Written by Dr. Trevor Laurence |
Monday, April 18, 2022
The imprecatory psalms are the liturgical, prayerful means by which the sons of God protect the sanctuary and subdue the earth, enacting their appointed role as characters in the story of the Scriptures. Adam was exiled from Eden for failing to drive out the serpent, and a Psalter without imprecation would be a recapitulation of his original abdication.

Break the teeth in their mouths. Let them be put to shame. Cut off my enemies. Cast them out. What in the world are the psalmists praying?
The imprecatory psalms are, for many, among the most uncomfortable, perplexing, even morally reprehensible portions of the Bible. They are violent prayers for justice against violent injustice. Where lies destroy lives and the innocent are slaughtered, these angry psalms beg for God to interrupt the assaults of the wicked, to vindicate the suffering righteous, to enact just judgement according to his promises.
We have little trouble understanding how the experience of violence may prompt a human being to pray such angry psalms. Amid the scourge and scars of unjust attack, some of us have known firsthand the unspeakable pain the psalmists manage to speak. What many cannot come to grips with is how these understandable prayers can be good. But here they are in the songbook of the Scriptures, intentionally included in a liturgical collection that shaped the worship of Israel, canonically commended to the people of God as words from God to offer back to God—and without the slightest hint that within them there is anything ethically dubious at all. Neither the psalmists nor the writers of the New Testament seem to share our reservations.
Instead of asking what in the world the psalmists are praying, then, perhaps we might turn the question around and ask, In what world are the psalmists praying? Ethics emerges from narrative: our deliberations about what constitutes faithful action are always shaped by the narrative in which we believe we are characters.1 If the psalmists are as confident in their judgment prayers as we are incredulous, that may very well be because they perceive themselves as actors within a world governed by a different controlling story.
The psalmists assume, allude to, and act within a theologically charged story of the world, taking their cues from the authoritative, ethically determinative narrative of Israel’s Scriptures. The theological coherence and moral intelligibility of the imprecatory psalms is grounded in the story within which they prayerfully participate. Consequently, we who have difficulty imagining how the psalmists may pray as they do must first reconsider how the psalmists imagined the cosmos and their place within it.
The Story of Sacred Space
There are many legitimate ways to synthesize the story of the Scriptures, but one telling of the tale that is underutilized in contemporary biblical theological discussions and yet particularly illuminating for the imprecatory psalms foregrounds creation as the house of God’s holy presence.
On this account, the story of the Bible is, in the simplest terms, the story of sacred space.2 In the beginning, God creates the heavens and the earth as a cosmic temple in which he will dwell, and he plants a garden in Eden as his primal sanctuary—the first in-breaking of heavenly sacred space onto the soil of the earth.3 The Lord installs Adam in his sanctuary garden as a son of God who bears the image and likeness of his divine Father,4 and he commissions the man to serve as a royal priest.
As priests, human beings are to serve and guard God’s Edenic sacred space (Gen 2:15) like the Levites and priests would one day serve and guard his tabernacle (e.g., Num 3:7–8),5 and this includes the responsibility to expel any encroaching unholiness. As kings, image-bearers are to exercise royal dominion and to subdue the entire earth (Gen 1:28)—expanding the borders of God’s sanctuary, adorning the land with beauty and glory in wisdom, preparing creation as the holy house of a holy God.6 When the wicked, deceiving serpent encroaches into the garden, God’s royal priesthood is to exercise the prerogatives of their office by subduing the threat, exercising dominion, protecting the sanctuary, driving out the unholy intruder. In a tragic irony, they are subdued with a lie and are themselves driven from God’s sacred dwelling place, and the Lord stations an angelic guardian at the eastern gate to guard his sanctuary from them (Gen 3:24).
Yet, before the Lord casts out Adam and Eve from the place of his holy presence, he makes a promise: the offspring of the woman will be at enmity with the line of the serpent, and a seed will arise who crushes the serpent’s head (Gen 3:15). Where the first royal priesthood failed, the Lord announces that the line of the woman will embrace the calling of the son of God to oppose the serpent and his seed until a climactic seed-son appears as a faithful Adamic priest-king to subdue the serpent and to consummate creation as sacred space in fulfillment of humanity’s original commission. This protoevangelium—this first announcement of God’s good news—is not so much the introduction of something radically new as it is the promise that the task given to Adam will be completed by a son of Adam who answers his calling as a son of God.
It is no coincidence that Israel is called a son of God (Exod 4:22–23) and a royal priesthood (Exod 19:6). As the offspring of the woman through the line of Abraham, the covenant community is the corporate heir to the Adamic office. With the tabernacle of God’s presence pitched among them as a renewed Edenic sanctuary, Israel is to guard sacred space by guarding the covenant in obedience (Exod 19:5)7 and by purging evil from her midst in accordance with the covenant (e.g., Deut 13:5), and the son of God enters the New Eden of Canaan from the east to drive out the unholy nations and subdue the land as the dwelling place of the Lord.8 Both Israel’s pursuit of holiness and her conquest of Canaan are royal-priestly exercises ordered toward the creation and cultivation of sacred space, and God vows further still that “all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord” (Num 14:21).
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According to Hebrews, it is by faith that we understand. And of course, if Christianity is actually true, that understanding requires knowledge of the invisible. By faith we know who God is, the truth that He created all things in the beginning and will judge all things in the future, and even present unseen realities like our union with Christ, our nature as Image of God, and the moral order. These invisible realities and their interconnections are at the heart of Christianity. Faith, therefore, is necessary for grasping the Christian vision of the world: it is by faith that we understand reality as it really is.

