Dear God, Please Kill Babies. Amen.: Application & Conclusion
This series so far:
- Dear God, Please Kill Babies. Amen. (or, my thoughts on the Imprecatory Psalms)
- Dear God, Please Kill Babies. Amen.: Justice Is At The Core
- Dear God, Please Kill Babies. Amen.:Imagine A Cross-less World
- Dear God, Please Kill Babies. Amen.: Hyperbolic Art
- Dear God, Please Kill Babies. Amen.: Godward Anger & Context
Over the past week and a half, I have been chronicling my thoughts on the imprecatory psalms, those psalms which are filled with anger, vengeance, violence, and cursing. As I admitted in the very first post, I don’t think I have answered every possible question related to these psalms. I don’t think I have all of those answers. These psalms still disturb me greatly. However, the things that I have mentioned in this series are the considerations which have helped me to come to peace with them.
The only thing left to discuss is in the realm of application. If the considerations that I have mentioned put our minds at ease about the potential ethical conflict with the teachings of Jesus, that is all well and good. But how does it impact my life today?
Consider these words by Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner:
We conclude, then, that it is not open to us to renounce or ignore the psalmists … But equally it is not open to us simply to occupy the ground on which they stood. Between our day and theirs, our calling and theirs, stands the cross. We are ministers of reconciliation, and this is a day of good tidings.
To the question, Can a Christian use these cries for vengeance as his own? the short answer must surely be No; no more than he should echo the curses of Jeremiah or the protests of Job. He may of course translate them into affirmations of God’s judgment, and tinto denunciations of “the spiritual hosts of wickedness” which are the real enemy. As for the men of flesh and blood who “live as enemies of the cross of Christ” or who make themselves our enemies, our instructions are to pray not against them but for them; to turn them from the power of Satan to God; to repay their evil with good; and to choose none of their ways. (from Psalms 1-72, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries, 1973, pp. 31-32)
Perhaps the greatest lesson that I have learned from these psalms is this: When we pray, we are to pray with our WHOLE hearts. Not just the pleasant parts of our hearts, the parts that we show to everyone else. No, we especially need to give to God the dark parts of our hearts that we try to hide from everyone else. Certainly, God already knows what’s there (Luke 16:15). But when we fail to give this ugliness to him in all of its hideousness, in a raw and unfiltered way that God may then take it off of our shoulders and bear it on his own, which are, after all, infinitely more capable of bearing them.
