By avoiding the stories of God’s wrath, we develop an immature understanding of how we should feel about sin.
Read: Psalm 83
When I was in college, I had a roommate who enjoyed listening to angry rock music. After he had become a Christian, he sought out an alternative Christian version of the same genre. Believe it or not, there is such a thing. Imagine listening to the lyrics from “Amazing Grace” sung with aggressive guttural yelling. Something about the lyrics doesn’t match the tune.
My roommate would listen to this music whenever he was angry. It was an outlet for how he was feeling. Yet, it didn’t have much of a redeeming quality. Sure, he had a Christian alternative to the music he used to listen to, but his anger was still a problem.
What is your track record with anger? Do you feel like you manage it well? Sure, you might get angry from time to time, but does it hit the bullseye, or is there collateral damage? Do you end up feeling guilty after you’ve lost your temper?
Anger is a negative emotion. Therefore, it must be bad, right? But that’s not the true problem with anger. The problem is that we are disproportionately angry about things that shouldn’t bother us, while not angry enough about the things that bother God.
That brings up another point. Maybe we struggle with the passages of Scripture that talk about the wrath of God. God is an angry God. Jesus’ sacrificial death is proof of that. He bore the punishment for all of our sins. If we don’t understand God’s anger, we will never be able to make sense of how our own emotions go wrong and where we have minimized the anger of God towards sin.
Imprecatory Psalms
Psalm 83 is an imprecatory psalm. It is an angry prayer. To ‘implicate’ is to tattle on someone. I used to do this when I was a child and my older sisters would do something I didn’t like. To ‘imprecate’ is to take it a step further and petition for judgment. I did that too whenever I thought my mom’s justice wasn’t swift enough.
Imprecatory prayers make us feel uncomfortable. We don’t know what to do with them and as a result, we are tempted to just skip past them. Furthermore, we don’t know how to feel about anger in the Bible. Jesus got angry. Shouldn’t we strive to be like Him? Or is it impossible so there’s no point in even trying?
The Psalms have often been a comfort by providing words to express our emotions, but they are actually designed for something much more. The songs of the Bible are meant to instruct our emotions and bring them into alignment with the holy standards of God. There cannot be any better example of how this works than the imprecatory psalms. They’re not the psalms we turn to when we are angry. Instead, we read them in order to be instructed on how we ought to feel in light of the wickedness of our world.
“Do Not Keep Silence”
In the beginning of Psalm 83, the psalmist recognizes a threat to the people of God. The nations have surrounded them and are threatening to wipe them off the map. God, however, is acting uncharacteristically silent. The LORD had led the Hebrew people out of captivity in Egypt and into the land of Canaan. Whenever God was leading their armies, they won. He had provided them countless victories in the past. They had nothing to fear with God on their side. But as time went by, the people of God stopped looking to Him for leadership. Now that they were once again under the threat of attack, they were fearful of their enemies.
God is slow to anger and rich in mercy, but this doesn’t seem like an act of grace. The psalmist repeats this opening prayer with three similar expressions, “Do not remain silent…Do not hold your peace…or be still” (Psalm 83:1). All three demonstrate an attitude of indifference. The psalmist is struggling to understand the reason that God seems to be far away in their time of need.
“Your Enemies Make An Uproar”
The wicked people presented in this text are described as the enemies of God. That might just be a clever way of trying to convince God that He should take up their cause, but that would make for a strange prayer to include in the Bible. We aren’t encouraged to manipulate God’s emotions towards our favor. No, this psalm is acknowledging that these are first and foremost God’s enemies.
In fact, that is the primary problem. When Joshua entered the Land of Canaan, he was instructed to drive out all of the inhabitants. But the people grew weary of fighting and eventually attempted to cohabitate with the locals. This led to multiple wars, perversion of their faith, and generations growing up forgetting the faithfulness of God. This was the background to their current problem. God felt distant because the people had wandered far away from Him.
This psalm describes ten tribes of people rising up against Israel to wipe them off the map. Interestingly, seven of the ten tribes were descendants of four key biblical characters: Cain, Lot, Ishmael, and Esau. Each of them, at one point, were presented to God as possible candidates to fulfill the promise of a redeemer. Yet they were not chosen by God and their descendants eventually became God’s enemies. Two others, Tyre and Philistia, were associated with the sea people who came in the late Bronze Age and ravaged the lands. The Jews had a long history with these people which caused them to develop a real fear of the sea. The final tribe, Asshur, was a descendant of Shem and the grandson of Noah. He was the father of the Assyrians who would be a people used by God to bring judgment on Israel.
