Ps 58
Joy for Justice
(Psalm 58)
Jason Procopio
NOTE: Like most of the psalms, there is an issue of verse numeration between French and English translations. Most psalms have a subtitle (“Psalm of David, to the tune of ‘Do Not Destroy’,” etc.). In many English translations (such as the ESV, which I use below) these subtitles are not generally given verse numbers. However, in the French translations, these subtitles are counted as separate verses.
Consequently, there is usually one more verse in the French translations than in the English, and each verse is one number ahead. So if you’re following along with us on the screen, in order to not get lost, be aware that if we’re reading (for example) v. 5 in French, it will be v. 4 in English.
I’ve waited years to preach a psalm like this, for reasons you can probably guess. Psalm 58 is what is known as an “imprecatory prayer”—that is, a prayer that God would execute vengeance on the evildoer.
Clearly these psalms—and there are quite a few of them—present us with some difficulties. Everyone understands the desire for justice against wrongdoing; but it can be disconcerting to hear David pray that God would break the teeth of the wicked, or—as he does in another psalm—rejoice in the idea of their enemies’ children being bashed to death against rocks (Ps. 137.9).
This doesn’t exactly square with the Christian ideal of love as we find it in the New Testament. Didn’t Jesus himself change things? Matthew 5.43-45:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.
How can we accept David’s prayer as legitimate when we are meant to love our enemies? It’s a difficult question, but one we have to deal with if we’re going to read the Psalms, because there are a lot of these. The overwhelming cry of all the imprecatory psalms is that God would vindicate righteousness, and punish unrighteousness. We don’t even need to think of the atrocities committed throughout history to understand this; we feel it in our own lives. Any time a wrong is committed against us—often we feel it even more acutely when the wrong is committed against someone we love—we feel the desire for something to happen to the person who committed the wrong, for some kind of punishment to be exacted to make them understand what they have done and feel sorry for it.
Of course Jesus changed things. The Son of God came to live a sinless life in our place, to be punished for our sin, in our place, and to give us his perfect life: although we were naturally enemies of God, rather than punish us for our rebellion, God declares us righteous—which means he could do the same for anyone. This is the good news of the gospel, and it definitely changes things.
But having that in mind isn’t how we should come to these kinds of psalms, at least not at first.
Rather than simply let the gospel shape the way we read these psalms, we need to let the psalms help us understand the gospel. In order to get to the good news, we need to feel the weight of the bad news, and these psalms help us do that.
On the surface, this psalm addresses the injustice of the tyrants of the world, but it doesn’t stay there for long: rather quickly David widens his scope, and makes us all uncomfortable.
Unjust Men (v. 1-5)
First we need to talk about why I’m mentioning “tyrants” at all, because it’s not necessarily obvious. V. 1:
1 Do you indeed decree what is right, you gods?
There’s a translation issue here that needs to be addressed. When we see the ESV translators end the first sentence of v. 1 with “you gods” (or “you mighty lords”), the idea of tyrants isn’t that hard to guess. But it should be said that there is another way to translate this, which is equally valid as far as the language goes: Is it in silence that you decree what is right? (No “you gods”.) This is the most literal translation, and it is the way all of the French translators have rendered the verse. Many English translation opt for “gods” or “lords”, not because that is clearly the best translation, but because they think “in silence” makes little sense.
In either case, the context of tyrants still seems to be in mind here, because in the second sentence of v. 1, David speaks of those who have the power to decree what is right. These are those who have the power to judge, to make laws, to render verdicts over guilt and to deal out punishment as they see fit: not everyone can do this.
So let’s take both possibilities into account—certainly both are common enough.
V. 1 again:
1 Do you indeed decree what is right, you gods?
Or:
Is it in silence that you decree what is right?
Do you judge the children of man uprightly?
2 No, in your hearts you devise wrongs;
your hands deal out violence on earth.
How many rulers over history have pretended to rule rightly, as a servant of the people—all the while exploiting the people under their power? How many rulers have pretended to be just, while perpetrating injustice? That’s what the psalmist is getting at here: “You tyrants, do you sit back and judge fairly, impassively? No—you get your hands dirty.”
We see this because even more than simply turning a blind eye to evil for the sake of their own gain (another way of interpreting “in silence”), these tyrants take the evil that begins in their hearts, and work it out in their hands. Their evil is premeditated and intentional.
