Can Christians Pray the Imprecatory Psalms? with Trevor Laurence

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Trevor Laurence

   If those prayers are good enough for heavenly worship, they're good enough for earthly worship as well. So that means that the disconnect that we intuitively find isn't detected in the New Testament Scriptures, either in heaven's liturgy or in Jesus' encouragement and exhortations about prayer to his church. Now, why is that? I think it's because we work with the wrong definition of love. Modern people, we think that love is constant affirmation. It's warm sentimentality. It's niceness. It's affirming everything about someone and wanting them to actualize their internal desires. Biblical love seeks the good of the beloved. And if we recognize that doing violence without interruption is actually to the detriment of the violent themselves, not merely to their victims, then love is going to say, "God, do something about it."

2. 00:58

   Adriel Sanchez

   Pastor Adriel here with Sola Media, and I'm excited about a conversation that I get to have right now with Dr. Trevor Laurence. Dr. Trevor Laurence is the author of this book, Cursing with God, about the imprecatory Psalms. He's also the director of the Cateclesia Institute. What exactly is that? Cateclesia Institute.

3. 01:17

   Trevor Laurence

   The Cateclesia Institute is a nonprofit that's all about cultivating biblical imagination.

4. 01:23

   Adriel Sanchez

   Oh, wow.

5. 01:23

   Trevor Laurence

   So, what we want to do is recognize that we live too often in a thoroughly modern world, and we imagine the world in those terms. What we want to do is start getting into the biblical world, understanding how it communicates and unfolds its story, and then internalize it to the point that we start naturally living within that story every day of our lives.

6. 01:44

   Adriel Sanchez

   Wow. Well, check out the Cateclesia Institute and also check out the work that he's done on the imprecatory Psalms. And maybe just to dive in, I think that that's a word that probably not a lot of people know or are familiar with. And so, what are imprecations? And what specifically are the imprecatory Psalms?

7. 02:04

   Trevor Laurence

   Yeah, the imprecatory Psalms are any of the Psalms in the Bible—and there are a lot of them—that contain a request, a petition, a prayer for God's judgment to break in upon the wicked. They're the prayers that cry out for justice, the justice that God's promised in his covenant word to his people, and they ask that it would become a reality in their experience. So, any of those Psalms where you see that sort of uncomfortable request that sort of makes your skin tingle a little bit and you want to quickly move on to the next psalm—those justice petitions are what characterize imprecatory Psalms.

8. 02:38

   Adriel Sanchez

   One of the things I appreciated, just at the beginning of your book, you talk about how sort of you were confronted with the imprecatory Psalms as you were praying through them with your wife—through the Psalms with your wife—and then you came across one of them. Can you talk about that just for a second?

9. 02:53

   Trevor Laurence

   Yeah, we decided, like really pious newlyweds, that we were going to pray through a psalm every evening before [inaudible]. And we got to Psalm 7, when the psalmist cries, "Arise, O Lord, you have appointed a judgment." And my wife, she just turns and looks at me and she's like, "What do we do with that?"

10. 03:12

    Adriel Sanchez

    Yeah.

11. 03:12

    Trevor Laurence

    And I'm like, all right, you've been—

12. 03:14

    Adriel Sanchez

    I'm gonna write a dissertation on that.

13. 03:15

    Trevor Laurence

    You've been training your whole life for this. You went to seminary, you've planted a church, you're a pastor—you better give a good answer. And I stumbled over my words long enough until we both just shrugged and we're like, "We got nothing."

14. 03:26

    Adriel Sanchez

    Yeah.

15. 03:26

    Trevor Laurence

    And what that means is that this academic work really came out of an existential and spiritual crisis in my own life. I want to honor Scripture as the Word of God for the people of God. But I don't know where to even begin with these cries for justice that are all throughout the Bible's hymnbook.

16. 03:46

    Adriel Sanchez

    Yeah. I'm struck by the fact that just like you, I think many people read through the Psalter and they come across these particular prayers, and they have no idea what to do with them. And there's also the question of, well, can I, as a believer under the New Covenant—I'm called to love my enemies. So how is it that I can pray for God's justice, his judgment, his curse on them in one sense, while still loving them? And I wonder if you can speak to that.

17. 04:19

    Trevor Laurence

    Yeah. The question, as I've thought about it, is how do I pray these Psalms against enemies while following wholeheartedly after the Christ who was crucified for his? How do I pray God's prayers while loving enemies according to the commands of God's own Son? That is, I think, the rub for Bible-believing Christians. That was the rub for me. I think one place to begin is simply to recognize that the New Testament that commands enemy love also commends justice prayers. In Luke 6, Jesus says, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." And then in Luke 18, the very same Jesus in the very same Gospel, just a few pages later, tells a parable so that his disciples will always pray and not lose heart, about a persistent widow who cries out, "Give me justice against my adversary."

