Streams of Living Water

Do you have a passion for the Glory of God? Do you live for, do you breathe for, do you do all for the Glory of God? Does the honour of His Glory and His Great Name mean more to you than your own reputation? Do you believe that God will not allow the guilty to go unpunished? These are the kind of questions brought up by the penultimate type of Psalm we are looking at – Psalms of Imprecation – Psalms like 137:7-9 where, humanly speaking, we are left scratching our heads at the viciousness of Scripture. After all, how barbaric is it to talk of taking little children and dashing their heads against rocks? I mean, that is so sub-Christian isn’t it? That’s the kind of thing psychopaths do – not followers of the man who said, ‘Love your enemies. Pray for them who spitefully use you’. I mean, you would might expect the Psalmist, if he had any morsel of what passes as modern godliness within him to say, ‘Lord, have mercy on Babylon’, but rather than that, this vicious, vengeful, hate-filled songwriter pens these words of vitriol. This has led to many commentators, even evangelicals, calling these verses, and the other psalms which follow this trend, Psalms like 69, 83 and 109, ‘devilish’. They don’t believe they should be included in the Christian cannon of Scripture because they say that they are simply sub-Christian sentiments – relics of Judaism, not worthy of the disciples of Jesus.
But tonight, I want to show you, by God’s grace and with His help, that these imprecatory Psalms are anything but devilish – indeed they are some of the most Christ-like things we can pray or sing through. In fact, far from being apologetic about their inclusion within the Psalter, as if to sing these makes our worship sub-Christian, I want to go on the offensive tonight and ask where in the sentiments and words of modern worship do you find anything which remotely comes close to the imprecatory psalms? You don’t, and I believe that this is a significant strength of our position on worship – especially when you come to understand, as I hope you all will tonight, what God teaches us about His Glory and His Love in the Imprecatory Psalms. I want to see two things tonight: first, some general principles surrounding the interpretation of the Imprecatory Psalms and then second, a specific application of the Imprecatory Psalms, namely Psalm 137, especially the problematic last verse – that one about taking infants heads and dashing them against stones.
[A] General Principles of Imprecatory Psalms
I want to begin this section by asking us all here to make a covenant of trust with God – I want us all to take to heart the words of Paul in 2 Timothy 3:16 where he says, “all scripture is God breathed and is useful” – all Scripture, including the imprecations. I want us all to make a covenant with God saying that we believe these imprecatory psalms are part of Scripture – they are God’s inspired word and it is our responsibility, even though they are a part of God’s word which is difficult to understand, to work at trying to understand what God is teaching us from them. So having asserted that we believe these Psalms are God’s Word, let’s make the following 5 points about the psalms of imprecation:
1. These are the words of Christ – who spoke these words? In Psalm 69:25 “May their place be deserted; let there be no-one to dwell in their tents”? At first glance, it is obviously King David. In and of itself, this is interesting, because as we read through the life of David we discover that he was not a vindictive, hate-filled man, but a man full of compassion and love – hardly, ‘devilish’. But, go back to the first sermon on the book of Psalms and what did we discover about the true source of these songs – who were they written by and for? David’s greater son, the Lord Jesus Christ was the source and the object of all these psalms. Do you know that Psalm 69 is quoted 5x in the New Testament, and Jesus Himself quotes it 3x? As you read through the Gospels, you find Jesus, gentle Jesus meek and mild, the one who said, ‘love your enemies’ coming out again and again with imprecatory-type statements – just read Luke 11:42-52 – “Woe to you Pharisees”. These are the words of the Lord Jesus Christ! These are the words of the apostles, like Paul in Galatians 1 – “if anyone is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!” Now I know that this goes against everything you have learned about the gentleness, love and meekness of Christ – but that goes only to show that Jesus Christ is bigger than you thought, because the same Jesus who cried out on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”, also condemned Judas to eternal punishment. Jesus prayed and sang these imprecatory Psalms, so should we.
2. These are cries for Divine Vengeance – is there a difference between these imprecatory psalms and the kind of things other faiths perpetrate in the name of their Gods? Is there a difference between Psalm 137:7-9 and the terrorist who straps a bomb to his waist and sets it off in a crowded restaurant? Not surprisingly, there is all the difference in the world – and that for two reasons. First, nowhere in the imprecatory psalms is a personal vendetta being pursued. The psalmist never, for his own sake, asks for vengeance upon his personal enemies. It is always the enemies of God he is pleading for judgement on behalf of. We cannot use these imprecatory psalms like they used to be used in medieval times when Franciscan priests were paid by people to curse their enemies with them. They aren’t songs of personal revenge. Secondly, the vengeance is always left to the Lord – the Psalmist never takes judgement into his own hands – he leaves it to God. The psalmist doesn’t bash the heads of Iraqi children against rocks – the judgement is left to God. That is a constant theme of the imprecatory psalms – judgement belongs to the Lord. Paul sums it up in Romans 12:19, itself a quote from the Old Testament, “Do not take revenge … but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written, “It is mine to avenge, I will repay”, says the Lord.” And so to pray an imprecatory psalm is itself an act of faith because what you are saying is that you, personally, will not take revenge against the enemies of God – you won’t blow up airliners – but rather, you will leave the judging to God. The American theologian, James Adams writes, “To pray the imprecations of the Psalms is to surrender all rights for vengeance to God.” Our weapons aren’t guns and bombs, but words and prayers. Never use these psalms as a basis for justifying aggressive personal revenge or the taking up of arms against the enemies of God. By praying them, you are asking God to judge.