Why do they do this? The simplest answer—and the answer the psalmist gives—is because they are sinners. V. 3:
3 The wicked are estranged from the womb;
they go astray from birth, speaking lies.
4 They have venom like the venom of a serpent,
like the deaf adder that stops its ear,
5 so that it does not hear the voice of charmers
or of the cunning enchanter.
They want what they want, and they have the power to get what they want…so they get it, no matter what it costs, and no matter whom it hurts.
Just before leaving for vacation I finished reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment—an amazing read if you have the patience for it. The main character of the book is a young law student named Raskolnikov, who murders an old pawn-broker and steals money from her, hoping to get himself and his family out of poverty. (This isn’t much of a spoiler, it’s at the beginning of the book.)
Later on we find out a little more about how he justifies the murder to himself.
He has come up with a novel theory that laws are necessary to govern ordinary people, because ordinary people need them, but that throughout history there have always been exceptional people to whom the rules should not apply, because if they obeyed all the rules, society would not progress. (The example given in the book is, of course, Napoleon.) Raskolnikov fancies himself one of these extraordinary people, so feels justified in killing this horrid old woman so that he can finish his studies and contribute to the welfare of society.
In other words, in his mind, the only difference between himself and Napoleon is that Napoleon had the power to carry out what he had in mind…and why should that make any difference?
It’s a difficult moral problem that Dostoyevsky lays out beautifully, without giving an easy answer. Instead, he shows us what devastating effects the murder has on the young man: pre-murder Raskolnikov and post-murder Raskolnikov are two very different people, and the collateral damage keeps piling up.
And that was part of Dostoyevsky’s point. Tyrants show us on a large scale what all humanity is capable of on a small scale; they’re what happens when sinful people have all the power they need to work out the evil within them.
But everyone has this potential in them—from the mightiest ruler to the poorest student. From the oldest to the youngest. V. 3 again:
3 The wicked are estranged from the womb;
they go astray from birth, speaking lies.
No one has to teach a small child to lie; every parent knows it happens all on its own, when a child feels like they can get something they want out of misrepresenting the truth. (And keep in mind, David isn’t just speaking theoretically: this is the man who, after acting like a tyrant and having a man killed in order to sleep with his wife, proclaimed in Psalm 51.5: Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.)
“The wicked” are like this, and David knows that naturally, he is one of them. He says (v. 4),
4 They have venom like the venom of a serpent,
like the deaf adder that stops its ear,
5 so that it does not hear the voice of charmers
or of the cunning enchanter.
In other words, the wicked want what they want, and no amount of argumentation or logic will convince them to not want it.
Have you ever tried that? To make yourself not want something you desperately desire? Good luck with that; it doesn’t work. The tyrant’s problem—our problem, if left to our own devices—is that we are led by our own desires.
And it is here that we see the subtle shift in what David is saying: by speaking of large-scale evil at the hands of rulers, he identifies characteristics that are present in all of us—even present in David himself. He’s not only speaking about evil men in power, but about all those who try to go through life without God—for without God, the only difference between our evil and the evil of tyrants is, as Derek Kidner says, a difference “of degree rather than kind”.
As tyrants are led by their desires, so are we all, if left to our own devices. Whether our desires result in widespread catastrophe or not is—at least as far as our hearts are concerned—irrelevant. Our natural desires are “anti-God”, and flow from the same polluted source.
So we can see that “the wicked,” so often referenced in the Bible, are not merely those evil people who have unlimited power to harm; they are all of us, as we are without God.
Prayer for Justice (v. 6-9)
You would think that because David knows that on his own, he is wicked too, that would lend him some compassion—that maybe he would pray for the wicked, that they would receive the forgiveness he himself has received.
But that’s where these psalms come in to instruct us. Before any talk of forgiveness makes sense, we have to understand what we’re being forgiven from—what all sin naturally deserves.
And that’s where David goes: in reaction to these “anti-God” desires that David deplores, he prays that God would execute justice. V. 6:
6 O God, break the teeth in their mouths;
tear out the fangs of the young lions, O Lord!
7 Let them vanish like water that runs away;
when he aims his arrows, let them be blunted.
8 Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime,
like the stillborn child who never sees the sun.
9 Sooner than your pots can feel the heat of thorns,
whether green or ablaze, may he sweep them away!