18. Trevor Laurence

    And he says, if this wicked judge is going to give justice at the cry of the widow, how much more is your Father who loves you going to swiftly do justice for his children? And will the Son of Man find faith when he returns? So, Jesus connects justice prayer in his parable of the persistent widow to the faith that he longs to see and find when he returns to the world for his people. We could also look at Revelation 6. There we've got a vision of the souls of the martyrs who have held fast to their testimony and to the blood of the Lamb all the way to death. And they're under the altar crying out to God. And what are they singing?

19. 06:00

    Adriel Sanchez

    "How long?"

20. 06:00

    Trevor Laurence

    "How long, O Lord?"—an imprecatory psalm. The words are pulled from Psalm 79: "until you avenge the blood of your people upon those who dwell upon the earth." They want to know, when is justice coming? Now, just for me, if those prayers are good enough for heavenly worship, they're good enough for earthly worship as well. So, that means that the disconnect that we intuitively find isn't detected in the New Testament Scriptures, either in heaven's liturgy or in Jesus' encouragement and exhortations about prayer to his church. Now, why is that? I think it's because we work with the wrong definition of love. Modern people, we think that love is constant affirmation. It's warm sentimentality. It's niceness. It's affirming everything about someone and wanting them to actualize their internal desires.

21. Trevor Laurence

    Biblical love seeks the good of the beloved. And if we recognize that doing violence without interruption is actually to the detriment of the violent themselves, not merely to their victims, then love is going to say, "God, do something about it. Step in, intervene, interrupt their downward spiral into inhumanity and bloodlust, and stop them from becoming the people they want to become." In that sense, though it's a difficult prayer, I think the biblical definition of love as seeking the good of the beloved is willing to say, when that person wants their own destruction, "God, I want you to stop them."

22. 07:37

    Adriel Sanchez

    To intervene.

23. 07:38

    Trevor Laurence

    To keep them from descending even further into the madness.

24. 07:42

    Adriel Sanchez

    There's so much there to unpack. I was also wondering, would you see the prayer of Maranatha—"Come, Lord Jesus"—as in one sense also having this element of imprecation? Because you think of all those times, like in 2 Thessalonians, where Paul is talking about the final judgment and God coming to bring relief to those who suffer, to his children who suffer. When we say, "Your kingdom come," as Jesus taught us to pray in the Lord's Prayer, in one sense, there's an element of imprecation there too, wanting justice.

25. 08:14

    Trevor Laurence

    I don't think it's just in a sense. I think it is a transparently imprecatory prayer. It's just in the grammar of the New Testament. "Thy kingdom come" is a prayer that asks for the kingdom to expand and for the kingdom of the devil to fall. It's a prayer for the consummation of God's temple kingdom on earth to be made a reality, and even for us to become more like the citizens of the kingdom that we ought to be: "Drive out what is unholy within me." The prayer "Come quickly, Lord, Maranatha"—we often have no problem with that, even though we want to keep the imprecatory Psalms at arm's length.

26. Trevor Laurence

    But let's just think for a moment about what we're asking God to do when we ask for the return of Christ. We're asking for him to make good on his promises, to exercise perfect, wise, righteous justice, to right every wrong and to expel all corruption and wickedness from the world that he's one day going to fill up with his comprehensive glory. That's the vision of the imprecatory Psalms. We could say "Come quickly, Lord Jesus" is an imprecatory cry in New Testament grammar. "How long, O Lord?" is "Come quickly, Lord Jesus" in the grammar of the Old Testament. We start making that connection, I think some of that defensiveness that we instinctively feel can begin to fall away.

27. 09:44

    Adriel Sanchez

    One of the things that we've tried to incorporate more and more in our own liturgy at the church that I pastor is the laments. Because in many churches, you get a lot of the happy songs, the hymns of praise, a lot of modern contemporary worship—not so much lament, not so much "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And the majority of the Psalter has these Psalms of lament. But we could even go a step further and think about also these Psalms of imprecation. And so, typically, I've tried to make the case, well, when we don't have lament within our worship, we're cutting out a great part of the Christian life.

28. 10:19

    Trevor Laurence

    Right.

29. 10:21

    Adriel Sanchez

    What do we miss when we're not incorporating this idea of imprecation? When we cut that out as well, what do you think the voice of God's people loses?

30. 10:31

    Trevor Laurence

    Oh, man. Well, not only do we lose in the moment the opportunity to express the sadness, the anger, the disappointment, and the longing for renewal that the imprecatory Psalms offer—we lose what we can call the pedagogical or the formational power of lament. When we step into corporate worship together, when we enter into the liturgy, what are we doing? We're entering into a new world according to the Word of God. And that trains us for how to conceive and move through our reality. Now, if the only thing that we are getting in corporate worship in the world of the liturgy is happy Pollyanna piety, then when devastation inevitably comes—when we experience injustice, when we see it on the news, when it touches our own lives—we're going to be utterly unprepared to respond because we've not gone through the training regimen in the school of worship with the church. We're going to have this profound disconnect because, well, in church, I learned that the Christian life was all about these positive emotions. And now that's not happening for me.

