I Give Myself to Prayer
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Read Psalm 109 in full before proceeding. It is a hard read, full of curses; do not be alarmed by it. As you read, notice how the psalmist, however fierce, leaves the judgment to God and does not lift his own hand, and watch for the verse the New Testament will later apply to Judas. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.
Because he stands at the right hand of the needy, to deliver him from those who threaten his life.
Psalm 109:31
We turn now to the psalms most readers wish were not in the Bible. They are called the imprecatory psalms (from a word that means to call down a curse), and they are exactly that: prayers that ask God to bring His judgment, sometimes in ferocious detail, on the wicked. Most of us, reading them, feel a flush of embarrassment. They seem to belong to a harsher religion than the one the Lord Jesus taught, and the temptation is to skip them, or to quietly apologize for them, or to treat them as a primitive stage the Bible later grew out of. We are not going to do any of that. They are Scripture, breathed out by the Spirit and placed in the church’s own prayer book, and if we will sit with them honestly instead of flinching away, they have something to teach us that we badly need.
We begin with the hardest of them, Psalm 109, the most sustained curse in the Psalter. It is the prayer of a man who has been savaged: lied about, surrounded with hatred, attacked without cause, repaid evil for the good he did and hatred for his love. And he responds by calling down upon his enemy a long and terrible series of curses. There is no use pretending the curses are mild; they are not. They reach to the man’s office, his family, his children, his very name and memory. This is raw, and it is meant to be.
And it raises the hard questions head-on. How can the inspired prayer book of God’s people contain such fury? How does a prayer like this square with the Lord Jesus, who told us to love our enemies, to bless those who curse us, to pray for those who persecute us? Has the Bible contradicted itself, the Old Testament cursing where the New Testament blesses? The answer, when we look closely, is no, and the key is hidden in a single line near the beginning of the psalm. After describing how his enemies repay his love with accusation, the psalmist says: but I continue to pray (v. 4). In the Hebrew it is even barer, but I, prayer, as though, in the face of all that hatred, the man has become nothing but prayer. That is the whole secret of the imprecatory psalm. The wronged believer does not pick up a sword. He does not plot his revenge. He gives himself to prayer, and the curse he prays is the form his refusal of vengeance takes.
For this is the thing we must grasp if we are to read these psalms rightly: the imprecation is not an act of vengeance but the alternative to it. The man who prays God, repay them has, in that very prayer, refused to repay them himself. He has taken his rage, his wound, his burning sense of injustice, and instead of acting on it, he has handed the whole of it to God, to the only One who can judge rightly, who sees what the believer cannot, and to whom vengeance actually belongs. Do not avenge yourselves, dear friends, Paul would write, but give place to God’s wrath, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord. The imprecatory psalm is precisely that giving place to God’s wrath, said out loud, in prayer.
So we will read Psalm 109 honestly, and we will not be embarrassed by it. We will follow the wrong done to the psalmist, the curse he calls down, the way he hands the judgment to the LORD rather than seizing it himself, the weakness out of which he prays, and the confident close where God stands at the right hand of the needy. And we will find that these psalms, far from being beneath the gospel, drive us straight to it: to the cross, where the curse they call for actually fell, and to the One who, cursed without cause, prayed for the forgiveness of the very men who were killing Him.
Evil for Good
O God whom I praise, do not ignore me! For they say cruel and deceptive things to me … They surround me and say hateful things; they attack me for no reason (vv. 1–3). The psalm opens in the experience of being wronged, and wronged in the most maddening way, for no reason. There is a particular agony in being attacked when you have done nothing to deserve it, surrounded by lies you cannot stop, hated by people who have no honest reason to hate you. David knows that agony, and he names it without flinching. And then he sharpens the wound: They repay my love with accusations … They repay me evil for good, and hate for love (vv. 4–5). He had loved these people. He had done them good. And they repaid the love with accusation, the good with evil. That is not merely injustice; it is betrayal.