Again, we need to see here that what David is going for—and what all the psalmists are after in this type of psalm—is not necessarily that God would literally do these things to the wicked. He’s not literally asking God to break their teeth and turn them into water. He’s expressing through vivid imagery the feeling of outrage that injustice should conjure up in us. When we see sin in the world around us, we should feel indignation toward it.
This indignation is very different to how we feel about sin most of the time. We read David’s prayer for justice and we think he’s laying it on a bit too thick; certain crimes against humanity, certain types of abuses, deserve that kind of outrage, sure. But things like pride? lying? sexual immorality? losing your temper unfairly? These are things we’ve all done; these are things we all struggle with. So these things, we tend to write them off as “normal” when they creep up in ourselves, and we treat them like they’re no big deal.
But when we’re on the receiving end of it, we have no problem feeling David’s outrage. My son Jack and I were at the post office a few weeks ago. A young woman was there directing people towards the machines, and she told us to get in a particular line. So we got in the line, and someone in another line got angry at me because apparently he was there first. I tried to tell him I just went where the girl told me to, and that he could go ahead of me, but he kept getting angrier, and started insulting me, telling me what a bad father I was, pointing at Jack and saying, “You should be ashamed at what you’re teaching your kid.”
I’ve got to admit that listening to this guy going after me like that, with my son standing right next to me listening, filled me with the kind of indignation we read here. “Lord, break his teeth! Dissolve this guy into slime!” And I felt that…over a guy insulting me in the post office. The greater the harm done, the more acutely we feel this outrage.
And we should feel it because, it would seem, this is exactly how God himself feels toward sin. Sin deserves absolute condemnation—as Paul says in Romans 6.23, the wages of sin is death. If we read this psalm and feel like David’s going a bit over the top, it’s not because he’s overestimating the seriousness of sin, but because we underestimate it.
Sin—all sin—is brutal and ravaging…but we don’t realize it, because much of the time it’s disguised as angelic. It’s disguised as something we all find “normal.” It’s only when things get horribly out of control that everyone sees sin for what it is, and by then it is too late.
Psalms like this help us to remember how serious sin is, because the outrage expressed over the abuse David’s feeling is proportionate to the offense: this is how sin should make us feel.
Joy Because of Justice (v. 10-11)
If we weren’t already uncomfortable enough over David’s language, he takes it even further in the final verses of the psalm, in which he describes not only our desire for justice—the kind of brutal justice described in v. 6-9—but the joy the righteous will feel when that justice is finally given. V. 10:
10 The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance;
he will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked.
11 Mankind will say, “Surely there is a reward for the righteous;
surely there is a God who judges on earth.”
That’s hard to read; any person with half a heart would be a little uncomfortable reading v. 6-9, and a little disgusted reading v. 10. David describes the kind of glee a particularly violent person celebrates after a victory on the battlefield: bathing his feet in the blood of the wicked. Why would that kind of judgment cause anyone to rejoice?
There are two reasons the psalmist gives, which all of humanity will see. The first is that “there is a God who judges on earth.” This only sounds like bad news to those who are guilty. Anyone who has been wronged—particularly those who have been traumatized by the wrongs committed against them—understands the immense relief of this promise. Imagine what will be like, when not a single injustice, throughout all human history, is forgotten or ignored, but exposed, and punished appropriately. How safe will the world be, when injustice is a thing of the past, because there is a God who judges on earth?
The second reason may be a little more difficult for us to accept—God’s judgment is reason for rejoicing because it will prove that “there is a reward for the righteous.” This is harder for us to integrate, because as we saw before, no one is righteous. We all have sin in us. So, at least if left on our own, we should all be on the receiving end of God’s judgment.
But this is what David understood, if only partially: God’s judgment against sin co-exists with his love for his people. He cannot abide sin, even the so-called “normal” sins we see in ourselves every day; he must judge sin.
At the same time, he loves his people, infinitely more and better than the best parents among us love our own children. So he does not wish to punish us. Punish our sin, absolutely; punish his people, never in life.
So how does he pull that off? At the time that David wrote this, he didn’t have the whole picture; but we do; we talked about it at the very beginning. God sent Jesus Christ to live a perfect, sinless life for us, in our place. He takes our sin, puts it on himself, and in exchange, gives us his perfect life. He is punished on the cross for our sin; and we are declared righteous before God, because we are wearing the perfect righteousness of Christ.
