The Pillars of Imprecation
How to Pray for Your Enemies by Praying Against Them
by John N. Day
In recent years, Western Christians have been awakened to the unrelenting suffering of our brothers and sisters around the world. Many suffer economic and social discrimination, imprisonment, and beatings, the destruction of their homes and churches, and others are sold into slavery, raped, forced into marriage, or murdered, all for the sole reason that they bear the name of Christ.
With this increased exposure to the appalling and systematic persecution of Christians abroad, and with our recognition of the mounting overt hostility to Christian influence in the cultures and policies of Western nations, Western Christians are increasingly aware that many in the world intensely hate them and intend to harm them. And to harm them simply because they are Christians.
For many of us, this raises with a new intensity the question: How are we, as Christians, to respond to such hatred and violence? It is not the easy question it once was. The characteristic Christian response is always to be one of love and kindness, but we are also faced with (what seems to us in the protected West) uncharacteristic antipathy and brutality. In such situations, what is the Christian response to be? What should we pray for?
Love & Justice
Here I speak of the Christian response to acts of persecution, rather than the response of any sovereign nation. For as the Scriptures declare, there is a difference between personal ethics and state ethics.
In Romans 12, Christians are forbidden to take revenge, but are instructed to surrender the demands of justice to God and continue to do good, knowing that God will take vengeance on the day of wrath on all who remain unrepentant of their evil (Rom. 12:19–20). This is to be our personal ethic, and it is in concord with the second greatest commandment (Lev. 19:18).
But Romans 13:4 describes government as “God’s servant, an avenger for wrath.” Governmental ethics is the ethics of justice. The state is entrusted with taking revenge, and we are to surrender the demands of justice to the state and continue to do good. Thus, whereas the Christian is to be fundamentally governed by the principle of love, the state is to be fundamentally governed by the principle of recompense: that is, punishing evil and promoting good.
What, then, is the Christian response? Let us make the question concrete: Jesus instructs us to pray for those who persecute us, but is it ever appropriate to pray against our enemies? In seeking to answer this question, I would like to draw your attention to the psalms, and to one in particular.
Psalm 83 is a key representative of the imprecatory psalms: those psalms that call down God’s “curse.” These curses are not a venting of anger or an expression of the spirit of revenge, they are cries to the God of justice to execute his justice in the here and now on behalf of his severely oppressed or defeated people. A curse is a call for harm to befall another, but in the Psalms (as in the rest of Scripture) it is a call for harm to befall the horrible enemies of God’s people. It is a plea for divine vengeance.
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