31. Trevor Laurence

    What is the question somebody inevitably asks? "What's wrong with me? Has God turned his back on me?" Because I've never been shaped, I've never been prepared to keep on praying and trusting the Lord when my world is shattered. And all I can do is cry out to him. I think we prepare people to actually open their eyes to the violence of the world and the reality of reality around them. One of the things I often say is that the imprecatory Psalms are far more realistic about the state of the world than modern liturgies. And in that sense, when we are confronted with the imprecatory Psalms, not only can they prove a comfort to the uncomfortable, but they can destabilize those whose visions of the world is too stable and too comfortable, can open their eyes to the ridiculous wildness of injustice that has been a part of a fallen world from the moment of the fall, and prepare them to respond to it in faith and hope and even love.

32. 12:58

    Adriel Sanchez

    Yeah. Amazing how these Psalms in particular can help us see the world more clearly and give us words for when we experience those injustices or when we see those injustices. I wonder if you could help me think through, I guess, one concern that I've heard—and it's a concern even that I've had—is in our polarized society, and just naturally as sinners, I think that we want to stick it to our enemies. And we want to see them suffer, those who have caused suffering around us. Is there a way in which, I think, people can take these Psalms of imprecation, and maybe not seeing it through the lens of this is a way of truly loving my enemies in one sense, longing for God to intervene so that they don't continue to destroy themselves—but is there a way in which, I guess, we can misuse the Psalms of imprecation? And what does that look like? Maybe what does it look like to use them correctly? And then what would it look like to use them in a way that would actually be dishonoring to the Lord or contrary to what Christ has called us to?

33. 14:05

    Trevor Laurence

    Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Sinners have this profound capacity to abuse any and every good gift from God. Even the prayer "I thank you, Lord, that I'm not like that man"—that's a prayer of thanksgiving, but it's utterly wicked. It's turned upside down from what a prayer of thanksgiving ought to truly be. I think when we go into the Scriptures and cherry-pick certain especially graphic petitions, and we aim them for our own purposes without concerning ourselves with the overarching story of God and the story that is in the Psalms, and the way that the psalmists are deploying this language, then we can direct them in all sorts of tragic, misguided, and potentially vice-inducing ways.

34. Trevor Laurence

    If we do that with self-assuredness, seeking our own agendas, merely wanting to see our enemies squirm in the kind of pain that we've experienced ourselves, then we are embodying and deploying Scripture to legitimate and express all of the dark parts of our hearts. I think we need to first attend to what the imprecatory Psalms are doing. The Psalms, if we look at them as a whole, are not merely expressing the creative vindictiveness of hurting people. They are actually very carefully praying God's promises back to him over and over, saying that this is for the glory of your name. This is for the good of your kingdom. They're asking for God to bring an end to the violence that's tearing apart the world. They want the righteous vindicated, so that the truth is exposed for all to see, and those who are innocent but shamed will not be shamed forever.

35. Trevor Laurence

    And they want God to make good on his promises for covenant justice so that ultimately his overarching promise—as Psalm 72 says, that your glory would fill up the earth—fill up the earth with glory like the tabernacle was filled with glory, like Solomon's temple was filled with glory. The psalmists are reaching for the day when God's glory cleanses, renews, and fills up the entire cosmos, so that Eden's initial vision becomes our eternal reality. When we start letting the trajectory and the direction of those kinds of Psalms set the trajectory for our own prayers, what happens is our abuses of the Psalms get interrupted. If we actually pray through the Psalter, we say, "Oh, this psalm actually isn't letting me direct it in the way that I want." Because if I say, "Lord, for your name's sake, do justice," and I'm actually doing it for my name's sake or for the sake of my political agenda, then I've got an internal contradiction at the very heart of my own prayer. And if we approach the text—if we approach communion with God—with the kind of humility and circumspection that allows his word to first interrogate us, before we begin interrogating the world, it's going to unwind some of those proclivities and, I think, direct us in a more fruitful way.

36. 18:23

    Adriel Sanchez

    One of the things you talk about in your book is this sort of Christological tie to the Psalms of imprecation. I wonder how that also ought to inform the way we think about these things.

37. 18:34

    Trevor Laurence

    Yeah, I think when we understand the way the New Testament actually uses the imprecatory Psalms to tell the story of Jesus, we can begin to discover that praying the imprecatory Psalms can be a profound confrontation with the entire swath of the gospel. Now, what do I mean by that? In the Psalms, you've got an innocent Davidic king who suffers, but hopes for vindication on the other side of shame. And the New Testament uses that to talk about the innocent suffering Davidic king who is Jesus Christ, who not only hopes for vindication—"Father, into your hands I commit my spirit," that he's quoting Psalm 31, an imprecatory psalm. He's not just hoping for the vindication; he knows it's coming. And on the third day, he's raised from the dead in vindication from shame, in a way that exposes the truth of his identity and his righteousness in the eyes of God. In the imprecatory Psalms, the petitioners—one of the things that I argue is that they are acting as a royal priesthood, as the sons of God that they are, who are trying to drive out serpents from the sacred space where God dwells among his people.

