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).
Read More

Reading, hearing, and expositing Scripture is part and parcel of biblical religion, which is why our Islamic friends call us “the people of the book.” God did not say, through Moses, “See, O Israel,” or “View, O Israel;” he said, “Hear, O Israel.” Further, God expressly and comprehensively6 prohibited the religious use of images. Generations later, the apostle Paul also affirmed the importance of oral language for our faith, when he asked, rhetorically, “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Rom. 10:14).

Contemporary Judaism, like love, is a many-splendored thing. For our own convenience, we often refer to three types of Judaism: Reformed, Conservative, and Orthodox, but there are many variations even within these three. Nonetheless, practicing Jews of any brand have a common liturgical practice in both the morning and evening services, where they cite together (often in biblical Hebrew) the “Shema Israel,” from Deut. 6:4-5: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” It is a remarkably significant text that affirms monotheism in a polytheistic context, and that contains what Jesus regarded as the “great and first” commandment in the Hebrew Bible (Mat. 22:38). The affirmation of monotheism in the second millennium BC in a culture surrounded by polytheism, and the claim that the highest ethical pursuit was whole-personed love of the One true God were remarkable in their day (and in ours). It is entirely understandable, therefore, that a third reality—admittedly of lesser significance than the other two—is also contained in this significant text, and that its beginning is: “Hear, O Israel.” Indeed, our Jewish friends call it “The Shema,” calling attention to its opening demand that Israel hear and heed the call and command of the one true and living God.
One might be excused for dismissing this observation, and for suggesting that in the second millennium BC there was no other way than oral language to mediate religion. Such a dismissal should be dismissed. In fact, every other known religion in the second millennium BC had an alternative medium for conveying religion: graven/carved images, images that were not only forbidden in the decalogue recorded in the previous chapter of Deuteronomy, they were prohibited thrice in Deuteronomy 4, even before the decalogue was given (Deut. 4:16, 23, 25). Indeed, in the central one, in Deut. 4:23, the entirety of the covenant God was about to institute was at stake on this one point: “Take care, lest you forget the covenant of the LORD your God, which he made with you, and make a carved image…”
There was/is an important relationship between the prohibition of images and the command to “Hear, O Israel.” The one and only true and living God was, well, true and living. He was not the product of human imagination; he was the creator of the human, and of human imagination. This one-and-only God made the human to be his image; and prohibited the human from rejecting this great privilege/responsibility by assigning it to something the human had made. No material image/likeness could be made that would reflect anything genuinely true about a non-material Creator; and no lifeless image could possibly reflect the truth of a living God. To the contrary, an inanimate image would always be non-living, and therefore non-threatening, the very opposite of the actual reality that “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). Such a God could only be known via the medium of language; since, ontologically, he was entirely different from the so-called deities of the Ancient Near East, any medium that could convey those deities would not be able to convey the distinctiveness of the one, only, living and true God.
Read More
Related Posts:

In the same sense, why does a minority insist on allowing the false teaching of ordaining self-described homosexual men to be pastors and church officers in the PCA? Why don’t they simply seek ordination and service in a denomination that is already set up to welcome them?

In 1967 the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA), in an attempt to compromise with the culture, changed the wording of its Confession of Faith. A key statement from PCUSA’s Confession of 1967 is as follows:
“The Bible is to be interpreted in the light of its witness to God’s work of reconciliation in Christ. The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current. The church, therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding. As God has spoken his word in diverse cultural situations, the church is confident that he will continue to speak through the Scriptures in a changing world and in every form of human culture”  [Book of Confessions 9.29].
That statement directly contradicts Scripture.
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17, NIV).
“Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:20-21, NIV).
If Scripture is nothing more than “the words of men,” then Scripture can be twisted to fit any agenda. Matthew A. Johnson, Chairman of the Board of the Presbyterian Lay Committee stated:
“The Confession of 1967 was the first step of many in a departure from the historical standards of the Presbyterian Church (USA) as expressed in the Westminster Confession of Faith. It took the denomination from relying on Scripture as its source of authority to everyone doing what was right in his own eyes.”
And that is exactly what happened.
A pastor in the National Capital Presbytery, Mansfield Kaseman, was charged with apostasy because he denied Christ’s sinlessness, bodily resurrection, vicarious atonement, and deity. When the case was heard before the Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly Mr. Kaseman was acquitted. He was allowed to remain in good standing as a pastor in the PCUSA and allowed to continue teaching heresy. By acquitting Mr. Kaseman, the Judicial Commission itself became complicit in apostasy as well.
With the door open for pastors to teach as they pleased without regard to the Word of God many churches voted to withdraw the PCUSA. Many joined the newly formed (1973) Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), which affirmed that the Scriptures are the Word of God and affirmed the Westminster Confession of Faith as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Scriptures.
However, now almost fifty years after the formation of the PCA it finds itself tempted to compromise with false teachers. At the PCA’s 2021 General Assembly, one of the issues appeared to be a growing number of PCA church officers who self-identify as homosexual. These men claim to be committed to celibacy and refer to themselves as same-sex-attracted as their “sexual orientation.”
In July 2018, Memorial PCA in St. Louis, pastored by Greg Johnson, hosted the first Revoice Conference celebrating “Gay Culture.” Since that time Pastor Johnson has continued to participate yearly in Revoice conferences in order “to support and encourage gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other same-sex attracted Christians.” In his recently published book, “Still Time to Care: What We Can Learn from the Church’s Failed Attempt to Cure Homosexuality,” Pastor Johnson writes about “the relative fixity of sexual orientation” teaching, as his subtitle implies, that the Holy Spirit cannot change his “sexual orientation.”
Because of Greg Johnson’s association with the Revoice Conference, several presbyteries, sessions and individual PCA members requested Missouri Presbytery (MOP) to investigate his views. MOP claimed that there was not enough evidence to formally charge Dr. Johnson for his views and teachings.
I am reminded of the situation in Micah’s day when he asked: “What is the disobedience of Jacob? Isn’t it Samaria? (Micah 1:5).
In the same vein I ask: What is the disobedience of the PCA? Isn’t it Missouri Presbytery?
We must remember that the Scripture repeatedly refers to homosexuality as an abomination (Leviticus 18:22; Romans 1:27); that the Scriptures teach that pastors and other church officers are to be above reproach (Titus 1:7); and that Christians are a new creation in Christ, by the incomparable power of the Holy Spirit, and are no longer in union with their old sinful nature (2 Corinthians 5:17). And now the PCA General Assembly is currently considering two overtures to amend its Book of Church Order to clarify that those being considered for church office, who insist on self-identifying by their continued union with their old sinful nature, are not qualified to be ordained.
At this point the outcome of this debate is unclear. Despite overwhelming support for the proposed amendments at the General Assembly, it is clear that there is a small but determined group of pastors and elders working to defeat the proposed amendments. Some have even strongly suggested that if this minority prevails in preventing the amendments from being approved, there may be a fracturing in the PCA.
Referring to Micah again when he asked: If the people wanted to worship Baal why not simply go to the temple of Baal and worship him there? Why insist in bringing that abomination of false worship into the Lord’s Holy Temple?
In the same sense, why does a minority insist on allowing the false teaching of ordaining self-described homosexual men to be pastors and church officers in the PCA? Why don’t they simply seek ordination and service in a denomination that is already set up to welcome them?
Richard Loper is a member of Chapelgate Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Ellicott City, Md.