The message today is on Psalm 35, one of the psalms of imprecation. These psalms have given many Christians many difficulties, and we don’t quite know what to do with them.
Let us grant at the outset that they can be abused by people who pretend to embrace them. We can want to “destroy the Amalekite” in the wrong way, and not know what spirit we are of. We can confuse God’s honor with our own. We can try to settle personal scores when God has told us to forgive. We can seek to “hew Agag to pieces before the Lord” and discover on the day of judgment that we only “hewed Agag to pieces.”
But as C.S. Lewis remarked somewhere, we love to prepare to resist temptations that we are most unlikely to encounter. Confronted with a flood, we break out the fire extinguishers. It is this way with us, and the psalms of imprecation.
We live in complacent times. We live in a time when the hearts of many believers have grown cold. We do not refrain from imprecatory prayers because, in our saintliness, we have risen above the fray, but rather because we are apathetic about spiritual things. It is not that imprecation might interfere with our burning love for the lost, but rather that imprecation might get us in trouble and lose us a few clients. We are afraid that imprecation might offend the great god Mammon.
So I want to give this exhortation before we consider the words of Psalm 35. Imprecation is another one of those inescapable issues. Either you will model your prayers after the prayers in the Bible, including this one, or you will come to the point where you are uttering imprecations against those who do You will speak this way—the question is whether you will speak this way against righteousness or against unrighteousness.
There are many “all you need is love” Christians, who refuse to have anything to do with these prayers against the unrighteous. At the end of the day, they carp against the righteous. So prepare your hearts to receive the word.