38. Trevor Laurence

    They're protecting the kingdom, and they want to see it extended to the ends of the earth, which is what the whole story of the Bible is really all about. And in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus protects his temple kingdom people. He renews them. He puts the powers of darkness to open shame when he triumphs over them. And one day he's going to renew the world when God judges the world in righteousness by the one man whom he has appointed, and by his resurrection from the dead, he has given evidence of this to everyone. That's what Paul preaches about Jesus. Jesus fulfills the imprecatory Psalms. Jesus receives the judgment of the enemy.

39. Trevor Laurence

    He takes God's wrath at the cross. He's expelled outside of the gate in his death so that enemies who deserve judgment can instead become sons and daughters and friends of God by faith. And in one of the most beautiful twists, Jesus, who is the human king who fulfills the Psalms, is also the divine judge. The New Testament all over the place is using Yahweh language from the imprecatory Psalms to describe what Jesus is doing and will one day do for his people. Now, what does that mean? It means that if I pray the imprecatory Psalms attuned by the Bible itself to all of the ways that Jesus fulfills the trajectory of each of its figures, each of the characters in the imprecations, then there's going to be a dynamic reconfrontation with the multifaceted Christ every time I take up one of those prayers. I'm going to see that I have already been vindicated in the vindication of Jesus because I have been raised with him and seated in the heavenly places. I'm going to know that in my innocent suffering, I am not alone because Jesus suffered in perfect innocence for me, and he stands in solidarity with me even now.

40. Trevor Laurence

    I'm going to be confronted with the fact that I'm the enemy of God, and Jesus took the judgment that I deserved when he walked the path of imprecatory judgment all the way to Calvary's hill. And ultimately, I'm going to see that Jesus is my Lord and my God—the one to whom I'm offering my prayers, who is one day going to make everything new, everything right, wipe every tear from every eye with all the authority of God because he is God himself. You want to talk about how the imprecatory Psalms change us? One heart can hardly hold all of that. But that's what I'm asking the Lord to do in me every time I take up one of those prayers.

41. 22:24

    Adriel Sanchez

    Maybe one more question. Just very, very encouraging and helpful. So, you mentioned one of the things we're reminded of as we're praying this is also the fact that we ourselves were the enemies of God. And you think of the imagery that we find in the New Testament, places like 1 Corinthians, where our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. I wonder if there isn't a sense in which, as we're praying these Psalms of imprecation, we're also calling for God to bring justice in us, in our own hearts. So, just that personal application—I wonder if you could speak to that as well.

42. 23:00

    Trevor Laurence

    I think that's absolutely right. One of the through lines I try to trace in the book is that starting with Adam, the royal priestly son of God, he is to drive out unholiness from the sanctuary of the Lord. That's what David and Israel are doing in the imprecatory Psalms. They are, by their prayers, seeking to drive out the seed of the serpent from the place where God dwells. And you and I, this very moment, are the temple of the living God—sanctuaries, walking gardens of Eden, living Zions, tabernacles of flesh and blood. And as we pray the temple-cleansing prayers of the Psalms, one of the absolutely relevant ways that we can take those and aim them at us is by asking the Lord to drive out those serpentine tendencies in me: "Expose the dark parts of my heart. Make me holy like you are holy. Keep on transforming me, Lord. Put to death my sin. Help me to live anew in the power of the Spirit in Jesus. Make me fit to be a house for the presence of the living God." So, I absolutely think that not only praying that he would cleanse me, but praying that he would cleanse the temple of his church through the faithful discipline of his people, through exposing abusers and wrongdoing that is lurking in the shadows of his church. What are we doing? We're asking, "Lord, make sure your justice is aimed at us too. And in your mercy, expose and change us so that we become more like the people, the sanctuaries that you have called us to be."

43. 24:48

    Adriel Sanchez

    Trevor, I'm encouraged by your work, brother, and convicted in some ways as well. I think for the whole Church of the Lord Jesus Christ to recover the entire Psalter—the Psalms of lament, and also even these Psalms of imprecation—to pray them in a manner that is honoring to the Lord, that recognizes that we need God to cleanse us from within, but we're also longing to see him bring justice for those who are oppressed, and to restrain evil and those who are destroying themselves. And so, God, give us wisdom as we seek to use these prayers in our own lives and in the liturgy of our churches. I love one of the things you do at the end of the book is you give an example of how to incorporate something like this in your church's liturgy. The book is called Cursing with God: The Imprecatory Psalms and the Ethics of Christian Prayer. And if I'm not mistaken, you're working on kind of a shorter version of this as well, right?

44. 25:44

    Trevor Laurence

    So, I would hope we can have something that's available and accessible not just for scholars and pastors, but for everyday church members who are struggling with the very questions that we've talked about today.

45. 25:56

    Adriel Sanchez

    Wonderful. Dr. Laurence, thank you for spending some time with us.

46. 25:58

    Trevor Laurence

    Thanks so much.