When David says, “Surely there is a reward for the righteous,” he’s talking about us—about all of us who have placed our faith in Christ. But he’s not talking about us because we live perfect, sinless lives. He’s talking about us because God has given us Christ’s perfect righteousness.
“Surely there is a reward for the righteous”—eternal life, eternal joy, eternal peace with God our Father.
“Surely there is a God who judges on earth”—Christ was judged for us, in our place, even more harshly than what David prayed for in Psalm 58.
What a joy to know where we stand in this situation—that if we have placed our faith in Christ, we are no longer on the side of the tyrants and abusers, no matter how imperfect we still may be, no matter how abusive we ourselves may have been in our past. We are counted among the righteous, and we will rejoice in God’s vengeance, because on that day—either because we see the wicked punished for their sin, or because we see Christ punished for our sin—all mankind will say, “Surely there is a reward for the righteous; surely there is a God who judges on earth.”
Conclusion
Now to close, let’s come back to our initial question: how can we square David’s prayer in this psalm with Jesus’s appeal to love our enemies?
David’s prayer is a prayer for justice, which is good and legitimate. He didn’t yet have the full picture of how this justice would come to pass; it’s logical that he would pray like this, because as far as he knows, how else could it possibly happen? We should take from this less the desire that God punish wicked people, and more the desire that God would punish wickedness.
Now I know this is hard to conceive of for some of us. I’ve known people who have been emotionally, psychologically and physically abused, by their spouses, or by their parents, or by someone they’re close to. That may even be the case (in fact, probably is the case) for at least some of you here. So it’s quite possible that you have prayed, as I have, that God would stop them. That he would punish these people—literally and immediately—that he would exercise his justice by letting his wrath fall on them.
If you’ve prayed like that, that’s okay: we all have reasons to do so, and those reasons are legitimate. But in the light of the gospel, here is what we need to keep in mind.
These cries for punishment are proportional to the gravity of sin. That’s why Jesus came in the first place: because sin is so horrific, sin is so grievous, that it deserves a worse punishment than any of us could imagine. In addition, sin is so horrific, and so grievous, that it deserves a punishment none of us could carry on our own—if it falls on us, we’ll be paying it for all eternity. Christ came to save his people from that…and we don’t know who God is going to bring into his family before he returns.
Those who are wicked today (that is, those who are either living for themselves, apart from Christ, or who are actively perpetrating evil against other people) may well continue the rest of their lives in wickedness, and die apart from Christ. These people will suffer a justice far worse than the punishment David prays for here: an eternity separated from God in hell. Justice will be done—not by us, but by God himself—and God’s people will rejoice because we will see that there is a God who judges on earth. That’s one possibility.
Here’s the other possibility. Those who are wicked today—even our enemies—may be radically and miraculously saved by Christ tomorrow. They may recognize the sin in their life, repent of their sins, turn to God in faith, and be saved by his incredible grace. In the case of these people, God’s people will rejoice as well, because we will see justice done for their sins too: the wrath of God, poured out on Jesus Christ, who took their sins on himself on the cross. We will rejoice, because we will see that surely there is a reward for the righteous.
So in the light of these realities, this psalm, and other psalms like it, should have four dramatic effects on us.
Firstly, if you are not living for God, this psalm should fill you with fear. It should cause you to realize that your rejection of God is far more serious than you suspected. It should open your eyes to the reality that you cannot save yourself from the wrath of God against your sin—that you need a Savior, and that you are invited to turn to him, and repent of your sin, and be forgiven. We’ll give you the opportunity to do that in just a minute.
Secondly—for those of us who already have repented of our sin and turned to Christ—this psalm should fill us with confidence that God is a just God, who punishes sin rightly. (These prayers are in the Bible, not as cautionary tales concerning how not to pray, but rather to teach us that such justice is a good thing.)
Thirdly, it should fill us with hatred of all sin, including our own. It should make us look at the sin in our lives with horror, because we know that whatever awful judgment the psalmist prays for, Christ endured that and much more, in our place, for us.
And lastly, it should fill us with a profound and unending gratitude that the justice prayed for is not executed on us, but for us. It should make us so thankful that we want to dedicate all of our lives—all of our eternity—to running away from sin, and towards holiness. It should make us want to be like Christ.
We will rejoice on the day of his judgment, even if today it seems harsh, because on that day, we will enjoy the reward of the righteous, and the peace of the God who judges on earth.
