Praying the Scripture Weekends - 03/16-17/2024 - Tough Psalms to Pray
Welcome to the weekend, Seeds of Faith community!
Scripture is God’s inspired word, the sacred story that makes sense of the world. Prayer is our response to God. Every 2nd and 4th weekend in 2024, we are considering how the Bible can not only reveal God to us, but also guide us in our praying.
Praying the Scripture Weekends is currently referencing the book Praying the Bible by Donald Whitney, professor of biblical spirituality and associate dean at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Click here to get a copy if you’d like to read it on your own.
Last time, we differentiated between interpreting the Bible versus praying the Bible. For today, let’s consider how to approach those difficult texts called the “imprecatory psalms.”
Praying along with “The Lord is my shepherd” (Psalm 23:1) is more straightforward than “O God, break the teeth in their mouths!” (Psalm 58:6)
When we come across texts like these, what are we to do? Okay, so it’s possible that certain people may come to mind when we read a passage like that, if we’re being honest. Yet, as Dr. Whitney points out, we can’t square praying about people that way with Jesus’ command to love and pray for enemies.
How might we still draw guidance from a text like this? Dr. Whitney suggests that we can pray them analogously, against sin.
“I sometimes pray angrily that all the enemies of God born in my sinful heart will be destroyed as thoroughly as these imprecatory psalms describe.” (p. 40)
And of course, we do not have to pray with a verse simply because it is next. If we are not sure how to pray it, then we can ask the Lord. We can also move on to the next. It may be that we do not yet know how to pray with them. That’s okay. The point is not to pray every verse in the scriptures, but to go to the scriptures and find there a resource for our praying.
Consider: What sin would you pray against in the words or images of the imprecatory psalms?
“But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” (Matthew 13:23)
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