47. 00:00

    Trevor Laurence

    If those prayers are good enough for heavenly worship, they're good enough for earthly worship as well. So that means that the disconnect that we intuitively find isn't detected in the New Testament Scriptures, either in heaven's liturgy or in Jesus' encouragement and exhortations about prayer to his church. Now, why is that? I think it's because we work with the wrong definition of love. Modern people, we think that love is constant affirmation. It's warm sentimentality. It's niceness. It's affirming everything about someone and wanting them to actualize their internal desires. Biblical love seeks the good of the beloved. And if we recognize that doing violence without interruption is actually to the detriment of the violent themselves, not merely to their victims, then love is going to say, "God, do something about it."

48. 00:58

    Adriel Sanchez

    Pastor Adriel here with Sola Media, and I'm excited about a conversation that I get to have right now with Dr. Trevor Laurence. Dr. Trevor Laurence is the author of this book, Cursing with God, about the imprecatory Psalms. He's also the director of the Cateclesia Institute. What exactly is that? Cateclesia Institute.

49. 01:17

    Trevor Laurence

    The Cateclesia Institute is a nonprofit that's all about cultivating biblical imagination.

50. 01:23

    Adriel Sanchez

    Oh, wow.

51. 01:23

    Trevor Laurence

    So, what we want to do is recognize that we live too often in a thoroughly modern world, and we imagine the world in those terms. What we want to do is start getting into the biblical world, understanding how it communicates and unfolds its story, and then internalize it to the point that we start naturally living within that story every day of our lives.

52. 01:44

    Adriel Sanchez

    Wow. Well, check out the Cateclesia Institute and also check out the work that he's done on the imprecatory Psalms. And maybe just to dive in, I think that that's a word that probably not a lot of people know or are familiar with. And so, what are imprecations? And what specifically are the imprecatory Psalms?

53. 02:04

    Trevor Laurence

    Yeah, the imprecatory Psalms are any of the Psalms in the Bible—and there are a lot of them—that contain a request, a petition, a prayer for God's judgment to break in upon the wicked. They're the prayers that cry out for justice, the justice that God's promised in his covenant word to his people, and they ask that it would become a reality in their experience. So, any of those Psalms where you see that sort of uncomfortable request that sort of makes your skin tingle a little bit and you want to quickly move on to the next psalm—those justice petitions are what characterize imprecatory Psalms.

54. 02:38

    Adriel Sanchez

    One of the things I appreciated, just at the beginning of your book, you talk about how sort of you were confronted with the imprecatory Psalms as you were praying through them with your wife—through the Psalms with your wife—and then you came across one of them. Can you talk about that just for a second?

55. 02:53

    Trevor Laurence

    Yeah, we decided, like really pious newlyweds, that we were going to pray through a psalm every evening before [inaudible]. And we got to Psalm 7, when the psalmist cries, "Arise, O Lord, you have appointed a judgment." And my wife, she just turns and looks at me and she's like, "What do we do with that?"

56. 03:12

    Adriel Sanchez

    Yeah.

57. 03:12

    Trevor Laurence

    And I'm like, all right, you've been—

58. 03:14

    Adriel Sanchez

    I'm gonna write a dissertation on that.

59. 03:15

    Trevor Laurence

    You've been training your whole life for this. You went to seminary, you've planted a church, you're a pastor—you better give a good answer. And I stumbled over my words long enough until we both just shrugged and we're like, "We got nothing."

60. 03:26

    Adriel Sanchez

    Yeah.

61. 03:26

    Trevor Laurence

    And what that means is that this academic work really came out of an existential and spiritual crisis in my own life. I want to honor Scripture as the Word of God for the people of God. But I don't know where to even begin with these cries for justice that are all throughout the Bible's hymnbook.

62. 03:46

    Adriel Sanchez

    Yeah. I'm struck by the fact that just like you, I think many people read through the Psalter and they come across these particular prayers, and they have no idea what to do with them. And there's also the question of, well, can I, as a believer under the New Covenant—I'm called to love my enemies. So how is it that I can pray for God's justice, his judgment, his curse on them in one sense, while still loving them? And I wonder if you can speak to that.

63. 04:19

    Trevor Laurence

    Yeah. The question, as I've thought about it, is how do I pray these Psalms against enemies while following wholeheartedly after the Christ who was crucified for his? How do I pray God's prayers while loving enemies according to the commands of God's own Son? That is, I think, the rub for Bible-believing Christians. That was the rub for me. I think one place to begin is simply to recognize that the New Testament that commands enemy love also commends justice prayers. In Luke 6, Jesus says, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." And then in Luke 18, the very same Jesus in the very same Gospel, just a few pages later, tells a parable so that his disciples will always pray and not lose heart, about a persistent widow who cries out, "Give me justice against my adversary."

