David’s Imprecatory Outbursts….”Get ’em, God!”

Posted on by Pam Larson

 

Are these prayers/Psalms really examples for us to follow?  Or are they expressions of our sinful desires for vengeance?

C. S. Lewis struggled greatly with psalms like Psalm 35:  

“The hatred is there – festering, gloating, undisguised – and also we should be wicked if we in any way condoned or approved it, or (worse still) used it to justify similar passions in ourselves” (Reflections on the Psalms, 22). These prayers of the psalmists, said Lewis, “are indeed devilish” (25).

However, Dr. Sam Storms, of Enjoying God Ministries says,

I love the Psalms. No book in all of Scripture has ministered to me as powerfully as this collection of inspired prayers and praise. Any suggestion that they are less than the inspired Word of God is deeply troubling to me. So how are we to make sense of these imprecatory outbursts in which the psalmist pleads for God’s wrath and destruction of the wicked?

Let me make several suggestions that might help.