Can Jesus Pray “Imprecatory” Prayers?

Prayers for God’s Judgment

It is usual to speak of the “imprecatory psalms” or “imprecatory” passages in the Psalms (from the Latin imprecare, “to invoke harm or curse someone”). But Bernhard Anderson (1916–2007) says that “it is doubtful whether these Psalms should be described as ‘imprecatory’ or cursing Psalms.”¹ He quotes Claus Westermann, who writes, “The distinctiveness of the curse lies in the fact that it is aimed directly, without any detour via God, at the one it is meant to hit. A curse is a word of power which the swearer released without recourse to God.”² These psalms have nothing of this character, for they are all prayers to God or desires expressed in the presence of God. There is a great difference between letting loose a curse against someone and praying for God to execute his just judgment on them; in the former, it is a battle between me and my enemy, while in the latter, it is a plea that God, who knows all things and acts with perfect justice, will bring about that justice.

For this reason, I have written “imprecation” or “imprecatory” in quotation marks. I have used these words because they are in common use, but I do not consider them well chosen. It would be better if we spoke of prayers for God’s judgment on the impenitent wicked.

The Problem

Again and again, the psalmists pray for God to act in judgment on the wicked. Some of the strongest examples are Psalms 69:24–28; 104:35; 109:7–10; 137:8–9; and Psalm 139:19–22. But there are many more.³ Some of these are shocking words. Are we meant to pray them? “Surely not!” we exclaim in horror.

These words seem to contradict the Lord Jesus’s command to love our enemies and pray for them (Matt. 5:43–44); the Lord’s example when he cried, “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34); the example of Stephen, the first martyr, when he similarly prayed, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60); the teaching of Paul to “bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them” (Rom. 12:14); and Paul’s own testimony, “When reviled, we bless” (1 Cor. 4:12). How then can we be expected to pray for God’s judgment on such people? Further, these prayers in the Psalms make us tremble because, in our better moments, we know that we deserve every judgment for which the
psalmists pray.

“No part of the Psalter,” writes Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “causes us greater difficulty today than the so-called psalms of vengeance. With shocking frequency their thoughts penetrate the entire Psalter.”⁴

The Psalms

Christopher Ash

In this comprehensive, 4-volume commentary, Christopher Ash provides a thorough treatment of all 150 Psalms, examining each chapter’s significance to David and the other psalmists, to Jesus during his earthly ministry, and to the church of Christ in every age.

A Common but Unsatisfactory Solution

In view of this seeming contradiction, perhaps the most common response has been along the following lines. The “solution” comes in two parts. First, it is said, these sentiments in the Psalms express the honest and entirely understandable feelings of believers under the most terrible pressures, as they experience almost unbelievable pain and utterly unfair treatment. So C. S. Lewis describes resentment under ill treatment as “natural,”⁵ and Peter Craigie (1938–1985) as “the real and natural reactions to the experience of evil and pain.”⁶ Derek Kidner (1913–2008) says that they “have the shocking immediacy of a scream, to startle us into feeling something of the desperation which produced them.”⁷ Patrick Miller writes of “the candor and truly painful honesty of the psalms.”⁸

This is undoubtedly true, and it is a major reason why those of us who have never experienced such persecution or ill treatment for Christ find it so hard to identify with these prayers. From a place of comfort, it is all too easy to condemn people who pray with such passion for the judgment of enemies. Our brothers and sisters in the persecuted church, who have seen their fellow believers beaten, imprisoned, or killed for Christ, have no such difficulty understanding how people can feel like this. So it is natural.

But the most common response continues with a second assertion: although these feelings are natural and understandable, it is said, they are still wrong. Lewis describes them as “terrible,” “contemptible,” “profoundly wrong,” and “devilish.”⁹ Craigie says, “Though the sentiments are in themselves evil, they are part of the life of the soul which is bared before God in worship and prayer”; these words “are often natural and spontaneous,” but they are “not always pure and good.”¹⁰ Kidner asks the question “Can a Christian use these cries for vengeance as his own?” and concludes, “The short answer must surely be No.”¹¹

Although this kind of response is popular, however, there are reasons why it is unsatisfactory.

Reasons Why This Solution Is Unsatisfactory

We Cannot Drive a Wedge between the Old Testament and the New Testament

We need first to clear away the common but shallow assertion that the Psalms include the kind of sub-Christian material we expect in the Old Testament and that we should be New Testament people rather than Old Testament people.