64. Trevor Laurence

    And he says, if this wicked judge is going to give justice at the cry of the widow, how much more is your Father who loves you going to swiftly do justice for his children? And will the Son of Man find faith when he returns? So, Jesus connects justice prayer in his parable of the persistent widow to the faith that he longs to see and find when he returns to the world for his people. We could also look at Revelation 6. There we've got a vision of the souls of the martyrs who have held fast to their testimony and to the blood of the Lamb all the way to death. And they're under the altar crying out to God. And what are they singing?

65. 06:00

    Adriel Sanchez

    "How long?"

66. 06:00

    Trevor Laurence

    "How long, O Lord?"—an imprecatory psalm. The words are pulled from Psalm 79: "until you avenge the blood of your people upon those who dwell upon the earth." They want to know, when is justice coming? Now, just for me, if those prayers are good enough for heavenly worship, they're good enough for earthly worship as well. So, that means that the disconnect that we intuitively find isn't detected in the New Testament Scriptures, either in heaven's liturgy or in Jesus' encouragement and exhortations about prayer to his church. Now, why is that? I think it's because we work with the wrong definition of love. Modern people, we think that love is constant affirmation. It's warm sentimentality. It's niceness. It's affirming everything about someone and wanting them to actualize their internal desires.

67. Trevor Laurence

    Biblical love seeks the good of the beloved. And if we recognize that doing violence without interruption is actually to the detriment of the violent themselves, not merely to their victims, then love is going to say, "God, do something about it. Step in, intervene, interrupt their downward spiral into inhumanity and bloodlust, and stop them from becoming the people they want to become." In that sense, though it's a difficult prayer, I think the biblical definition of love as seeking the good of the beloved is willing to say, when that person wants their own destruction, "God, I want you to stop them."

68. 07:37

    Adriel Sanchez

    To intervene.

69. 07:38

    Trevor Laurence

    To keep them from descending even further into the madness.

70. 07:42

    Adriel Sanchez

    There's so much there to unpack. I was also wondering, would you see the prayer of Maranatha—"Come, Lord Jesus"—as in one sense also having this element of imprecation? Because you think of all those times, like in 2 Thessalonians, where Paul is talking about the final judgment and God coming to bring relief to those who suffer, to his children who suffer. When we say, "Your kingdom come," as Jesus taught us to pray in the Lord's Prayer, in one sense, there's an element of imprecation there too, wanting justice.

71. 08:14

    Trevor Laurence

    I don't think it's just in a sense. I think it is a transparently imprecatory prayer. It's just in the grammar of the New Testament. "Thy kingdom come" is a prayer that asks for the kingdom to expand and for the kingdom of the devil to fall. It's a prayer for the consummation of God's temple kingdom on earth to be made a reality, and even for us to become more like the citizens of the kingdom that we ought to be: "Drive out what is unholy within me." The prayer "Come quickly, Lord, Maranatha"—we often have no problem with that, even though we want to keep the imprecatory Psalms at arm's length.

72. Trevor Laurence

    But let's just think for a moment about what we're asking God to do when we ask for the return of Christ. We're asking for him to make good on his promises, to exercise perfect, wise, righteous justice, to right every wrong and to expel all corruption and wickedness from the world that he's one day going to fill up with his comprehensive glory. That's the vision of the imprecatory Psalms. We could say "Come quickly, Lord Jesus" is an imprecatory cry in New Testament grammar. "How long, O Lord?" is "Come quickly, Lord Jesus" in the grammar of the Old Testament. We start making that connection, I think some of that defensiveness that we instinctively feel can begin to fall away.

73. 09:44

    Adriel Sanchez

    One of the things that we've tried to incorporate more and more in our own liturgy at the church that I pastor is the laments. Because in many churches, you get a lot of the happy songs, the hymns of praise, a lot of modern contemporary worship—not so much lament, not so much "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And the majority of the Psalter has these Psalms of lament. But we could even go a step further and think about also these Psalms of imprecation. And so, typically, I've tried to make the case, well, when we don't have lament within our worship, we're cutting out a great part of the Christian life.

74. 10:19

    Trevor Laurence

    Right.

75. 10:21

    Adriel Sanchez

    What do we miss when we're not incorporating this idea of imprecation? When we cut that out as well, what do you think the voice of God's people loses?

76. 10:31

    Trevor Laurence

    Oh, man. Well, not only do we lose in the moment the opportunity to express the sadness, the anger, the disappointment, and the longing for renewal that the imprecatory Psalms offer—we lose what we can call the pedagogical or the formational power of lament. When we step into corporate worship together, when we enter into the liturgy, what are we doing? We're entering into a new world according to the Word of God. And that trains us for how to conceive and move through our reality. Now, if the only thing that we are getting in corporate worship in the world of the liturgy is happy Pollyanna piety, then when devastation inevitably comes—when we experience injustice, when we see it on the news, when it touches our own lives—we're going to be utterly unprepared to respond because we've not gone through the training regimen in the school of worship with the church. We're going to have this profound disconnect because, well, in church, I learned that the Christian life was all about these positive emotions. And now that's not happening for me.

