The Psalms occupy a unique place in the canon of Scripture. Most of the writings that make up the Scriptures consist of God’s prophetic words to us, or narratives about God’s dealings with human beings in salvation history. The book of Psalms, on the other hand, is a collection of human prayers addressed to God. If we are to understand the Psalms as being, along with the rest of Scripture, the word of God, then we must understand the Psalms as God telling His people, “Here are some examples of things that you can say to me.” The Psalms are human prayers, but they are prayers that have been given the Divine seal of approval. In this sense they are, indirectly, the word of God.
In the Psalms, Christians can find many theological, spiritual, and aesthetic riches. Throughout Church history, Christians have used the Psalms as a beloved prayerbook and songbook, both for corporate worship and for personal devotions. In fact, some printed copies of the New Testament will include in addition the Psalms, privileging this one book above the rest of the Old Testament. If we want to know how to pray and to praise God rightly, it seems best to use the book of prayers which He Himself has given His people as our starting point.
Yet, the Psalms are not part of the New Testament. They are part of the Old Testament. If we understand that Scripture is not a flat text, but a story, then we must understand that not everything in the Old Testament is necessarily directly applicable to Christians today. We cannot just assume that all of God’s commands to His people in the Torah should be followed by Christians today. Nor can we just assume that all of the Psalms should be prayed by Christians today.
Theological difficulties arise when Christians come across psalms which include prayers for victory in battle and imprecatory prayers, which call on God to harm and destroy the psalmist’s enemies (e.g., Psalm 69, 109, 137, 139). It seems very difficult to reconcile such prayers with the ethics of the New Testament, which call us to love our enemies and to refuse to use violence. Should Christians pray these psalms today?
A Christological Reading?
One popular Christian approach for reading the Psalms that attempts to deal with such difficulties is to read them Christologically. According to this approach, Christians should understand the Psalms as the prayers of Christ, in which Christians are invited to participate. Thus, the times when the psalmist calls on God to give him victory in battle can be understood as referring to the victory over the powers of evil that Christ won in His death and resurrection, rather than through actual violence. The imprecatory psalms can be understood as calling for God’s wrath on the enemies of Christ, rather than our personal enemies, and we can pray them knowing that, in fact, Christ is the one who took God’s wrath upon Himself on the cross.
There is some biblical basis for this Christological reading of the Psalms. Jesus Himself claims that the suffering He will endure at the hands of the religious leaders is to “fulfill” the words of the psalm(s), “They hated me without reason” (Psalm 35:19 and/or 69:4). Jesus’s apostles cite other words from psalm 69 as being the words of Jesus as well (John 2:17, Rom 15:3). On the cross, Jesus quotes the first verse of Psalm 22, applying the words of the psalm to Himself (Matt 27:46). John cites another verse from the same psalm as being fulfilled during Jesus’s crucifixion (John 19:24), and the author Hebrews cites another verse from the same psalm as the words of Jesus (Heb 2:12). In Acts, Peter claims that Psalm 16, though written by David, is prophetically the words of Christ (Acts 2:22-32). And the words of Psalm 2, “He said to me, ‘You are my son; today I have become your father’” (v. 7) are applied to Jesus by both Paul (Acts 13: 32-33) and the author of Hebrews (Hebrews 5:5).
Yet, we cannot conclude based on these New Testament passages that all the Psalms should be read as the words of Christ. A number of New Testament passages interpret psalm 110 as a messianic psalm that is fulfilled in Jesus (Matt 22:41-46; Mark 12:35-37; Luke 20:40-44; Acts 2: 34-36; Heb 5:6, 7:1-28). Yet this psalm is clearly not the words of the Messiah, but someone else’s words about the Messiah. In fact, Jesus’s remarks about the words of this psalm rely on the assumption that the speaker is David and that David is speaking about the Messiah, who will be his Lord. Thus, even if many psalms should be understood Christologically, it cannot be the case that all the psalms should be read as the words of Christ.
One thing in particular that makes it very difficult to read all the psalms as the words of Christ are the many psalms in which the psalmist confesses His sin and asks God for forgiveness (e.g. 25, 32, 38, 40, 41, 51, 143). Since Christ is completely without sin (Heb 4:15), it makes no sense for Him to confess His sin. Some argue that, since Jesus took our sin upon Himself and “became sin for us” (2 Cor 5:21) on the cross, we can rightly apply these prayers of confession to Jesus, but this seems somewhat convoluted.
