“How long, O LORD? . . . Pour out your anger. . . . Let the avenging of the outpoured blood of your servants be known among the nations before our eyes!” (Ps. 79:5–6, 10). As you’re reading through Psalms and you stumble across Psalm 79, you can’t help but wonder what to do with this very Old Testament-sounding prayer. Surely, Asaph needed to be educated in the gospel, right?
Revelation 6:9–10 describes the martyrs in heaven who have been slain for their testimony to the gospel and places Psalm 79 on their lips: “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”
Scholars agree the prayer of Psalm 79 is the likely background for the prayer of the martyrs, furthering our appreciation of this as a prayer for the church. It’s a prayer of and for the persecuted church. As we stand alongside them, we have divine warrant to pray Psalm 79 on their behalf.
Trevor Laurence explains, “The vengeance petition of Rev. 6:9–10 thus supplies a model for the ongoing prayer of Christ’s body on earth.” Rather than being contrary to New Testament ethics, then, Psalm 79 fuels the church’s longing for every wrong to be made right.
Nevertheless, you may still wonder, How do I take up a psalm like this in prayer for my persecuted brothers and sisters without falling into vindictive rage and vengefulness? Thankfully, Psalm 79 provides the guidelines needed to answer this question.
Pray in Response to Horrific Injustice
Verses 1–4 catalog the horrors God’s people suffered at the hands of the Babylonians who destroyed their temple: They defiled God’s holy place, they gave the flesh of God’s faithful ones to the beasts of the earth, they poured out their blood like water and refused them a proper burial, and they were the cause of God’s people becoming a taunt to their neighbors. Psalm 79 is not prayed in response to petty grievances but birthed out of horrendous evil.
Psalm 79 is not prayed in response to petty grievances but birthed out of horrendous evil.
This has two implications. First, these prayers do not give license for us to pray such things against just anyone. Second, if we object to such prayers, they challenge us to ask whether we have ever faced anything close to the agonizing evil that gave birth to this prayer.
As Jamie Grant posits, “Perhaps our reluctance to appropriate the psalms of enmity is rooted in the comfort of our lives.” If we knew the kind of horror Psalm 79 speaks of (and that our persecuted brothers and sisters endure daily), perhaps we wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss these psalms.
Pray for the Glory of God
As psalms like this respond to such evil, they are fundamentally concerned with God’s glory. We see this in Psalm 79:6, where the nations’ refusal to call on God’s name is the motive behind Asaph’s cry. Likewise, verse 9 cites the glory of God’s name and his “name’s sake” as a rationale for God to answer this request. And verse 10 is concerned that, at present, the onlooking nations say, “Where is their God?”
So Asaph asks that God’s justice would be made known among the nations (v. 10), and that God’s people might praise him for it (v. 13). The glory of God is the ultimate end of the imprecatory psalms. Or as James Hamilton says, “The glory of God in salvation through judgment is the center of the theology of Psalms.” The same is true of imprecatory psalms like Psalm 79. Their controlling desire is “Hallowed be thy name.”
Pray with a Humble Posture
The imprecatory psalms are not prayed in a spirit of self-righteousness; those praying them understand their need for God’s grace. They pray for justice from a posture of humility, where they confess that this judgment is what they too deserve apart from God’s grace (vv. 8–9).
This is not unlike the widow’s prayer for justice in Luke 18:1–8 being paired with the parable of the Pharisee and tax collector in verses 9–14.
We pray for justice, but we do so as forgiven sinners. We pray the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer (“Thy kingdom come”) with the fifth petition also in mind (“Forgive us our debts”).
Pray with a Desire for Repentance
If God could turn his anger away from repentant sinners in exile (Ps. 79:5), then he could do the same for Israel’s enemies. While this is not explicit in Psalm 79, its near neighbor Psalm 83, at the conclusion of this section of Asaph psalms, prays that God would fill the faces of these enemy nations with shame “that they might seek [the LORD’s name]” (v. 16).
It is legitimate to see this desire as qualifying the earlier imprecations in the Asaph collection (indeed, in the whole Psalter). Hamilton even suggests every prayer for judgment in the psalms should be read as if containing an implicit “footnote” desiring repentance as a possibility.
Pray with the Hope of Final Justice
The prayers of judgment, like Psalm 79, are not petty prayers incompatible with a Christian ethic. God’s people pray in response to horrific injustice, aimed at the glory of God, with a posture of humility and openness to their enemies becoming God’s friends.
We pray for justice, but we do so as forgiven sinners.
The imprecatory psalms, then, fit perfectly with the gospel of Jesus Christ. And they arm the church to intercede for the saints in a day when our Christian brothers and sisters suffer great harm throughout the world.
We long for God to answer these prayers through the conversion of our enemies. But if they remain impenitent, it is only right for God to bring justice. And it is thus right for us to pray that he would.
The Gospel Coalition