I’M A RESPECTABLE senior citizen now, reasonably comfortable in my own skin. But I was a teenager once. And like many teenagers, I sometimes struggled to know where I belonged, trying on this or that behavior to see what might make me cooler in the eyes of others. At the time, I thought the liberal use of, well, “colorful language” was the key. When I wasn’t at home, I eagerly salted my speech with 4-letter word bombs that even then felt completely fake, like someone trying too hard to fit in — which, of course, I was.

We don’t often use the word “cursing,” but when we do, we often mean colorful or salty language, the kind your mother taught you not to use in polite company. Today, we might “curse” in the sense of dropping expletives when we’re frustrated or angry. Or such words may simply be a normal but relatively meaningless part of conversation, depending on our social context.

But cursing in Scripture is more serious than a breach of etiquette. When the psalmists curse, they are explicitly or implicitly invoking God, praying for God to swoop in and punish those who have wronged them.

Think of it this way. And forgive my language, but I hope you see the point: what does it mean to tell someone to “Go to hell” or to shout, “Damn you”? Is it a direct and conscious wish for the other person to burn in torment forever? Maybe. But usually not. And again, for some, it may be little more than the way people in their social group express strong but possibly momentary anger.

Not so for the psalmist. Many lament psalms already include a cry for justice: things aren’t as they should be and the psalmist is suffering for it. The prayer is for the righteous God to make things right. But the imprecatory psalms, the psalms of cursing, add an element of vengeance. The psalmists actually pray for their enemies to be severely punished, even to be obliterated.

Psalm 109 can be read as one or more people bringing false charges against the psalmist and telling whatever lies are needed to obtain a guilty verdict. The cursing begins simply enough in verse 6:

Appoint someone evil to oppose my enemy;
    let an accuser stand at his right hand.
When he is tried, let him be found guilty,
    and may his prayers condemn him. (Ps 109:6-7, NIV)

That’s not much more than straightforward eye-for-an-eye justice: Let it be done to him as he is trying to do to me. But the cursing doesn’t stop there. The psalmist prays that his enemy’s life would be cut short, leaving his wife a widow and his children begging in the street as penniless orphans:

May his days be few;
    may another take his place of leadership.
May his children be fatherless
    and his wife a widow.
May his children be wandering beggars;
    may they be driven from their ruined homes.
May a creditor seize all he has;
    may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.
May no one extend kindness to him
    or take pity on his fatherless children. (vss. 8-12)

And the psalmist still isn’t done. It isn’t enough for the man to die and for his family to suffer. The prayer is for his entire line to be wiped out:

May his descendants be cut off,
    their names blotted out from the next generation.
May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the LORD;
    may the sin of his mother never be blotted out.
May their sins always remain before the LORD,
    that he may blot out their name from the earth. (vss. 13-15)

The psalmist prays for God to do all of this and more in a way that would make it obvious that this was an act of divine judgment and vengeance:

Let them know that it is your hand,
    that you, LORD, have done it. (vs. 27)

Who today would dare to pray this way? And to me, Psalm 109 isn’t even the most severe of the imprecatory psalms. Psalm 137, for example, is a short, nine-verse poem written from exile and filled with hatred for Babylon and a clear lust for vengeance. Here’s how it ends, in verses 8 and 9:

Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
    happy is the one who repays you
    according to what you have done to us.
Happy is the one who seizes your infants
    and dashes them against the rocks.

Yes, that’s in your Bible.

I’m not holding my breath waiting for someone to turn it into a worship song.

Imprecatory psalms are only a small part of the Psalter, but they reveal something important about the way the psalmists think. As I’ve suggested throughout our study of the Psalms, the psalmists share a worldview framed by Psalm 1: there are two paths in life, the path of righteousness and the path of wickedness. The first is the path of blessing, the second is the path of destruction. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, the way a holy and righteous God intended.

With that in mind, try laying Psalms 109 and 37 (not 137, 37) alongside each other. Psalm 37, as we saw in earlier posts, is a wisdom psalm, not a cursing psalm. But it plays out the worldview of Psalm 1 in a way that parallels some of the prayers of Psalm 109. In both psalms, the wicked are those who persecute the poor and needy — exactly the opposite of the character of God! — and for this reason are doomed to destruction.

And Psalm 37 teaches that even if the wicked seem to have the upper hand now, God will eventually make things right. It is the righteous who will inherit the land and prosper through the generations. As for the wicked, says the psalmist, “Wrongdoers will be completely destroyed; the offspring of the wicked will perish” (Ps 37:28). The writer of Psalm 109, in other words, in praying for his enemy’s entire line to be wiped out, is asking for what Psalm 37 already promises.

Yes, there is vengeful anger in the Psalms, sometimes of an intensity that should rightly make us uncomfortable. Indeed, even before we get to the New Testament, there are things taught by the prophets of the Old Testament that one could use to correct even the vehemence against Babylon.

What we need to remember, however, is that the psalmists aren’t just randomly spitting venom and demanding that God satisfy their bloodlust. To some extent, they’re praying for justice in a way that befits the vision of all the psalms, even the ones that aren’t out for blood. The question, as we’ll see, is whether anything in their attitude would change if they were confronted with the person of Jesus.

But before we explore that question, I want to explore a related piece of Psalm 109 that otherwise might be easy to overlook.