But notice what he does with it, for it is the hinge of everything: They repay my love with accusations, but I continue to pray. The natural response to betrayal is to strike back, or to nurse the grievance until it hardens into bitterness. David does neither. His response to being hated is to pray. He turns the whole wretched business (the lies, the hatred, the betrayal) toward God, and lets God be the one to deal with it. We should not rush past how remarkable this is. The man has every earthly means and motive to retaliate, and instead he becomes, as the Hebrew almost says, prayer itself. Whatever else the curse that follows is, it is first of all this: a prayer, prayed by a man who has chosen prayer over the sword.
And we cannot read of one loved and betrayed, repaid evil for good, hated without cause, without our minds running ahead to the One in whom all of this came true at its deepest. The Lord Jesus loved perfectly and was repaid with a cross; He did nothing but good and was hated without cause. They hated me without reason, He said, taking the words of another psalm onto His own lips (John 15:25). The experience David describes here is, in its fullest form, the experience of the sinless Son of God, betrayed by those He came to save. Psalm 109 is, in the end, the prayer of the righteous Sufferer, and there has only ever been one perfectly righteous Sufferer. We will keep that in view as the curses come.
And there is a quiet discipline in but I continue to pray that every wronged believer needs to learn, because the wound of being repaid evil for good does not simply sit still in the soul. It festers. It replays the offense at three in the morning; it rehearses the speeches we wish we had made; it builds, in the imagination, satisfying little scenes of vengeance and vindication. That rehearsing feels like dealing with the hurt, but it only deepens it, wearing the groove of bitterness a little smoother each time we run it. David shows the way out. He takes the very same wound that could have fed a thousand revenge fantasies and turns it, instead, into prayer; he directs it upward rather than letting it circle inward. This is not a denial of the hurt; he names it plainly, in all its sting. It is a redirection of it. The energy that wants to go into plotting, or into the endless private replay, he pours out before God. And a hurt prayed is a hurt that has somewhere to go besides round and round inside us.
The Curse
Then come the curses, and they are unsparing. Appoint an evil man to testify against him! May an accuser stand at his right side! … May his days be few! May another take his job! May his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow! (vv. 6–9). On it goes for many verses, against the man’s livelihood, his family, his name, his memory, his very posterity. We will not linger over the details; they are harsh, and they are in your Bible, and you can read them. The question is not whether they are severe (they are) but what to make of the fact that such a prayer stands in Scripture at all.
A few things help us read it rightly. First, some careful readers understand the long curse of these verses to be David quoting back the curses his enemies had spoken against him, so that when he says, just after, May the LORD repay my accusers in this way (v. 20), he is asking God to let the evil they wished on him return upon their own heads. That reading has real merit, and it softens the psalm somewhat. But we will not lean on it to escape the difficulty, because whichever way we read it, this remains a prayer for God’s judgment to fall on the wicked, and that is the thing we must learn to handle, not dodge. Second, and more importantly, notice who is praying and against whom. This is not a powerful man cursing the weak. It is the cry of one oppressed and needy (v. 22) against one who harassed the oppressed and needy, and killed the disheartened (v. 16). The imprecatory psalm is the prayer of the victim, not the bully: the cry of someone who has no power to right the wrong himself, casting his ruined cause on the God who can.
And that reframes the curses entirely. The desire that evil be stopped, that the cruel be held accountable, that the one who hunts the helpless to death not simply get away with it: that desire is not wicked. It is right. A universe in which the torturer and the oppressor and the betrayer faced no reckoning at all would be a moral horror, and something in us that is made in God’s image rightly cries out against it. The imprecatory psalm gives that holy cry a voice. It is the same cry the martyrs raise beneath the altar in the book of Revelation: How long, Sovereign Master, holy and true, before you judge those who live on the earth and avenge our blood? The longing for justice is not sub-Christian. It is the longing of the persecuted church, and of every wronged believer, for God to set the world right. One more thing worth noting before we move on: one of these curses, May his days be few! May another take his job!, is the verse the apostle Peter would later apply to Judas, the man who betrayed the Lord of love with a kiss. The New Testament itself reads this psalm as reaching its point in the arch-betrayer of Christ.
