The Imprecatory Psalms - the ones that pray down curses on enemies, are sometimes embarrassing to the church today. Our Lord told us to love our enemies, so how can some of the Bible's own model prayers and songs model for us what appears to be the very opposite of loving our enemies? One of the most notorious is Psalm 137, which is a Psalm written by the exiles in Babylon, where they long for Zion and their lost home. The Psalm closes with a curse pronounced on their Babylonian captors:
"O daughter Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall be he who repays you with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall be he who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!"
- Psalm 137:8-9
It sounds like the Psalmist is giddy at the thought of a particularly morbid vengeance. I'm not going to write a whole treatise on what we're supposed to do with these Psalms, but I thought of this one in particular because in studying Isaiah 13, which is an oracle against Babylon, I noticed this:
"Their infants will be dashed in pieces before their eyes" (Isaiah 13:16).
It might soften the impression Psalm 137 creates to realize that Isaiah had made this pronouncement before the exile, and so the exiles in Babylon, perhaps recalling Isaiah's words (notice v.8 of the Psalm), were not so much expressing a personal and petty desire for payback so much as recalling and affirming the Lord's promise.
The other reason this was on my mind, though, is because I just read the chapters in The Brothers Karamazov where the brother Ivan makes his case against God. Basically, his case is a blunt and devastating statement of the problem of evil, and he makes the point especially by pointing to the suffering of innocent children. What Ivan comes down to is that even granting that there is a God, and granting even further that all wrongs will be righted in the end, it isn't worth it. It's true that atheism has its own problem of evil, but Ivan's case is made basically on Christian premises, which makes it that much harder to answer.
Helpful answers can be given, even if they aren't final and won't satisfy everyone. But it's a problem that goes beyond Imprecatory Psalms, and definitely beyond what I want to try and deal with on a blog. That would be silly.
I never found Ivan's polemic persuasive, but perhaps that's because his vision of God is so small. To the extent a child's worth is greater than God, it is persuasive. But the vision of God in Scripture, especially at the Cross, is so infinitely grand.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's all the persuasion I need.