that the Old Testament simply teaches a cruder, more vengeful ethic that the New Testament progressively corrects or replaces. I do not hold to that kind of developmental account of the two Testaments, since it risks implying that God Himself changed, or that the Old Testament was somehow less than fully inspired in its ethical instruction. What actually changes across the canon is not God’s moral character but the specific covenant administration under which His people operate. Israel, under the Mosaic covenant, functioned as a theocratic nation with a civil law code, including provisions for judicial punishment of serious crimes such as murder, that simply does not apply in the same direct way to the church, a spiritual body scattered among many nations without any comparable civil authority of its own. I have written more fully about how progressive revelation relates to a dispensational reading of Scripture, and imprecatory psalms are a useful test case for that framework, since they reflect prayers appropriate to Israel’s specific covenant situation, crying out to the divine King of a specific nation for covenant justice, rather than a timeless template for how individual New Testament believers, living under a different covenant administration entirely, ought to pray about their personal grievances.

Does Jesus’s Teaching Actually Cancel This?

Jesus commands love for personal enemies, and He modelled that command perfectly, praying for those crucifying Him, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). I hold that command with total seriousness; a Christian has no warrant to hate a personal enemy or wish them evil out of wounded pride. But Jesus Himself also pronounced genuine woes on unrepentant cities, “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!” (Matthew 11:21), cursed a fruitless fig tree as a prophetic sign of judgement (Mark 11:12-14), and will return, according to Revelation 19:11-16, as a conquering King treading the winepress of the wrath of God Almighty. Love for enemies and a genuine, righteous desire for God’s justice to prevail are not actually contradictory postures; they operate on different levels. A Christian can genuinely forgive the individual who has wronged them personally while still longing, with the martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6:9-11, who cry out asking how long it will be before their blood is judged and avenged, for God’s final justice against unrepentant, entrenched evil in the world.

What About the Dashing of Infants?

Psalm 137:9 remains the hardest single verse in this category, and I do not want to soften it into something more comfortable than it actually is. The psalmist, an exile grieving in Babylon, pronounces “blessed” whoever repays Babylon by dashing her infants against the rocks. Several things help here without fully resolving the discomfort. Ancient Near Eastern warfare, including Babylon’s own conduct toward Israel, involved exactly this kind of atrocity against conquered children, so the psalmist is invoking the covenant principle of measure-for-measure justice, that Babylon should receive precisely the horror she inflicted, rather than inventing a novel cruelty. This is poetry, not policy; the psalm is a prayer expressing raw grief and a longing for justice, not an instruction manual for how conquering armies should behave, and Scripture elsewhere consistently condemns the deliberate slaughter of children as wicked, including when Israel’s own enemies commit it (2 Kings 8:12, Hosea 13:16). And its inclusion in inspired Scripture tells us that God, remarkably, makes room in His book for the unfiltered grief and rage of a genuinely traumatised people rather than requiring them to sanitise their pain into a more comfortable register before bringing it to Him in prayer.

How I Actually Use Imprecatory Psalms in Ministry

I do not encourage believers to pray Psalm 137:9 word for word against a difficult neighbour or a frustrating colleague; that would badly misapply a psalm written out of genuine, national, covenant-scale atrocity to a situation of ordinary personal irritation, and it would collapse the important distinction Scripture maintains between righteous zeal for justice and petty personal malice. Where I do find imprecatory psalms genuinely useful is with believers who have suffered real, severe injustice, victims of abuse, genuine persecution, or violent crime, who are sometimes told by well-meaning Christians to simply forgive and move on before they have been given any biblical language for the legitimate anger and desire for justice such evil actually deserves. Imprecatory psalms give those believers permission to bring the full, honest weight of their grief and desire for justice to God directly, in prayer, rather than either suppressing it in a way that often produces bitterness later, or acting on it themselves in a way Scripture forbids. Handing the desire for vengeance to God, in the very words Scripture itself provides, is a genuinely healthy, biblical way to process what would otherwise fester unaddressed.

I want to add one further, more personal reflection here. In pastoral ministry I have sat with people whose grief over genuine evil, a violent crime against a family member, sustained abuse, the kind of injustice that leaves lasting scars, was met by well-meaning friends with a premature call to simply forgive and feel at peace. I have watched that premature pressure produce not genuine peace but a kind of quiet, buried resentment that resurfaces years later in unexpected and often destructive ways. Imprecatory psalms offer something healthier: a path that takes the desire for justice with total seriousness, gives it real, unembarrassed voice before God, and only then, having been genuinely heard rather than silenced, allows the believer to move, often gradually rather than instantly, toward the kind of forgiveness Christ actually calls us to. Skipping the honest lament in favour of an immediate, forced peace is not more spiritual. It is often simply less honest, and Scripture’s own inclusion of these difficult prayers suggests God is not asking His people to be more composed than the Psalter itself.

Holding Both Together

The resolution, as I understand it, is not that imprecatory psalms represent a sub-Christian Old Testament ethic that Jesus’s teaching on loving enemies simply overrides and retires. It is that both bodies of teaching agree on the same underlying principle: personal vengeance belongs to God alone, never to the individual believer, and the proper response to genuine evil is to entrust it to Him rather than either ignoring it or executing judgement personally. Imprecatory psalms model handing that desire to God in prayer; Jesus’s teaching on loving enemies models refusing to let that desire curdle into personal hatred, bitterness, or retaliation in the meantime. A mature Christian holds both together: genuine love and prayer for the individual who has wronged them, and a genuine, unashamed longing, entrusted to God rather than acted upon, for His justice to prevail fully and finally over evil that persists unrepentant.

So, now what?

If you are carrying real grief over genuine injustice, do not feel you must pretend that grief and anger do not exist before you can pray. Imprecatory psalms give you honest, God-given words for exactly that pain, words that hand the matter to the only One qualified to judge rightly. And in the meantime, pray for the person who has wronged you, as Christ prayed for those who crucified Him, trusting that the very same God who will one day judge with perfect and complete justice is also, even now, patient, actively working, and fully able to save even the worst of your enemies, exactly as He once graciously saved you.

“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

For Further Study

Readers wanting to go deeper into how the imprecatory psalms fit within a coherent biblical theology of justice and mercy will find helpful treatment in Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology on the doctrine of Scripture and progressive revelation, in Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology, in Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology on divine justice and judgement, in J. Dwight Pentecost’s writings on Old Testament typology, and in Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s work on the Psalms within their Israelite covenant context.