More on Imprecations
Imprecations, prayers calling down
God's wrath upon the wicked, are found in the New Testament as well as the
Old, on the lips of Christ and the apostles as well as the Psalmists.
See Matt. 23:13ff, Gal. 1:8ff, Rev. 6:10, 18:20. On the other
hand, the biblical ethic of love is also found in both
Testaments. Scripture always proscribes personal vengeance
[1]
and calls us to love our
enemies: Ex. 23:4f, Lev. 19:17f, Psm. 7:4f, Prov. 20:22. So the
problem we have in reconciling these two biblical themes cannot be met
by some view of "dispensational
change."
Jesus did refuse to exercise divine
vengeance during his earthly life, because he came not to judge the world,
but to save. Thus he rebuked his disciples who wanted to call down
fire from heaven upon a city that rejected them (Luke 9:54ff), but
he did promise judgment on unbelieving cities in the last day
(Matt. 11:20-24). In these passages we learn that Jesus' first advent was
not to bring vengeance, but that ultimate vengeance is postponed until his
return (which will be vengeful, II Thess. 1:6-10).
But these facts in themselves neither authorize nor forbid the use of
imprecatory prayers today.
Nor is it a sufficient solution to
say that the imprecatory Psalms are prayers of Christ himself through
his people. While this is true in a sense, that merely raises
the same question (the love/justice relation) again with respect
to Christ's own motives, and it renders problematic the use of
such sentiments in free prayer.
I was helped by J. A. Motyer in Elwell, ed., Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ad loc., who reminds us of the
larger biblical pattern, "vengeance is mine, says the Lord." The
imprecatory Psalms, he points out, are prayers, calling upon God to remedy
those injustices which neither we as individuals, nor the state, are
competent to remedy. They do not seek personal vengeance; rather they
leave vengeance to God, as God has demanded.
Imprecatory prayers are like all
prayers in that there is always the qualification implicit in the phrases "thy will be done" or "in Jesus'
name." When we ask for things, we should do it with the realization
that our ultimate desire is God's glory. If God will be glorified in
giving us our request, then we thank him; if he is more glorified in
denying our request, our prayer has not thereby become useless; for all
prayer is a recommitment to God's purpose, his kingdom. The Lord's Prayer
beautifully exemplifies this spirit.
Now sometimes we are persuaded that
someone is guilty of a great injustice which we are not able to deal with
in our own strength. As in Biblical imprecations, the believer is to
share this concern with God. In doing so, he must share God's evaluation
of injustice: that "because of such things God's wrath comes on those
who are disobedient" (Eph. 5:6). And so he
calls for divine vengeance to be exercised: not by himself, but by God.
Can we love an enemy and still call for God's wrath against him? Is a
desire for divine judgment consistent with a desire for our enemy's
salvation? The psychology of it is difficult, to be sure. But consider
this example: when Idi Amin went
abroad in Uganda, killing Christians right and left simply to satisfy his
personal hatred, many Christians prayed that God would bring vengeance
upon him. Such vengeance, of course, does not, either in the Psalms or in
our example, necessarily entail ultimate damnation. The prayer is
primarily for a historical judgment.
Though historical judgment is not entirely divorced in the biblical mind
from ultimate damnation, the two are not inseparably conjoined either.
But what if God had converted Amin, instead of judging him? Would those Christians
have been disappointed? Surely not; they would have glorified God for answering
their prayer beyond their wildest expectations. Answering their prayer?
Certainly! (1) In one sense, such a conversion would have precisely
brought vengeance against this man, a vengeance visited by God's
grace upon Christ in his atoning sacrifice. (2) Their prayer would
have been answered in that Amin the persecutor
would have received the sharpest divine rebuke (cf. "Saul, why do you
persecute me?") and a historical defeat for his murderous regime. (3)
Their prayer would have been answered in that their deepest desire was
the glory of God.
Should the Christians, then, have
prayed for his salvation rather than his judgment? No. Prayer is often
somewhat immediate, and rightly so. Of course, Christians sometimes
get into a mood where they start praying for all sorts of wild things:
the conversion of people like Hitler, the conversion of all the members of
the US Congress, the coming of Christ at 6 p.m. tonight, and so on. I do
not rebuke the naive, immature faith which motivates such prayers. God
often gives special help to those who are children at heart. Indeed, there
are even times when the prayer of mature believers properly anticipates
the broad sweep of history: "Thy kingdom
come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in
Heaven." But most often, prayer is based on our hopes for the
near-term. And biblical prayer follows this pattern: it is often
realistically short-term in its expectations. We see a situation before
us, and we make a tentative judgment, based on our understanding of God's
usual workings (from Scripture and providence), as to what help
we might reasonably expect. When Peter was in prison, the
church prayed for his release, not for the conversion of everybody
in the correctional system.
When Amin
was ravaging the church, the immediate need was for judgment. Though one
with a great childlike faith might have anticipated the possibility of Amin's conversion, to most Christians that was not an
immediate possibility, even taking account of the riches of God's grace. Amin was a militant Muslim, a hater of all things
Christian, and mentally irrational to boot. Yes, God's grace has converted
hopeless cases before; but this was not a time for considering big
theological possibilities. It was time for an earnest cry for help, based
on present realities in the light of Scripture. The best short-term
possibility was judgment: the death of Amin or
his expulsion from the country. So the prayer of these believers often did
not explicitly include his conversion. But as I said earlier their prayer
did not exclude that either; indeed that possibility was always
implicit in the nature of divine judgment (which provides for and
offers atonement), in the nature of salvation (which is always
a judgment upon sin) and in the qualification "thy
will be done." I suspect that this is also the way the earliest
believers prayed for Saul the persecutor.
What about the "hatred"
expressed in the imprecatory Psalms (e.g., 139:21f)? How is this
compatible with Jesus's command to love, not
hate, our enemies? Again, as we have distinguished between personal and
divine vengeance, I think we must distinguish between two kinds of hatred.
Love and hate in Scripture are not so much emotions as patterns of
behavior. To love is to seek another's benefit;
to hate is to seek his destruction. When we pray for divine vengeance,
granting all the above qualifications on that prayer, we are seeking
the destruction of an enemy of God. We are "hating" that person.
But in our individual relationships with that person, in
which vengeance is excluded, we are to love, to seek what is best
for our enemy. So Scripture similarly distinguishes between good
and bad anger: the quickly aroused, difficult to
extinguish, murderous anger of personal vengeance (Matt. 5:22), and the slowly
aroused, easily extinguished, righteous anger of God's servants defending
His honor (Eph. 4:26) (like the anger of
God itself). So hatred and love are not contrary to one another
in every respect. It is possible to have a godly hatred and a
godly love toward the same person, paradoxical as that seems.
We today may be called to cry for divine justice: against abortionists and abortion advocates, against homosexual militants who try to destroy the church's freedom to proclaim God's word, against the remaining anti-Christian dictators of the world. We crave great historical signs of God's displeasure with injustice. That desire is quite legitimate. And if God pleases instead to rebuke these movements by sending revival and converting the hearts of His enemies, our desire for divine judgment will be completely fulfilled. But in our cry for divine justice, the imprecatory Psalms will rightly guide our prayers.