The point behind all of these stories is that the enemies of God had been around for a long time. The root of Israel’s problems went deep. Their refusal to do the work of purification which God had commanded had led them to this situation where they were now under threat.
“Do To Them As You Did To Midian”
The first eight verses of Psalm 83 are the implication. The psalmist was telling God what was happening. The second half starting in verse 9, is the imprecation, where the psalmist declares what God should do to His enemies.
The psalmist reminds God of the victories that He had led them through in the past. These victories described come from the Book of Judges. Just as a side note, these stories are actually fairly obscure to New Testament readers, but they're worth studying for a few reasons. Number one, we don’t know our Bibles, particularly the Old Testament, like we should. This is Scripture, and there are no obscure passages to God. Number two, we ought to be instructed by these stories how to understand God’s anger. We can’t just pick the stories we like about the Bible. By avoiding the stories of God’s wrath, we develop an immature understanding of how we should feel about sin.
It sounds like the psalmist is reminding God of how He had behaved in the past in the hope that God might act again in a similar manner, but it’s actually more like the psalmist is reminding himself of how God has been faithful. He’s preaching to himself, and anyone else who would listen, that they might remember the testimonies of God. Our Heavenly Father loves to hear of His achievements, not because He has a gigantic ego, but because it demonstrates that we have taken His Word and His work seriously as we learn to trust in Him.
“Make Them Like Whirling Dust”
The psalmist ramps up the imprecation in verse 13. This is the part that we struggle with the most. How can we ask God to judge His enemies so harshly? Mind you, this is actually one of the tamest imprecatory psalms. Psalm 58 talks about stillborn children (v. 8). This is a pain that the author, King David, would experience as he lost his own infant son born out of adultery with Bathsheba. These are things we would never wish on our worst enemies, but here we are invited to sing along with this prayer as we ask God to pour out His wrath. Perhaps we ought to ask ourselves: Are we too soft on evil? We cannot see God’s enemies as our enemies until we see sin as our problem as well.
The failure of the Jews to drive out the inhabitants of Canaan serves as one of the best metaphors for our own struggle with sin. We start off pretty strong, we see early victories, but eventually we grow weary in battle. We’ve cut the hedges down to the ground, out of sight, out of mind, but the roots still remain. Every once in a while the shoots sprout from the ground again.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches us how to read the imprecatory psalms, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespasses against us” (Matthew 6:12). He then offers some commentary on this particular inclusion in the Lord’s Prayer, “If you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14-15). Later He adds, “Judge not, that you be not judged,” and, “Take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye” (Matthew 7:1-5).
This instruction is crucial for understanding the imprecatory psalms. We need to first acknowledge that we were once the enemies of God. Our sin had separated us from God. We need to be forgiven, and one of the ways that happens is by demonstrating grace towards others. By loving our enemies, we are expressing Christ-like love, and therefore experiencing what Jesus did for us. Then, we need to carefully examine our own lives. We need to keep applying the gospel as a continual need for confession and forgiveness. Only then will we be able to pray the imprecatory prayers and see clearly that God’s wrath must be satisfied, His justice must be upheld, and His love is demonstrated through His mercy and grace.
“That They May Know That You Alone…Are the Most High”
Ultimately, the psalmist prays that the glory of God would be made known to all the nations, and that the shame of sin would cause people to seek the LORD. Perhaps this is why we have not been effective in our evangelism. Do we understand the offense that sin is toward God? Or are we only bothered by sin when it affects us personally?
Reading the imprecatory prayers can lead to a sense of self-righteousness if we are not careful. We can make all of these prayers about our own preferences without considering how sin, including our own, affects God. The truth is, we are more likely to be annoyed when another driver cuts us off while we are driving to Church than we are that those individuals are not joining us in worshiping God on His holy day. How can we expect others to take sin seriously when we have not made God alone the highest authority in our lives?
If our only understanding of the Bible is as a list of verses taken out of context and sewn into couch pillows, our understanding of God will not be adequate to face the challenges of life, the deep emotions of the soul, and the mission of our calling as Christ followers.
That is why we need the imprecatory psalms, not to give a voice to our anger, but to bring our emotions into subjection and conformity to the very image of Christ. We need to be reminded of the wrath of God and develop a mature understanding of the necessity for God’s righteous judgments. Then we need to be motivated by the holiness of God to proclaim His glory to those around us.
Adam Miller is the President and host of Songtime Radio and serves as the pastor of
South Chatham Community Church.
You can hear his teaching on our daily broadcast on the radio or online, watch his preaching live on Facebook, and read his articles on our website.
