PASSAGE FOR THE DAY:
Psalm 109 (click the link)
KEY VERSES:
1 My God, whom I praise,
do not
remain silent,
2 for
people who are wicked and deceitful
have opened
their mouths against me;
they have
spoken against me with lying tongues.
3 With
words of hatred they surround me;
they attack
me without cause.
4 In return
for my friendship they accuse me,
but I am a
man of prayer…
7 When he
is tried, let him be found guilty,
and may his
prayers condemn him.
8 May his
days be few;
may another
take his place of leadership.
9 May his
children be fatherless
and his
wife a widow.
10 May his
children be wandering beggars;
may they be
driven from their ruined homes.
11 May a
creditor seize all he has;
may
strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.
12 May no one
extend kindness to him
or take
pity on his fatherless children.
13 May his
descendants be cut off,
their names
blotted out from the next generation.
14 May the
iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the Lord;
may the sin
of his mother never be blotted out.
15 May their
sins always remain before the Lord,
that he may
blot out their name from the earth…
20 May this
be the Lord’s payment to my accusers,
to those
who speak evil of me.
21 But you,
Sovereign Lord,
help me for
your name’s sake;
out of the
goodness of your love, deliver me.
22 For I am poor
and needy,
and my
heart is wounded within me. (Psalm 109:1-4, 7-15, 20-21, NIV)
REFLECTIONS:
Psalm 109 is a psalm of lament. Interestingly enough, the psalms of lament are the largest single category in the whole book of the Psalms. There are more psalms of this kind than any other, which makes sense. If there is one thing people know how to do, it’s complain! And if you know how to complain then you can lament, because a lament psalm is basically a complaint.
And I think that says a wonderful thing about God—that just as God delights when we bring words of praise and joy to him, God also longs for us to bring hurts and burdens and pain and doubt to him.
I want you to notice something about this psalm. How exactly is the psalmist’s life falling apart? What is his situation in detail? In the Psalms we almost never know. The Psalms are very different in this way from most all the rest of the Old Testament where it is filled with details of names of individuals, places, tribes, nations, battles and so on.
But the Psalms are very general. There are very few details, and this is intentional on the part of the psalmists. Psalms were written to be all-purpose, to be used so that people in lots of different situations, including you and me, could adapt the psalms to our circumstance, so we could use them to give voice to what’s happening in our own lives.
Psalm 109 is actually part of a special subcategory of lament psalms called imprecatory psalms. Surely you’ve run across a few of these unnerving passages. These are where the psalmist expresses shockingly strong wishes for the destruction of his enemies. For example, here’s our psalmist’s prayer regarding his enemies’ children:
10 May his children be wandering beggars;
may
they be driven from their ruined homes.
11 May a creditor seize all he has;
may
strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.
12 May no one extend kindness to him
or
take pity on his fatherless children. (verses 10-12)
For those of us who are Christ followers, when we come to words like this, it causes us to stop and wonder, “How can I reconcile these words with what Jesus teaches, ‘Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you and turn the other cheek’?” A whole lot has been written on these imprecatory psalms and Christian scholars struggle with how to understand them and how to interpret them.
But I’ll give you the best comment on them I know. This is from a man named Miroslav Volf. I mentioned him in a recent sermon. He is a brilliant theologian who teaches at Yale. He is originally from Croatia, so he knows something about pain and oppression and genocide. This is what he writes about these psalms, just this one phrase: “Rage belongs before God.”
I think that’s deeply true. It’s the only safe place for it.
These imprecatory comments are the unfiltered expressions of hearts that have experienced enormous pain and great injustice. And instead of taking vengeance into his own hands, the psalmist lays out his heart before God with shocking candor, realizing that God’s going to have to bring justice, and God’s going to have to enable him to forgive, because he can’t do it on his own. Rage belongs before God.
APPLICATION:
Take your rage and anger to God. He’s the only one able to deal with it rightly. When you take your rage and anger to others, there is normally a path of destruction in your wake. There is an old truism in ministry: hurt people hurt people. (People who have been wounded by others, end up hurting others themselves.)
Whatever enemy you are facing right now, whatever injustices you believe you are encountering… take that lament to God in all its raw candor, and let God help you sort it out. Ultimately, he is the only one who can bring justice and set all wrongs right. Trust him.
PRAYER:
Father, I bring whatever rage or anger I have toward others and express that to you now. You know my hurt and pain. You know my anger and resentment. And you know how badly I can mishandle my own hurt, and you know the wounding I can inflict on others. So I lay this pain at your feet and ask you to deal with my enemies as you see fit. You are the only one wise enough, just enough, and gracious enough to do so. In my suffering Savior's name, Amen.
WHO AM I?
My name is Greg Bland. On Monday of this week I took Alexander (my 4 year old son) to the doctor for his scheduled shots. Afterward, he was speaking his own imprecatory psalm about the sweet nurse that gave him the shots! Of course, Alexander had a hard time understanding that even though the shots were painful, they are actually intended to help him. In the same way, God can take any hurt, including those hurts done with malice against us, and redeem them for His glory and our good. God is just that wonderful.
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