This kind of thing is typically said by those who know little of the Old Testament—or of the New, for that matter. When Paul teaches, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to [lit., leave room for] the wrath of God,” he supports this with quotations from Deuteronomy 32:35 and Proverbs 25:21–22 (Rom. 12:19–20). The Old Testament is his authority for forbidding personal revenge. When Peter writes, “Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling,” his authority is from Psalm 34 (1 Pet. 3:9–12). David refuses to take revenge on King Saul; instead, he says, “May the Lord judge between me and you, may the Lord avenge me against you, but my hand shall not be against you” (1 Sam. 24:12). The New Testament follows the Old Testament in consistently opposing personal revenge.

Further, the New Testament contains striking prayers for cursing. Paul writes, “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed” (1 Cor. 16:22), and, “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed” (Gal. 1:8). So the Old Testament has no monopoly on praying for God’s curse on the wicked. We cannot evade this difficulty in the Psalms by an uninformed Old Testament–New Testament contrast.

These Prayers Are Inseparable from the Rest of the Psalms

Next, we need to face up to the fact that these prayers are woven into the warp and woof of the Psalter in such a way that it is very difficult to unpick the threads and remove them (see above). Lewis rightly observes that these—what he calls “the bad parts”—“will not ‘come away clean’; they may . . . be intertwined with the most exquisite things.”¹² For example, Psalm 55 contains the beautiful words “Cast your burden on the Lord” (Ps. 55:22) but also prays, “Let death steal over them; / let them go down to Sheol alive” (Ps. 55:15), and expresses delight that “you, O God, will cast them down / into the pit of destruction” (Ps. 55:23).

We delight in the beautiful descriptions of creation in Psalm 104, but the psalm closes with the petition “Let sinners be consumed from the earth, / and let the wicked be no more!” followed by the cheerful injunction “Bless the Lord, O my soul! / Praise the Lord!” (Ps. 104:35). We love the celebration of God’s loving knowledge of us in Psalm 139. But then near the end we read, “Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? / And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? / I hate them with complete hatred; / I count them my enemies” (Ps. 139:21–22). These prayers do not appear in just a few difficult Psalms, which might perhaps be set to one side in our praying; they surface again and again— sometimes at unexpected moments. As Christoph Barth writes, “It is not possible . . . to handle the problem . . . in isolation—far less to commit the impropriety of simply omitting the offensive passages . . . from Church worship. It is impossible to have the Psalter without its references to godless enemies” and the prayers for their destruction.14 The Psalms themselves give no indication that some parts are authorized responses to God (to be echoed by us) while other parts are natural but unauthorized cries of the anguished soul (to be omitted by us). So we are faced with a decision: either we regard the Psalms—all the Psalms and the whole of each psalm—as a God-given, authorized response to shape our prayers, or we treat the Psalms as a resource for our praying, such that we pick the bits that seem to us inspiring and worthy. The trouble is that if we adopt the latter strategy, we have evacuated the Psalms of their authority, and we might as well take any other pious literature as a resource and inspiration for our praying. Those with a low view of Scripture may be happy to do this but not those who hold to its utter trustworthiness and authority. We must not pick and choose, for such an approach dishonors God by implying that we know better than him what we should pray.

We Cannot Simply Spiritualize the Enemies

So how do we get around the difficulty? Another suggestion is to spiritualize the enemies against whom the psalmists pray. So Kidner suggests that the Christian “may of course translate them into affirmations of God’s judgement, and into denunciations of ‘the spiritual hosts of wickedness’ which are the real enemy.”¹⁴ But it is not clear that the Bible authorizes us to do this; we cannot evade the fact that the enemies in the Psalms are human enemies. They may act under satanic inspiration, but the agents of hostility are flesh and blood, and it is against these historical men and women that the psalmists pray.

The New Testament Quotes Some of These Prayers with Approval

And there is a further point to note. The New Testament, far from quietly omitting these prayers in the Psalms, quotes from them and says, for example, that they have been answered in the judgment of God on Judas Iscariot (note that Acts 1:16–20 quotes from Pss. 69; 109). Indeed, when the Lord Jesus weeps over Jerusalem and declares that enemies will “tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you” (Luke 19:44), he makes an unmistakable allusion to Psalm 137:9, where a blessing is pronounced on the one who does just this.

Working toward a Solution

So although the “imprecatory” prayers in the Psalms are an acute difficulty for us, we must grapple more deeply with them to see if there is any way we can join in these prayers. We do this in five stages.