Vengeance Belongs to the LORD
Now watch the direction the psalmist sends it all, because here is where the imprecatory psalm shows its true character. May the LORD repay my accusers in this way (v. 20). May the LORD repay. David does not say let me have my revenge, or give me the strength to repay them. He asks that the reckoning come from the LORD, that God, not David, be the one to judge. The whole matter is lifted out of David’s hands and placed in God’s. This is the very opposite of vigilante justice. The man taking vengeance trusts his own rage, his own judgment, his own partial knowledge, and his own arm. The man praying an imprecation distrusts all of that and entrusts the case to a Judge who is not blinded by rage, who sees every heart, who will repay with perfect justice and not one ounce more.
And that is exactly why the imprecatory psalm, far from contradicting the command to love our enemies, is bound up with it. The Lord Jesus told us never to take vengeance; so did the apostle. But what is a wronged believer to do with the genuine rage and the genuine cry for justice that a real injustice produces? He has only three options. He can act on it, and that is the vengeance God forbids. He can bury it, and that is the bitterness that poisons the soul from the inside, the grudge that eats its keeper. Or he can do the third thing, the thing this psalm models: he can pray it, bringing the whole raw, ugly, burning thing to God, laying it before Him, and leaving it there. The imprecatory psalm is how a believer obeys do not avenge yourselves. It is the safe and God-given channel through which the cry for justice flows out of the believer’s own hands and into the hands of the One to whom vengeance belongs.
This is a great mercy, and not least for our own souls. Suppressed rage at injustice does not disappear; it festers, curdles, and makes us bitter and small. Acted-out rage makes us into a version of the very evil we hated. But rage prayed (handed over to God, named honestly before Him, and entrusted to His justice) is rage disarmed. The believer who has truly prayed Lord, You repay them; You judge; I leave it with You has, in the praying, let go of the thing he was clutching. He has put down a weight he was never meant to carry, the weight of being his own judge and avenger, and given it to the only shoulders strong enough and clean enough to bear it.
And leaving vengeance to God does not mean that evil simply goes unaddressed in this world while we wait for the last day. God executes His justice in more ways than one. He has appointed earthly authorities (courts, magistrates, governments) to restrain evil and punish wrongdoing in the present age; the one who bears the sword, Paul says, is God’s servant to administer retribution on the wrongdoer. So when a believer refuses private vengeance and entrusts the matter to God, he is not choosing to let injustice win. He may still seek justice through every right and lawful means (report the crime, testify to the truth, pursue the proper remedies), for these too are channels God has established for His justice. What he renounces is not the pursuit of justice but the taking of vengeance into his own hands, the appointing of himself as judge and executioner. The imprecatory psalm and the lawful pursuit of justice are not at odds; both hand the matter over to God, one to His final judgment, the other to the appointed orders through which He governs the world now. What neither does is what God forbids: to repay evil for evil out of the believer’s own wrath.
Poor and Needy
Having handed the judgment to God, the psalmist turns to his own plight, and the prayer becomes, of a sudden, very tender. O sovereign LORD, intervene on my behalf for the sake of your reputation! Because your loyal love is good, deliver me! For I am oppressed and needy, and my heart beats violently within me (vv. 21–22). The fierce curser is, underneath, a broken man: oppressed and needy, his heart wounded, fading away like a shadow at the end of the day, his body wasted, scorned by the very people who wronged him. The ferocity of the curse, it turns out, was the ferocity of the helpless, not the strong. This is a man at the end of himself, with no power to fix his situation, doing the only thing he can: crying to God.
And mark the ground he stands on as he asks for deliverance. Not his own merit; not even the rightness of his cause, though it is right. He pleads for the sake of your reputation (for God’s own honor) and because your loyal love is good. There is that anchor word again, the LORD’s chesed, the covenant faithfulness that has held every psalm in these last sessions; and now it holds this one too. Help me, O LORD my God! Because you are faithful to me, deliver me! (v. 26), where faithful renders the same word, chesed. Even in the most ferocious psalm in the book, the deliverance the believer asks for rests not on the depth of his enemies’ guilt but on the loyal love of God. The imprecation calls for justice; the plea for rescue appeals to mercy. Both, in the same prayer, to the same God.