77. Trevor Laurence

    What is the question somebody inevitably asks? "What's wrong with me? Has God turned his back on me?" Because I've never been shaped, I've never been prepared to keep on praying and trusting the Lord when my world is shattered. And all I can do is cry out to him. I think we prepare people to actually open their eyes to the violence of the world and the reality of reality around them. One of the things I often say is that the imprecatory Psalms are far more realistic about the state of the world than modern liturgies. And in that sense, when we are confronted with the imprecatory Psalms, not only can they prove a comfort to the uncomfortable, but they can destabilize those whose visions of the world is too stable and too comfortable, can open their eyes to the ridiculous wildness of injustice that has been a part of a fallen world from the moment of the fall, and prepare them to respond to it in faith and hope and even love.

78. 12:58

    Adriel Sanchez

    Yeah. Amazing how these Psalms in particular can help us see the world more clearly and give us words for when we experience those injustices or when we see those injustices. I wonder if you could help me think through, I guess, one concern that I've heard—and it's a concern even that I've had—is in our polarized society, and just naturally as sinners, I think that we want to stick it to our enemies. And we want to see them suffer, those who have caused suffering around us. Is there a way in which, I think, people can take these Psalms of imprecation, and maybe not seeing it through the lens of this is a way of truly loving my enemies in one sense, longing for God to intervene so that they don't continue to destroy themselves—but is there a way in which, I guess, we can misuse the Psalms of imprecation? And what does that look like? Maybe what does it look like to use them correctly? And then what would it look like to use them in a way that would actually be dishonoring to the Lord or contrary to what Christ has called us to?

79. 14:05

    Trevor Laurence

    Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Sinners have this profound capacity to abuse any and every good gift from God. Even the prayer "I thank you, Lord, that I'm not like that man"—that's a prayer of thanksgiving, but it's utterly wicked. It's turned upside down from what a prayer of thanksgiving ought to truly be. I think when we go into the Scriptures and cherry-pick certain especially graphic petitions, and we aim them for our own purposes without concerning ourselves with the overarching story of God and the story that is in the Psalms, and the way that the psalmists are deploying this language, then we can direct them in all sorts of tragic, misguided, and potentially vice-inducing ways.

80. Trevor Laurence

    If we do that with self-assuredness, seeking our own agendas, merely wanting to see our enemies squirm in the kind of pain that we've experienced ourselves, then we are embodying and deploying Scripture to legitimate and express all of the dark parts of our hearts. I think we need to first attend to what the imprecatory Psalms are doing. The Psalms, if we look at them as a whole, are not merely expressing the creative vindictiveness of hurting people. They are actually very carefully praying God's promises back to him over and over, saying that this is for the glory of your name. This is for the good of your kingdom. They're asking for God to bring an end to the violence that's tearing apart the world. They want the righteous vindicated, so that the truth is exposed for all to see, and those who are innocent but shamed will not be shamed forever.

81. Trevor Laurence

    And they want God to make good on his promises for covenant justice so that ultimately his overarching promise—as Psalm 72 says, that your glory would fill up the earth—fill up the earth with glory like the tabernacle was filled with glory, like Solomon's temple was filled with glory. The psalmists are reaching for the day when God's glory cleanses, renews, and fills up the entire cosmos, so that Eden's initial vision becomes our eternal reality. When we start letting the trajectory and the direction of those kinds of Psalms set the trajectory for our own prayers, what happens is our abuses of the Psalms get interrupted. If we actually pray through the Psalter, we say, "Oh, this psalm actually isn't letting me direct it in the way that I want." Because if I say, "Lord, for your name's sake, do justice," and I'm actually doing it for my name's sake or for the sake of my political agenda, then I've got an internal contradiction at the very heart of my own prayer. And if we approach the text—if we approach communion with God—with the kind of humility and circumspection that allows his word to first interrogate us, before we begin interrogating the world, it's going to unwind some of those proclivities and, I think, direct us in a more fruitful way.

82. 18:23

    Adriel Sanchez

    One of the things you talk about in your book is this sort of Christological tie to the Psalms of imprecation. I wonder how that also ought to inform the way we think about these things.

83. 18:34

    Trevor Laurence

    Yeah, I think when we understand the way the New Testament actually uses the imprecatory Psalms to tell the story of Jesus, we can begin to discover that praying the imprecatory Psalms can be a profound confrontation with the entire swath of the gospel. Now, what do I mean by that? In the Psalms, you've got an innocent Davidic king who suffers, but hopes for vindication on the other side of shame. And the New Testament uses that to talk about the innocent suffering Davidic king who is Jesus Christ, who not only hopes for vindication—"Father, into your hands I commit my spirit," that he's quoting Psalm 31, an imprecatory psalm. He's not just hoping for the vindication; he knows it's coming. And on the third day, he's raised from the dead in vindication from shame, in a way that exposes the truth of his identity and his righteousness in the eyes of God. In the imprecatory Psalms, the petitioners—one of the things that I argue is that they are acting as a royal priesthood, as the sons of God that they are, who are trying to drive out serpents from the sacred space where God dwells among his people.