These Are Prayers, Not Curses

First, we note that these verses and passages in the Psalms are prayers to God. They are not strictly curses (see the discussion of the terms “imprecation” and “imprecatory” above).

They Are Prayers for God to Do What He Has Promised to Do in His Covenant

Second, the prayers to God are precisely in line with the covenant promises of God; the psalmists are praying that God will do what he has already promised to do. They are “completely unoriginal,” for “David and the Psalmists didn’t choose their curses from a warped imagination, but primarily from their reading of the Law of Moses.”¹⁵ Right back at the start of the covenant with Abraham, God promises, “I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse” (Gen. 12:3). The most shocking curses in the Bible appear not in the prayers of the psalmists but in the covenant curses of the law of Moses (note especially Deut. 28:15–68). God prophesies in Isaiah that on the day of judgment, Babylon’s “infants will be dashed in pieces / before their eyes” (Isa. 13:16); Jeremiah says that “Babylon must fall for the slain of Israel, / just as for Babylon have fallen the slain of all the earth” (Jer. 51:49). The prayer that horrifies us in Psalm 137:9 is directly in line with the judgment that God has already declared.

So when a psalmist prays for God to curse an enemy who has been cursing him, he is praying in line with the revealed covenant will of God. “Vengeance is mine, and recompense,” says the Lord (Deut. 32:35, quoted in Rom. 12:19). To pray for God to do what God has said he will do is very different from taking the law into our own hands and exacting revenge on our enemies.

These Prayers Are Against God’s Enemies and Assume That the Psalmist’s Enemies Are the Same as God’s Enemies

Third, these prayers are not about personal enemies but about those whose hostility is, first and foremost, against God and therefore against God’s King and God’s people. “Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?” (Ps. 139:21).

This raises another problem: How can I know that my enemies are necessarily enemies of God? People may dislike or harm me for all sorts of reasons, and some of their reasons may be at least partially justified by my own bad behavior. Some of my enemies may be God’s enemies, and some of God’s enemies may be my enemies. But plenty may not be, and it would be arrogant and unrealistic of me to suppose that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the two.¹⁶ The psalmists are not saying something like this to God: “O Lord, you know that your interests and mine partly coincide, so please come in and fight on my side even though you only partly agree with me.” No, the psalmist is claiming that he loves God so much that his enemies are precisely God’s enemies. If anyone opposes him, it is because he opposes God.

This cannot be true of any random believer; it can be true only of the covenant leader of the people of God in his official role as King or leader. It finds its fulfillment in the only man in history who has indeed loved God the Father so much that his enemies are precisely (with one-to-one correspondence) God the Father’s enemies. This is a hint—perhaps more than a hint—that the only one who can ultimately pray these prayers is Jesus Christ. He is the only one who can pray these prayers from a sinless heart, with no selfish motives of revenge, such as those that plague our hearts when we are maligned or wronged.

All the curses due to a sinner are borne by Jesus Christ if that sinner comes to repentance and faith.

And he is the one who will die the death of sinners to redeem from their sins all who will trust in him. The only man who can be entrusted with the dignity of executing the judgment of God on sinners (Acts 17:31) is the one who dies for sinners. The wrath that will finally be poured out against hardened impenitence is “the wrath of the Lamb” (Rev. 6:16).18 He is the one who becomes the curse of the law on behalf of all who will be his (Gal. 3:10–13).

Conversion Is a Possible Way These Prayers May Be Answered

Fourth, conversion is sometimes envisioned as an alternative way that an enemy of God can be changed. There is a sense in which conversion involves the destruction of an enemy of God, in that the enemy is reconciled with God and becomes God’s friend. We see a hint of this in Psalm 83:

Fill their faces with shame,
     that they may seek your name, O Lord.
Let them be put to shame and dismayed forever;
     let them perish in disgrace. (Ps. 83:16–17)

This passage is somewhat ambiguous. Perhaps they will “seek your name,” but if they don’t, then they must “perish in disgrace.”¹⁸

We are reminded of the old question “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my
friends?”¹⁹

There is a deep theological truth here. All the curses due to a sinner are borne by Jesus Christ if that sinner comes to repentance and faith. When the Psalms pray for God’s judgment to fall, those prayers are answered for the elect when the judgments fall on Christ.