There is real comfort in this for anyone who has been deeply and unjustly wronged: the abused, the betrayed, the slandered, the oppressed. The Bible does not hand such a person a command to feel serene about what was done to them, or to manufacture a forgiveness they do not yet feel, or to pretend the wrong was nothing. It hands them this psalm. It lets them say to God, honestly, this was evil, and it has crushed me, and I want You to see it and judge it. It lets the poor and needy bring the full weight of the injustice to the One who takes injustice with deadly seriousness (far more seriously than the victim ever could) and who has promised to set every account right. To pray this psalm is not to indulge hatred. It is to refuse to carry the wrong alone, and to lay it where it belongs.
And we should notice that this psalm cuts two ways, depending on where the reader is standing. To the poor and needy, the wronged, the powerless, the preyed-upon, it is a refuge: God hears their cry, takes their suffering seriously, and stands as their Defender. But to anyone who is doing the preying, the very same psalm is a warning that ought to make the blood run cold. The one who never bothered to show kindness but harassed the oppressed and needy, and killed the disheartened has a God listening to the cries of his victims, a God who does not forget, who will repay. The comfortable and the powerful, the ones in a position to oppress, are meant to read these psalms and tremble: the tears of the people you have wronged are not falling into the void. They are being collected by the God who avenges. There is a sobering self-examination in that for all of us, for there is more of the oppressor in every human heart than we like to admit. The imprecatory psalm comforts the victim and warns the victimizer, and bids each of us ask honestly which we have lately been.
He Stands at the Right Hand of the Needy
The psalm ends, astonishingly, in praise and confidence. I will thank the LORD profusely … because he stands at the right hand of the needy, to deliver him from those who threaten his life (vv. 30–31). And there is a deliberate and beautiful reversal here. Back at the start of the curse, the psalmist had asked that an accuser stand at his right side, at his right hand, the place where, in an ancient court, the prosecutor stood to press his charge. Now, at the end, it is not an accuser but the LORD Himself who stands at the right hand of the needy, not to accuse, but to defend, to save. The God who is asked to judge the wicked is the God who stands as the defender of the wronged. The accuser is answered by the Advocate.
And this is where the whole psalm finds its center in Christ. For there was an Accuser whose name actually means the accuser, the one the Scriptures show standing at the right hand to accuse God’s people, the adversary who accuses them day and night before our God. And there is One who now stands at the right hand of every needy believer as his Advocate: if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous One. The deepest reading of he stands at the right hand of the needy is the gospel itself: that against every accusation, the believer has a Defender at God’s right hand, the risen Christ, who pleads his case and delivers him from those who would condemn his soul to death.
And it is Christ, in the end, who prays this psalm most truly, for He is the righteous one cursed and accused without cause, the One repaid evil for the only perfect good ever done. He prayed the Psalter as His own prayer book all His life, and He embodied the very posture the imprecatory psalm teaches. When he was maligned, he did not answer back; when he suffered, he threatened no retaliation, but committed himself to God who judges justly (1 Peter 2:23). There is the imprecatory psalm lived out to perfection: not retaliating, not threatening, not seizing vengeance, but handing the whole injustice over to the Father who judges justly. The Lord Jesus did not carry His own case; He entrusted it to God. And that is precisely what the believer does when he prays an imprecation rather than picking up the sword. He follows his Lord, who absorbed the worst injustice in history without raising a hand to repay it, and left the judging to the only One fit to judge. To pray these psalms in Christ’s footsteps is to do what He did: to entrust ourselves, and our enemies, to the righteous Judge.
But the cross goes deeper still into this psalm, and here is the heart of it. The imprecatory psalm calls down a curse, and the staggering truth of the gospel is that the curse fell. It fell, but not where we might have expected. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). All the judgment that sin deserves, all the reckoning the imprecatory psalms cry out for, came down in full upon the Lord Jesus, on the cross, in the place of sinners. The curse was not waved away; it was borne. And the One who bore it had every right, by the logic of Psalm 109, to pray it down upon the men who nailed Him there, and instead He prayed, Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing. He took the curse the psalm calls for, so that His enemies (and we were all His enemies) might be forgiven instead of cursed. The cross is where the cry for justice and the love of enemies meet: justice fully satisfied, because the curse fell; mercy fully offered, because it fell on Him.