3. These are calls for Conversion – In Psalm 83:16 we read an imprecation, “cover their faces with shame, so that men will seek your name, O Lord.” There we have one ultimate aim of the imprecatory psalms – it is a call for God’s enemies to be so humbled that in their desolation and pain, they come to seek after God. We are praying that God will use judgement in order to humble them so that they may realise how wrong they were and how much they need Christ. And we all know situations where a nation has been judged harshly and it has led to many coming to know Jesus. For example, Afghanistan was a staunchly muslim nation, completely closed to the Gospel. But then, in the 1980’s, the Soviets invaded and caused havoc forcing many Afghans to leave their homeland and live in refugee camps outside Afghanistan. In these refugee camps, many of these Afghans heard the Gospel and came to know Christ. But it needed them to be forcibly removed – they needed to be judged and humbled before they would listen to God. And so, when we pray these imprecations, we aren’t doing so with hatred in our hearts, but a desire to see God’s enemies turn to Him.
4. These are prophecies of Christ’s sufferings – the curses of the imprecations are difficult to stomach – how on earth can God ever condone the prayers of Psalm 69:24 “Pour out your wrath on them; let your fierce anger overtake them?” And how does this relate to what Jesus Christ endured on the cross at Calvary? What can these prayers of vengeance possibly have to do with the love of God? The link is found in Galatians 3:13 – “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.” The problem is that, by nature, we are all God’s enemies, none of us are able to take a righteous man’s place and condemn everybody else because, by nature, we are sinners and unrighteous. By nature, we face God’s curse – we face the curses of the imprecatory psalms. But Jesus took the curse upon Himself at Calvary – He bore the pain of the imprecations on our behalf so that we could be free to enjoy the blessings of friendship with God. When you sing the imprecations, don’t forget that God loves you so much that Jesus endured these for you! He was cursed for your blessing; he suffered for your prosperity; he cried out in pain so that you could cry out in joy. And again, let’s go on the offensive – other religions may talk of vengeance and judgement, but where is their Christ, the Christ who Himself bore the vengeance of God upon sin? 
5. These are warnings of end-time punishment – Many will come to the Lord Jesus and be freed from the curse of the law – they will find Him taking for them the curses of the imprecations. But if other people will not come to Jesus, then the curses of the imprecations still rest upon them and they will endure the pain. They will, in the language of Psalm 83, be covered with shame; they will, in the language of Psalm 69, endure the wrath and anger of God. Paul talks of that in 2 Thessalonians 1:6-10, “since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed.” If a man will not come to the Lord Jesus Christ, then he will be broken by the Lord Jesus Christ.
I hope these five principles for interpreting the imprecatory psalms help you to understand the broader picture of Psalm 137:7-9. If you haven’t taken all that in, then just think of what Jesus taught us to pray in the Lord’s Prayer – “Thy Kingdom Come” – we all want God’s kingdom to come don’t we? But in order for God’s Kingdom to come, Satan’s Kingdom has to go – it has to be destroyed – and that’s what we pray for in the imprecatory psalms. That’s just common sense – I support Aberdeen Football Club and I want to see them win every game – but in order to win every game, the teams they are playing need to lose. Aberdeen and the teams they are playing can’t both win. I can’t cheer both when Aberdeen score and the opposition team score. As much as I hope Aberdeen win, I hope the team they are playing lose. In these psalms we have a passion for God’s glory being expressed in a desire to see His enemies destroyed. Do you have a passion for God’s glory – then you cannot also have a passion for the glory of the world!
[B] Specific Application of Imprecatory Psalms
Psalm 137 was written about 400-500BC by Jews who were enduring the exile in Babylon. The Psalm itself can be divided into 3 sections:
1. Torture (vs. 1-3) – the Jews were being tormented and tortured by their captors – they were being systematically humiliated and it hurt – they were weeping and crying out when they remembered the city of Jerusalem and all they had there. Their captors were forcing them to sing to them the songs of Zion – not because they wanted to hear them, but as a means of breaking their willpower. The Nazi’s at the death camp of Treblinka did the same to Jews there. They forced the Jews to sing and dance of their Jewishness. Walter Brueggeman notes that, “this was part of the humiliation intending to rob Jews of their identity, their dignity and their hope.” Let’s not think of the Babylonish Captivity as a nice, humane, political move – it was nothing short of ancient ethnic cleansing – of the same variety and brutality as that of Nazi to Jew and Serb to Bosnian.