These Prayers Are Against Hardened Sinners

This leads to our fifth observation, that those who fall under final judgment are those in whom there is hardened opposition and final impenitence. In Psalm 35 David says of his enemies,

They repay me evil for good;
     my soul is bereft.
But I, when they were sick—
     I wore sackcloth;
     I afflicted myself with fasting. (Ps. 35:12–13)

That is, David’s response to their suffering is to pray for them. Only when they persist in completely ungrounded opposition does David pray for God to act in judgment (Ps. 35:14–26).

There is such a thing as “blasphemy against the Spirit” (Matt. 12:31) or “sin that leads to death” (1 John 5:16), a hardening of the heart that will never be reversed, in which men or women turn so deeply against God that they will never turn in repentance to seek forgiveness. If they ever did repent and seek forgiveness, they would find it; their very seeking of forgiveness would prove that they had not committed this unpardonable sin.

This is helpful and humbling to us. It reminds us that we cannot know for sure whether someone will be finally impenitent. Had we watched Saul of Tarsus ravaging the church (Acts 8:3), we might have been confident that he was one of the enemies against whom we could pray for God’s judgment. Perhaps we would have felt the same had we listened to Simon Peter denying Jesus three times. In both cases we would have been wrong. Again, had we watched Judas Iscariot during the ministry of Jesus, we would have seen an insider, a disciple who looked and sounded like a genuine disciple (e.g., John 13:22). Soberingly, we would have been wrong. It is not for us to know for sure who will be saved in the end.

Can We Attach Names to These Prayers?

This raises the question whether we can, as it were, attach names to these prayers (“Lord, please punish X or Y”). How can we know if a particular persecutor, for example, is a hardened enemy (a Judas Iscariot) or a future trophy of grace (a Saul of Tarsus)? The answer is that we can’t know. But this may not be a barrier to praying for God’s restraining and just judgment on a particular persecutor. Perhaps the early church prayed for God to act in judgment on Saul of Tarsus. What if they did? A case can be made that when Saul was converted, their prayers were answered beyond their wildest dreams. They would come to know that the judgment of God had indeed been visited—but with the sins of Saul falling on Jesus Christ. The persecutor had been sternly rebuked and had genuinely repented. And the glory of God—the deepest burden of their praying—would be lifted high.Their response would be awe and wonder at the majestic wisdom of God in answering their prayers more deeply than they had asked.

Someone has pointed out that when Simon Peter was imprisoned (Acts 12:3–5), the church prayed for his release rather than for the conversion of everyone in the prison system. To call for God to answer in ways we can envision him acting does not prevent him answering yet more deeply and richly, with conversions rather than destruction.

Praying These Prayers in Christ

The most coherent and biblical way forward may be summarized in three stages as follows.²⁰

First, we hear these prayers as fulfilled in the prayers of Jesus Christ. Jesus alone can pray these prayers from a pure heart, entirely desirous for his Father’s honor, entirely devoid of any personal vindictiveness, speaking from a place of unsullied motive and perfect knowledge of the human heart and from a heart of infinite love.

It is true that Jesus prayed for those who crucified him, but he did so because “they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). There was something about them that did not necessarily indicate a finally hardened heart. And yet, even more deeply than this, surely he prayed for his Father’swill to be done on earth as it is done in heaven; this cannot happen while rebels patrol the earth.

Second, we take comfort that this judgment has fallen, for believers, on Jesus Christ.

Third, with great caution and humility, we need to learn to let Jesus lead us in these prayers, which are all expressions of the petition “Your kingdom come, / your will be done, / on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). We may pray them in our praying of the Psalms but only in Christ our covenant head. We do so with hesitation, deeply aware that they can be sullied by our mixed motives, and yet we do join with Christ in praying, “Your kingdom come,” in the words given us in the Psalms.

We need to understand that the judgment of God on the finally hardened and impenitent is a necessary and good part of the gospel. It is necessary because it is the essential precondition for the new heavens and new earth to be a pure and holy place. It is good because it will resound to the glory of God. When “Babylon”— a symbol for the whole anti-God system of the world—falls in Revelation 18–19, the people of God do not weep; they sing hallelujahs with great joy. It is this they have longed for, and they grasp that God is glorified in it.

This article is adapted from The Psalms: A Christ-Centered Commentary (Volume 1) by Christopher Ash.

Christopher Ash is writer in residence at Tyndale House in Cambridge. He previously served as a pastor and church planter and as the director of the Proclamation Trust Cornhill Training Course in London. He and his wife, Carolyn, are members of a church in Cambridge, and they have four children and numerous grandchildren.

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