In Psalm 140 the psalmist pleads for God to destroy evil doers. This is a regular plea through many different psalms, but a difficult one for Christians to process. I have argued previously that these prayers are not expressions of personal hatred but of a formal hatred for what the evildoer represents in that situation. To take this a step deeper, there is a sense in which all people in sin are essentially false versions of themselves. A person in a state of sin (rejection of God) has adopted a self-fabricated autonomous identity. Certainly, God wants to destroy this false self, but always with a view to raising up a true self, a child of God. The latter depends of course on our response. If we entrust ourselves to Christ, as God calls us to do, then we are ‘put to death’ in a very important sense (Romans 6:4) in order to be raised up as a new creation. Think of Saul of Tarsus. The Christians who were being persecuted by Saul could have prayed the words of Psalm 140 against him. And God answered this prayer, that is, by destroying Saul the persecutor and raising up Paul the apostle of grace. The church all over the world regularly faces ferocious opposition. Prayers like Psalm 140 are appropriate. The rejection of these kinds of psalms by Christians, in the name of grace, hasn’t made us more gracious. It has only caused an unhealthy repression of anger. We are allowed to feel angry so long as we take our anger to God and let him be the judge.
Pray this psalm over an appropriate situation.
Read Psalm 140.