Reading the Curses with Christ
So how does a Christian pray these psalms now, on this side of the cross? Not by nursing private hatreds, and not by calling down ruin on the people who irritate us. We pray them, first, as the cry for God’s justice against real evil: the evil that still hunts the poor and needy to death, the cruelty that still seems to win, the wrongs no earthly court will ever touch. We are allowed, even commanded, to long for God to set the world right, to stop the wicked, to vindicate the oppressed; and these psalms give that holy longing its words. We pray them, second, as the deliberate handing-over of our own wounds and rages to God, the refusal to avenge ourselves, the laying-down of a weight we were never meant to carry. And we pray them, third and finally, with the cross in view, knowing that the judgment they call for has already fallen on Christ, for the sins of the whole world, and that its verdict of pardon is received by faith.
And that last point is what lets us hold the imprecatory psalms together with the command to love our enemies, instead of being torn between them. We long for God’s justice, and we pray, at the very same time, for our enemy’s repentance, that the curse which fell on Christ for him too might become his pardon, received in repentance and faith, that he might be moved from the company of the cursed into the company of the forgiven. We want evil stopped, and we want the evildoer saved, and there is no contradiction, because the cross is where both happen at once. We can pray Lord, judge this evil and Lord, have mercy on this man in the same breath, because at Calvary the judgment of the evil and the mercy on the man were accomplished together. The believer who has understood the cross can pray the fiercest psalm in the Psalter without a drop of personal malice, handing the justice to God, and hoping, even for his enemy, that the curse has already been carried by Another.
There is also a horizon these psalms teach us to long for, and it is the right end of all their fierceness. The deepest cry of the imprecatory psalm is not finally against this enemy or that one, but against evil itself, and it will be answered, fully and forever, on the day evil is judged and ended. When we pray thy kingdom come, we are praying, among other things, for that day: when every cruelty is at last set right, every tear of every victim wiped away, every oppressor stopped, and the whole long reign of wickedness brought down. The Scriptures end with exactly that, the final judgment of all evil and the making of a new creation in which death will not exist any more, or mourning, or crying, or pain. The imprecatory psalms are, at bottom, a groaning for that morning, the same groaning the whole creation makes, waiting to be set free. To pray them rightly is not to wish private harm on a personal enemy but to ache for the day when God will rid His world of evil altogether, and to trust that He will. The fiercest psalm in the Psalter turns out to be, when followed to its end, a prayer for the new heavens and the new earth.
This is why we do not skip these psalms, and why we are not embarrassed by them. They tell the truth about a world full of real evil and real victims; they give the wronged a place to bring what they cannot carry; they keep vengeance out of our hands by putting it into God’s; and they drive us, in the end, to the foot of the cross, where the curse was borne and the accuser silenced and the needy given a Defender at the right hand. Far from belonging to a harsher religion than the gospel, the imprecatory psalms are the gospel’s own honest reckoning with evil, and they are answered, every one of them, at Calvary.
Gathering the Threads
We took up the psalms most readers wish were not in the Bible, the imprecatory psalms, the prayers of cursing, and refused either to skip them or to apologize them away. In Psalm 109 we found a man savaged without cause, repaid evil for good and hatred for his love, who responded not with the sword but with prayer: but I continue to pray. And that, we saw, is the whole character of the imprecatory psalm: not an act of vengeance but the alternative to it, the wronged believer handing his rage and his cry for justice to the only One to whom vengeance belongs, rather than seizing it himself. We read the curses honestly, noting that they are the cry of the poor and needy against the one who hunted them, not the bully against the weak; that the longing for evil to be judged is a holy longing, the very cry of the martyrs; and that one of these curses the New Testament itself applied to Judas, the betrayer of the Lord of love.