2. Resistance (vs. 4-6) – in these verses the Jews are resisting – they must keep their faith and their culture alive – they must not give into the humiliation and torture of the Babylonians. They must not integrate into Babylonian society and become rank and file model citizens – they must resist and keep their faith alive. And to a certain extent they were successful in this, because 100 years after this Psalm was written, Nehemiah, when he heard tell of the broken down state of Jerusalem, still felt strongly enough to weep and to pray. Hey but let’s ignore that resistance in the modern church – let’s conform and not resist the integrating influences of the world trying to get us to give up the militancy of our faith – let’s give in to Babylon and forget the faith of our fathers. Over the last 5 years I can’t believe how much society has moved from being predominantly Christian to being aggressively secular humanist – we have given in to extremist Islam and we have given in to the homosexual lobby to the extent that Christianity is now being discriminated against. And before you think it can’t get any worse – it can and I believe it will. And what is our response to be? So far, it’s been nothing short of pathetic – we have given in – we have not resisted. We are not a militant church prophetically calling our nation to repentance – we have conformed and been silent. The Babylonians are winning and we capitulating. We have made peace with the Babylonians and have forgotten that we are in the land of the foreigner. Is that you? Have you stopped resisting? This is one of the reasons I think we should be singing the imprecations and why I think the modern church is missing so much by having no hymns or worship songs which reflect the sentiments of psalms like these. They are calls to God for vengeance and calls to God’s people to resist – they are the war cries of God’s people. An army without war cries has already lost.
3. Judgement (vs. 7-9) – these verses may look harsh, but given all the Jews had suffered at the hands of these ancient Nazi’s, they are no more than just and righteous. These verses form a call to God to bring divine vengeance to bear upon the Babylonians – those who razed Jerusalem to the ground – burning, looting, murdering, raping and kidnapping – this is a call to God to destroy Babylon. I suppose though it is the problematic words of vs. 9 which cause so much reservation amongst God’s people. Let’s take a closer look at the words, through the lens of the New Testament and the death of Jesus.
·         “dash” – the only other biblical usage of this word is in Luke 19:44 where Jesus talks about what is going to happen to the city of Jerusalem in AD70 when the Roman armies besiege it and utterly destroy it. In Luke 19 Jesus weeps over the city of Jerusalem because of its fate – a fate which it will bring upon itself for not accepting its Messiah Jesus, but rather putting Him to death on a cross. So even this word ‘dash’ makes us realise that this verse in Psalm 137 doesn’t so much refer to Babylon as it does to every city and every person who does not believe in Jesus Christ.
·         “Babylon” – in the New Testament, for example in Revelation 18:2, Babylon is used figuratively to describe the world in opposition to God – the world as it has caved in to, and followed Satan and His hatred of the Lord Jesus Christ. Babylon is not one kind of person, one ethnic grouping – Babylon is the world against God – the seat of evil – the seat of ultimate persecution of the Church.
·         “Infants” – the word ‘infants’ as translated in the NIV does not refer to age – it does not mean babies. Rather it is talking about those who are sons of Babylon – those who live there, whether man or woman. This is a reference to those who have made their home in the seat of evil – those who have consciously decided to line up against God and His people. It does not mean babies – it means evildoers.
·         “Rock” – the NIV mistranslates the last word in Psalm 137 – it is not rocks, it is the singular rock – ‘dashes them against the rock’. Now this would have seemed very strange if you were reading it as a Babylonian, because Babylon was situated on a desert plain, a million miles away from any hills, cliffs or rocks. What then, is the rock? In Matthew 21:44-44 we have the answer – “Jesus said to them, have you never read in the Scriptures: The stone (or rock) the builders rejected has become the capstone … He who falls on this stone (or rock) will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.” What is the rock, or rather, who is the rock? That rock is Jesus Christ. This word ‘rock’ is there to show us that he who rejects Christ in this life will fall upon the risen, exalted, glorified Lord Jesus Christ and be broken in pieces at the day of Judgement. The rock who is Jesus will fall on all those who have rejected Christ and sided with His enemies.
Does this verse now become clearer to you – it is a cry to God for the judgement of all those who have rejected Christ and have therefore become Christ’s enemies. God, in love, extended to them the offer of salvation through the dying blood of Jesus on the cross, but they spat upon it. They are the enemies of Christ. And the question is this, “Are Christ’s enemies my enemies?” because if they aren’t, it shows that you don’t love the Lord Jesus as you should.
The call of the Imprecatory Psalms is a call coming from a militant church that God’s glory be revealed in the world – that His Kingdom Come and that the Kingdom of Satan be utterly destroyed. These Psalms form a passion for God’s glory. These are the words of Christ. Maybe one reason we feel uncomfortable reading them is that we have lost a passion for Christ and His Glory and have settled for our own feelings of comfort and prosperity. The Imprecatory Psalms call us to resist – not with the weapons of this world, but with prayer and word. Are you in the Lord’s army – praying for His Kingdom to come and Satan’s kingdom to go? Let these psalms then be at least part of your battle cry.
But lastly, if you are still living in Babylon – if you still haven’t accepted Christ as your Lord and Saviour – take heed and be warned! These curses are true and faithful – and they will take place. So come to Christ, even tonight, the Christ who died upon the cross to take the curse away. AMEN