84. Trevor Laurence

    They're protecting the kingdom, and they want to see it extended to the ends of the earth, which is what the whole story of the Bible is really all about. And in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus protects his temple kingdom people. He renews them. He puts the powers of darkness to open shame when he triumphs over them. And one day he's going to renew the world when God judges the world in righteousness by the one man whom he has appointed, and by his resurrection from the dead, he has given evidence of this to everyone. That's what Paul preaches about Jesus. Jesus fulfills the imprecatory Psalms. Jesus receives the judgment of the enemy.

85. Trevor Laurence

    He takes God's wrath at the cross. He's expelled outside of the gate in his death so that enemies who deserve judgment can instead become sons and daughters and friends of God by faith. And in one of the most beautiful twists, Jesus, who is the human king who fulfills the Psalms, is also the divine judge. The New Testament all over the place is using Yahweh language from the imprecatory Psalms to describe what Jesus is doing and will one day do for his people. Now, what does that mean? It means that if I pray the imprecatory Psalms attuned by the Bible itself to all of the ways that Jesus fulfills the trajectory of each of its figures, each of the characters in the imprecations, then there's going to be a dynamic reconfrontation with the multifaceted Christ every time I take up one of those prayers. I'm going to see that I have already been vindicated in the vindication of Jesus because I have been raised with him and seated in the heavenly places. I'm going to know that in my innocent suffering, I am not alone because Jesus suffered in perfect innocence for me, and he stands in solidarity with me even now.

86. Trevor Laurence

    I'm going to be confronted with the fact that I'm the enemy of God, and Jesus took the judgment that I deserved when he walked the path of imprecatory judgment all the way to Calvary's hill. And ultimately, I'm going to see that Jesus is my Lord and my God—the one to whom I'm offering my prayers, who is one day going to make everything new, everything right, wipe every tear from every eye with all the authority of God because he is God himself. You want to talk about how the imprecatory Psalms change us? One heart can hardly hold all of that. But that's what I'm asking the Lord to do in me every time I take up one of those prayers.

87. 22:24

    Adriel Sanchez

    Maybe one more question. Just very, very encouraging and helpful. So, you mentioned one of the things we're reminded of as we're praying this is also the fact that we ourselves were the enemies of God. And you think of the imagery that we find in the New Testament, places like 1 Corinthians, where our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. I wonder if there isn't a sense in which, as we're praying these Psalms of imprecation, we're also calling for God to bring justice in us, in our own hearts. So, just that personal application—I wonder if you could speak to that as well.

88. 23:00

    Trevor Laurence

    I think that's absolutely right. One of the through lines I try to trace in the book is that starting with Adam, the royal priestly son of God, he is to drive out unholiness from the sanctuary of the Lord. That's what David and Israel are doing in the imprecatory Psalms. They are, by their prayers, seeking to drive out the seed of the serpent from the place where God dwells. And you and I, this very moment, are the temple of the living God—sanctuaries, walking gardens of Eden, living Zions, tabernacles of flesh and blood. And as we pray the temple-cleansing prayers of the Psalms, one of the absolutely relevant ways that we can take those and aim them at us is by asking the Lord to drive out those serpentine tendencies in me: "Expose the dark parts of my heart. Make me holy like you are holy. Keep on transforming me, Lord. Put to death my sin. Help me to live anew in the power of the Spirit in Jesus. Make me fit to be a house for the presence of the living God." So, I absolutely think that not only praying that he would cleanse me, but praying that he would cleanse the temple of his church through the faithful discipline of his people, through exposing abusers and wrongdoing that is lurking in the shadows of his church. What are we doing? We're asking, "Lord, make sure your justice is aimed at us too. And in your mercy, expose and change us so that we become more like the people, the sanctuaries that you have called us to be."

89. 24:48

    Adriel Sanchez

    Trevor, I'm encouraged by your work, brother, and convicted in some ways as well. I think for the whole Church of the Lord Jesus Christ to recover the entire Psalter—the Psalms of lament, and also even these Psalms of imprecation—to pray them in a manner that is honoring to the Lord, that recognizes that we need God to cleanse us from within, but we're also longing to see him bring justice for those who are oppressed, and to restrain evil and those who are destroying themselves. And so, God, give us wisdom as we seek to use these prayers in our own lives and in the liturgy of our churches. I love one of the things you do at the end of the book is you give an example of how to incorporate something like this in your church's liturgy. The book is called Cursing with God: The Imprecatory Psalms and the Ethics of Christian Prayer. And if I'm not mistaken, you're working on kind of a shorter version of this as well, right?

90. 25:44

    Trevor Laurence

    So, I would hope we can have something that's available and accessible not just for scholars and pastors, but for everyday church members who are struggling with the very questions that we've talked about today.

91. 25:56

    Adriel Sanchez

    Wonderful. Dr. Laurence, thank you for spending some time with us.

92. 25:58

    Trevor Laurence

    Thanks so much.