We watched the psalmist hand the reckoning to the LORD and not take it into his own hand, the opposite of vigilante justice, and learned that rage prayed is rage disarmed, a weight laid down where it belongs. We heard the broken, tender plea of the oppressed and needy one, grounded not in his enemies’ guilt but in the goodness of God’s loyal love, and found in it real comfort for any believer deeply and unjustly wronged. And we saw the psalm end with the LORD standing at the right hand of the needy as their Defender: the accuser answered by the Advocate, the risen Christ who pleads our case. Above all we found that the curse the psalm calls for actually fell. It fell on the Lord Jesus, who became a curse for us, and who, with every right to pray Psalm 109 against His murderers, prayed instead, Father, forgive them. The cross is where the cry for justice and the love of enemies meet: justice satisfied because the curse fell, mercy offered because it fell on Him. So we pray these psalms now longing for God’s justice, refusing our own vengeance, and hoping even for our enemies that the curse has already been carried by Another.
For Discussion
The imprecatory psalms make most readers uncomfortable, and many wish they were not in the Bible. Why is it important that we not skip them or explain them away, and what might we lose if we did?
When David is repaid evil for good, his response in verse 4 is striking: but I continue to pray. How is praying his rage and his cry for justice to God different from, even the opposite of, taking vengeance into his own hands (compare Romans 12:19)?
The desire that evil be stopped and the wicked held accountable is, in itself, a right and even holy desire; the martyrs cry How long? in Revelation 6:10. How does entrusting that desire to God, the perfect Judge, differ from nursing it in bitterness or acting on it ourselves?
The psalm is the prayer of the oppressed and needy (v. 22) against one who harassed the oppressed and needy, and killed the disheartened (v. 16): the cry of the oppressed, not the powerful. How does that change the way we read the curses, and what comfort might it offer someone who has been deeply and unjustly wronged?
The Lord Jesus was cursed and killed without cause, and could have prayed every word of this psalm against His murderers, yet He prayed, Father, forgive them (Luke 23:34), and became a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). How does the cross both answer the psalm’s cry for justice and open a door for enemies to be forgiven?
How do we hold together the imprecatory psalms’ cry for God’s justice and the Lord Jesus’ command to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44)? Are they really opposed, or can a believer pray for both justice and an enemy’s repentance at once?
Looking Ahead
The next session takes up the other great imprecatory psalm, and perhaps the most famous (and most shocking) of them all. Psalm 137 begins with one of the most beautiful and sorrowful images in all of Scripture: By the rivers of Babylon we sit down and weep when we remember Zion (Psalm 137:1). It is the song of God’s people in exile, hanging up their harps on the willows, unable to sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land, aching for the Jerusalem they have lost.
And then it ends with a line so terrible that many a reader has snapped the Bible shut at it: a cry of blessing on whoever would dash the infants of Babylon against the rocks. We will not flinch from that line either. We will ask what it means that such raw, anguished fury found its way into a worship song; how the grief of exile and the longing for home turn into a cry for the fall of the city that destroyed everything; and how this psalm, too, when read honestly and with Christ, points beyond the rage to a justice that is God’s alone, and to the true and lasting Zion that no Babylon can ever take away. We will learn to weep by the rivers of Babylon, and to long for home.
Read Psalm 137 in full before the next session; it is only nine verses. Sit with both its beauty and its horror: the weeping exiles who cannot sing, and the fierce closing cry against Babylon. As you read, ask where the longing for home is really pointing.
Closing Prayer
O God of our praise, be not silent when the wicked prey upon the weak and the innocent are wronged. We confess that the world is full of evil that no earthly court will ever touch, and that our own hearts burn with anger we do not know what to do with. Teach us to do what Your servant did, and give ourselves to prayer: to bring our rage and our cry for justice to You, and to leave them in Your hands, refusing to avenge ourselves, trusting that vengeance belongs to You and that You will repay with perfect justice and perfect knowledge. Be the Defender of all who are poor and needy and have no helper, and stand at their right hand to save them.
We thank You that the curse our sin deserved fell not on us but on Your Son, who became a curse for us, and who, hated without cause and nailed to a tree, prayed for the forgiveness of His enemies. Make us like Him: longing for Your justice and yet praying for our enemies’ repentance, hoping that the curse already borne at the cross might cover them too, and move them from the company of the cursed into the company of the forgiven. Set the world right in Your time, judge all evil, wipe away every injustice, and bring us at last to the day when there is no more cause to weep. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, our Advocate at Your right hand, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.