Things become even more convoluted when we try to put the words of the imprecatory Psalms into Jesus’s mouth. Jesus, as He unjustly suffered and died on the cross, prayed for His enemies, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). In order to pray these imprecatory passages as the words of Christ, we have to understand them as calling for God’s wrath on His enemies, but actually meaning the opposite of what He is saying because He secretly plans on taking that wrath upon Himself. This is convoluted indeed.
There are some messianic psalms (Psalm 2, 110) and some other passages in the Psalms which are fulfilled in the life and death of Jesus. Yet the New Testament never teaches that the entire psalter should be read Christologically. And the New Testament never teaches that Christians should pray all of the Psalms today.
Are Imprecatory Prayers Christian?
Some Christians would argue that it is appropriate for Christians to pray imprecatory prayers today. After all, God is just as wrathful in the New Testament as He is in the Old Testament. A number of times in Acts, God strikes evildoers with bodily ailment or death (Acts 5:1-11, 12:19-23, 13:4-12); in two of these cases, this act of God’s wrath is preceded by an apostle declaring what God was going to do. The apostle Paul writes, “If anyone does not love the Lord, let that person be accursed” (I Cor 16:22), and “If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse” (Gal 1:9). And in the book of Revelation, the souls of the martyrs cry out, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” (Rev 6:10).
Yes, God’s wrath does still sometimes fall on the wicked. But unless we are prophets or apostles speaking under the direct inspiration of the Spirit, we cannot declare when that is going to happen. Paul does declare that those who reject the true Gospel and do not love the Lord should be accursed. But this is the same Paul who commands Christians to “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse” (Rom 12:14). This is the same Paul who commands Christians to pray for all people, including people in the brutally oppressive Roman government, that all might be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth (I Tim 2:1-4). This is the same Paul who commands Christians to gently instruct the enemies of the Gospel, in the hope that they might repent and be saved (2 Tim 2:25-26). Paul does not pray that specific people be cursed; he prays that, if people do not repent and accept the Gospel (as he hopes they will) that such people will be justly cursed. As for the cry of the martyrs’ souls in the book of Revelation, this is an apocalyptic book filled with metaphorical imagery. We should probably understand this not as a literal prayer but as the martyrs’ souls figuratively “crying out” for justice as the blood of the unjustly slain Abel did (Gen 4:10).
The primary model Christians have for how to pray for their enemies is, of course, Jesus’s prayer from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Stephen, the first martyr, reinforces this model with his dying prayer, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60). This is the attitude towards praying for evildoers that the apostles taught to the early Church, as evidenced by St. Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to his martyrdom, telling Christians to “constantly pray for others; for there is still hope that they may repent so as to attain to God.”[1]Epistle to the Ephesians.
God does not change; He is still wrathful as well as loving in the New Testament. But the ethical demands God has for His people do change over time. In the Old Testament, God’s people sometimes acted as agents of His wrath. In their prayers, they saw injustice and cried out for God’s justice. In the New Testament, Christians, as members of the body of Christ, are never to act as agents of God’s wrath, but only as agents of His loving, reconciling work in Jesus. In our prayers, we should not pray for God’s just wrath against our enemies, but only for God’s mercy and grace to bring evildoers to repentance. As the church father Tertullian put it, “In days gone by, prayer used to call down plagues, scatter the army of foes, withhold the awesome influences of the showers. Now, however, the prayer of righteousness averts all God’s anger, provides shelter on behalf of personal enemies, makes supplication on behalf of persecutors. . . Christ has willed that it be operative for no evil: He has conferred on it all its virtue in the cause of good.”[2]Tertullian, On Prayer.
Yes, we must recognize that not all will repent, and that God’s wrath will justly come upon some. But we should not pray imprecatory prayers that this will happen. Nor can Christians, who are called to be people of peace and nonviolence, rightly pray that God’s people have “a sharp sword in their hands–to execute vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples” (Psalm 149: 6-7). Though the Psalms contain many valuable prayers that Christians can absolutely still pray today, there are parts of the Psalms that are not appropriate prayers for Christians to pray. We must assess each of the psalms on a case by case basis and assess to what extent it is or is not appropriate for Christians to pray these Old Testament era prayers.