The things I love deeply are also the things that irk me most easily. And most profoundly. This makes sense: when we love, we care. (Likewise, indifference breeds apathy.) For nerds like me, this applies especially to books.
Let me first say that I love Luc Ferry’s little gem A Brief History of Thought. It’s a gem because it succinctly if simplistically traces through the whole history of the Western intellectual tradition by articulating four major epochs; and it does this by charting the ligaments between metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. So, so helpful.
But as this is the internet, we must race past vague, general praise toward concrete, specific, detailed, brash criticism.
Allow me, dear reader, to explain what irks me about Ferry’s book. Ferry thinks of philosophy as an attempt to construct a theory of salvation without recourse to divine revelation. In religious traditions, the divine brings salvation to humanity. In philosophical traditions, humanity seeks salvation on its own. In the introduction, Ferry puts it this way: “Unable to bring himself to believe in a God who offers salvation, the philosopher is above all one who believes that by understanding the world, by understanding ourselves and others as far as our intelligence permits, we shall succeed in overcoming fear, through clear-sightedness rather than blind faith.” (p. 6) I happen to think this is an unhelpful way to differentiate religion and philosophy, but what really irks me is that word ‘blind’…
Ferry is, of course, not alone in insinuating that religious faith is an agent of blindness, that to have faith is to shut oneself off from some aspect of reality, that faith requires persistent belief without evidence or even in the fact of evidence to the contrary. Both outside the church and, more troublingly, inside, Christians are often told that the claims they are meant to hold most dear, the claims they ought to order their lives around, are either irrational or, at best, a-rational. Anyway, the central, credal claims of Christians throughout history aren’t subject to the sort of careful, reasoned investigation that, in the physical universe known to humanity, only humans can undertake. We must simply believe.
1. Seeing the Invisible
The Scriptures paint a different picture of faith’s relationship to sight.
In the letter we know as 2 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul connects faith in God to Christians’ ability to suffer well. He writes:
For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. … Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, ‘I believe, and so I spoke,’ we also believe, and so we also speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. … So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. … So we are always of good courage. … [F]or we walk by faith, not by sight. (2 Cor. 4:6-10, 13-14, 16-18; 5:6a, 7)
Notice that Paul runs headlong into a connection between faith and knowledge: we believe by faith, and so speak, because we know we will be raised. This connection between faith and knowing, which is not unique to Paul, eliminates the idea that faith is opposed to knowing, and therefore to reasonable belief. Notice that Paul includes the faith-sight contrast in this very context. In whatever sense faith is opposed to sight, faith simply is not opposed to knowledge.
We can go further.
The author of Hebrews toys with the idea of knowing by faith through seeing the unseen as well. Moses is said to have endured the wrath of Pharaoh “as seeing him [that is, God] who is invisible”. (11:23) Moses looked to his unseen future reward. (11:22)
Hebrews goes beyond Paul: “By faith we understand”, it says. (11:3) The things understood are themselves invisible: the creation of the world by the Word, the promises of God fulfilled, Jesus seated at the right hand of God. This goes further than mere knowledge because understanding requires knowledge but is more than knowledge. Understanding is knowledge organized and applied. To understand is to systematize what you know and be able to utilize that knowledge in the right circumstances.
2. Understanding by Faith
In the context of religion—or, more broadly, any perspective on the whole of reality—understanding involves not just knowledge of certain religious facts, but the systematization of those facts.
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We should expect opposition to the gospel. If the same gospel preached by Jesus, the Apostles and the Early Church faced opposition, why would we assume things will be any different for us? If those who will be won are drawn by God’s Spirit, it is hardly that surprising that those who will not be won will be repelled by that same Spirit. Opposition to God is inherent in all of us. We are all by nature hostile to him. It only makes sense, then, if we were not drawn by him to Christ we will necessarily be repelled by that same good news that are words of death to us. Which means opposition is inevitable. 

One of the things that we consistently believe is that if we just got our arguments right, if we were just more convincing, more people would believe the gospel. Quite why we believe this, I’m not sure because the Bible is clear that it often just isn’t the case. The issue is rarely that our arguments were not as good as they might have been (even if they weren’t as good as they might have been).
One thing we see consistently in scripture – throughout the gospels, Acts and the letters – is that sometimes the same preaching that persuades in one instance leads to dissent and aggression in another (cf. Peter in Acts 2 and Stephen in Acts 7). Sometimes the same miracles that cause people to believe lead others to hate and oppose (cf. John 7:31, 12:37). Consistently, those who oppose the message begin with apparently legitimate questions of interpretation, but are really just as a means of trying to trap someone (cf. Matthew 22:15-40, Acts 6:9-10). If this fails to work, it moves on to outright lies (cf. Mark 14:56-58, 15:11, Acts 6:10-14). Soon enough, these things descend into plotting to do harm in a bid to stop this person saying the things they are saying (John 11:53, Acts 7:54-60).
We are clearly mistaken if we think the preaching of Jesus, Peter or Stephen needed to be a bit more persuasive. If we think the Lord Jesus just needed to nail his arguments better, more people would have believed, we must surely wonder how any of us could possibly say anything of any value ever! The issue in all these cases was not unpersuasive preaching or lack of familiarity with the requisite scriptures. It wasn’t even failing to understand the hearts of the people because, certainly in Jesus’ case, he knew exactly what was in their hearts. Yet, they were not won to Christ, but set against him. The sound of the same gospel that was life to some was the aroma of death to others.
Why is this the case? The bible tells us, in Jesus’ own words, ‘No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him’ (John 6:44). Unless God is at work, no one will believe. Unless the Spirit has imparted new life, no amount of convincing arguments and gospel clarity from us will do anything about it. It is not the soundness of our arguments that draws people to Christ, but the Father at work by his Spirit. The same gospel offered with the same arguments may draw one and repel another. The drawing is not down to the arguments, but the Spirit who blows where he wills.
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