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God can handle grief, rage, and cries for justice. God can handle the victim who cannot yet forgive. God can handle the prayer that comes out jagged and wounded. The good news is that God is holy and merciful enough to handle all our prayers.
Can Christians pray imprecatory psalms? The first time I ran into an imprecatory psalm was through its absence. I was relatively new to the Christian faith and had begun exploring the psalms in the Lutheran Book of Worship. While paging through the hymnal, I noticed that Psalm 137 was missing. That seemed strange. Why would a Christian hymnal leave one out?
This was before the internet could instantly answer every question, so I grabbed a Bible and looked it up. The psalm begins beautifully enough: “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion” (137:1).
It is the prayer of a people who have lost their homeland. Jerusalem has been destroyed. The temple was burned. Families were torn apart. The people were carried into exile where their captors mockingly demand that they sing the songs of Zion. Then the psalm reaches its terrible conclusion: “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” (137:9).
Once I read those words, I understood why the editors might have left the psalm out. At the time, my reasoning was simple: Christians should not pray like that. Jesus tells us to love our enemies. He commands us to pray for those who persecute us. Surely there is no place in Christian prayer for asking God to destroy someone, especially someone’s children.
But the longer I have lived, the less simple that conclusion has become. These prayers are not embarrassing remnants of a more violent world. They are part of the church’s prayer book given to us by God to give words to our prayers. The question is not merely, “Can we pray these psalms?” The deeper question is “Why has God given us prayers like these?”
The imprecatory psalms are those passages in which the psalmist calls upon God to judge, punish, expose, or destroy the wicked. Here are some examples found in Scripture:
Break the teeth in their mouths, O God… Let them be like the snail which dissolves into slime (Ps. 58:6-8).
May his days be few; may another seize his goods! May his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow! (Ps. 109:8-9).
Let death come upon them, and let them go down to hell alive (Ps. 55:15).
These are not polite prayers. They do not fit easily into a devotional book. No, these prayers come from the rawest edges of human experience. That matters because these psalms were not written by people irritated that someone took their parking spot. They arise from betrayal, oppression, violence, exile, and bloodshed. They are prayers from people who have been crushed by evil and have no apparent power to stop it.
This is important because people who are removed from suffering can unintentionally suppress the anger of those who have been wounded. From a safe distance, we may counsel patience and restraint before we have fully reckoned with the injustice that gave rise to the anger. That was the counsel given to Martin Luther King by the white clergymen who urged him to slow down and wait. In response, King wrote “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” exposing how seemingly reasonable appeals to patience and moderation can preserve the comfort of those untouched by injustice while placing an additional burden on those already suffering.
We may tell the wounded to calm down, forgive, be patient, move on. But Scripture teaches us to pray from the perspective of those who are not safe. The Bible does not force victims to pretend that evil is small. It does not require them to use pleasant religious language while their lives are being torn apart. It gives them words strong enough to tell the truth. Evil is real. Victims matter. Injustice should not be minimized. Wickedness must not be allowed to have the final word. The imprecatory psalms give the wounded permission to bring the full force of their anger into the presence of God.
Currently, I have two people in my life honest enough to tell me they are praying imprecatory psalms. (I personally think there are many more people praying such prayers). Their situations are different, but there is something they share: both have been so deeply wounded that they want their perpetrators to die.
That may sound shocking. It should sound shocking. Death is not something Christians should wish upon another person. Yet, in both cases, something significant is happening. My friends are not taking matters into their own hands. They are not plotting revenge. Instead, they are placing their rage before God and asking God to handle it.
In this, prayer becomes an alternative to vengeance. Notice, the psalmist does not say, “I will repay.” The psalmist says, “O Lord, you repay.” That distinction is enormously important. The person who prays an imprecatory prayer is confessing that judgment belongs to God. And that is where it belongs. “‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Deut 32:35). This is a promise that evil will be handled.
Still, can followers of Jesus pray this way? After all, Jesus said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:44). From the cross, he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Paul told the church, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them” (Rom 12:14).
So what do we do with prayers that say, “Break their teeth, O God?” The answer is that we read these prayers through Christ, knowing that Christ entered the laments of Israel. On the cross, he took Psalm 22 on his lips: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (22:1). Jesus bears sin. He suffers injustice. He is betrayed by a friend, surrounded by enemies, mocked by those who hate him without cause, and condemned though he was innocent. Jesus is the righteous sufferer of the Psalms. He is also the one who entrusts himself to the Father who judges justly. Peter says of Christ, “When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly” (I Peter 2:23). Jesus does not take vengeance into his own hands. He receives it all while entrusting himself to the Father. From the cross, he prays for his enemies, bears the curse, absorbs violence, and receives the judgment sinners deserve. In him, God’s judgment against sin and God’s mercy for sinners meet.
The cross does not make evil less serious; it makes it more serious. At the cross, God does not shrug off evil. He does not say sin is small. He does not pretend injustice does not matter. The blood of Christ tells us that sin is so serious it must be judged. And yet the cross also reveals that God’s answer to enemies is deeper than our anger. Christ dies for the ungodly. He forgives sinners. He reconciles enemies. He promises a kingdom where violence, injustice, and death will be no more. Until that day, there will be times when the only word a wounding sinner might pray is an imprecatory word. But even then, Christ bears it.
The future Christ promises is not a future of everlasting resentment. It is a future of healing and reconciliation. Christ has won forgiveness for sinners, and he calls those who belong to him to forgive as they have been forgiven. In the resurrection, the grudges, injuries, and divisions that mark this present age will not be carried forward. Christ is making all things new.
But the imprecatory psalms are prayers for the time before all things have been made new. They belong to a world in which wounds remain open and oppressors may still prosper. Victims are not always ready to forgive. They do not deny the reconciled future Christ has promise. They simply tell the truth of the “not yet.”
Lament lives in this tension. It knows that evil will not have the last word, but it refuses to pretend that evil is not speaking loudly now. It trusts that reconciliation is coming, while admitting that the wounded person may not yet be able to imagine it. The imprecatory psalms do not replace forgiveness. Instead, they give us words for the painful distance between today and God’s tomorrow.
The first time I read Psalm 137, I understood why someone might want to omit it. I still understand that impulse. But I am no longer convinced that leaving it out makes sense. Sometimes leaving out the hard prayers teaches the wounded that their pain is too much for God, too angry for the church, or too ugly for worship. But the Psalms say otherwise. They teach us that God can handle the prayer we are afraid to pray.
God can handle grief, rage, and cries for justice. God can handle the victim who cannot yet forgive. God can handle the prayer that comes out jagged and wounded. The good news is that God is holy and merciful enough to handle all our prayers.
So, can Christians pray the imprecatory psalms? Yes. We pray them when evil has become too heavy to carry and when victims need words strong enough to tell the truth. We pray them when we are tempted to take vengeance into our own hands. We pray them to be reminded that judgment belongs to the Lord. And most importantly, we pray them through Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who bore the curse, forgave his enemies, defeated evil, and will come again to judge the living and the dead.
Until that day, the church prays all the Psalms. Even the ones we might wish never needed to be written.
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