Psalm 58: Vengeance

I’m not sure there is a more difficult Psalm to read or understand than Psalm 58. It is one of the imprecatory psalms, meaning those that plead for judgment, even invoke curses upon enemies. There are at least 21 of these psalms within the book, but I have the most difficult time with Psalm 58. I think it’s just the vivid language. David likens his enemies to snakes and asks God to “Break their teeth in their mouth.” He refers to them as young lions and asks God to “Break out the fangs”. He expects the wrath of God to take them away “with a whirlwind”. The language of the Psalm is vivid, I’ve only touched on a few of David’s descriptions, but for me, the most difficult, even troubling part of all is verse 10, where David says, “The righteous shall rejoice when he sees the vengeance; He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked”. How do we reconcile this with Ezekiel 18:23 and 33:11 when God Himself says, “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked”? Is Psalm 58 uninspired? Was David off? Or is there something more that we need to see, is there something deeper that we need to remember as we read things we don’t initially understand?

One of the questions I feel is important to ask is, what do we do when the Scriptures disturb us? I’m not talking about when we are convicted of sin or begin to recognize our own immaturity, but what do we do when the Scriptures are hard to read because they don’t seem to rightly represent what we thought we already knew? Psalm 58 appears violent, vengeful, even petty. At first read through it is hard to find anything that we might think is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting or training in righteousness, much less God-breathed, as II Timothy 3:16 promised all Scripture to be. It’s at these crossroads where we have to decide if we will move on, give up, make up our own interpretation or dig deeper, read more carefully and apply the character of God we’ve seen throughout the whole of Scripture to the piece of Scripture that we are currently troubled by.

The first thing we see about Psalm 58 is that David is being honest before God. David is sharing his heart; he’s prayerfully expressing his deepest emotions to His most loving and righteous advocate. If this Psalm teaches us nothing else, we learn that we can and should share the reality of our hearts with God. There is no need to carefully parse our words. Rather than working to say what we think is the right thing to God and then exploding with fear, anger, worry and venom when we are with people, we should express the truth of our hearts to God and carefully guard our tongues with each other. David wrote earlier in the Psalms that God desires truth in our inward parts, but James told us to be “slow to speak, quick to listen and slow to become angry”. I think we’ve once again gotten the equation backwards. We carefully parse our words with God and then blow off steam with each other. It should be the other way around because anything spoken to God will be heard and can be rebuked, corrected, comforted and redeemed, but the words that we speak to each other, those immediately go to the heart and rarely, if ever, can be washed from the mind. David’s intimacy with God, his nearness to Him and confidence in Him, didn’t just produce beautiful songs of love and joy, it also produced songs of lament, songs of disappointment, songs of anger and as in Psalm 58 songs of judgment because David’s nearness to God produced honesty, both in his words to God and God’s words to him.

The Psalm speaks in honesty but who does it speak of? The translation of verse 1 is a bit all over the place. The Hebrew word that is used to point to the subjects of David’s anger literally means “in silence”. The King James makes the subject of David’s anger the “congregation”, the NIV the “rulers”, the ESV and NASB use the word “gods” and the New King James simply refers to the object of David’s scorn as the “silent ones”. What we gather from all of this is that David is enraged at the rulers who are silent in justice and loud in their own selfish wickedness. This is a Psalm that speaks to God, with anger and outrage directed toward unjust, selfish and unrighteous leaders. David’s emotion is less personal in this Psalm than in others, he’s not filled with self-pity or despair, he’s not questioning or blaming God, He’s crying out to Him because while David’s anger may be running hot, He knows that God is not unmoved by injustice, He knows that God does not turn away from the cries of the downtrodden, He knows that God is the defender of the weak and the one who topples unrighteous kingdoms just as much as He builds up righteous ones.

If Psalm 58 teaches us to be honest before God, it must also teach us to be moved by the presence of injustice and to come to God, even join with God in the battle for justice. We are a culture that does everything publicly. Every thought is expressed on social media, every emotion is captured and shared via video. We lash out in outrage before we know full details and we express support without learning true character. Psalm 58 teaches us not to suppress our emotions but to bring them where they belong, where they can be resolved, where they can not just be validated by those who think the same way we do, but they can be searched, tested, corrected or established by the One who knows and is the truth that we have yet to hear, consider or understand.

Paul told us, “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” I believe we have a calling to outrage, a calling to anger, a calling to wrestle, but we must always be sure that the source of those things is applied rightly. Every injustice that comes against us and that we see come against others is a spiritual action, before it comes through people it comes to people. Our activism must first be expressed in intercession, if we are fighting against people without wrestling in the spirit we are as much a part of the problem as those we fight against. We go into the prayer closet and we express our heart to God, but we are not free to leave, we are not free to act, we are not free to express ourselves outside of that closet until we have heard the heart of God. He wills that none would perish, which means that Jesus died for and desires redemption for the oppressed and the oppressor, for the righteous and the wicked for the sinner and the sinned against. That can be a difficult pill to swallow, which is precisely why we must allow our anger to burn in God’s presence so that He can turn it from vengeance to righteousness, from destruction to redemption.

I’m sure I still don’t understand Psalm 58, but what I do understand is that there will be times in which my heart will burn, times in which it needs to burn, those times must drive me to God’s presence, not so that the burning will end or so that I will get what I believe is right in that moment, but so that in pouring out the truth of my heart God can fill me with the truth of His. David wanted destruction for the wicked, God desires salvation for all—there is a point where those two things meet, it’s called the cross. When we come to God with our anger, He reminds us of the cross and then we can join Him in the battle for redemption. He leads us to intercession not simply for the removal of wickedness but for the restoration of righteousness, not just for the unjust to be removed, but for “justice to roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”