Most of the vacations my family took when I was growing up involved camping. Sometimes we’d travel out of state, or we might just drive an hour or so into the Redwoods in Northern California. It was good being outside, and I enjoyed those times. But wasps and yellow jackets were a nuisance at certain times of the year. Sometimes we’d be harassed by dozens of them during mealtimes. And the adults would always say to us, “if you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone.” The only problem with this advice was that it didn’t work very well. We’d try to leave them alone, but they didn’t seem to realize that they were supposed to leave us alone in return. And very often someone would get stung. So, at some point, I began to realize that the world is not as benign as my elders wanted me to think.
Another expression I remember hearing as a child was this: “If you’re nice to people, they’ll be nice to you.” Have you ever heard that? The assumption was that people are basically good, and if you treat them that way, they’ll respond positively. And often it’s true that people respond in positive ways when we are kind and polite to them. But not always. There are some people who will turn things around and use your kindness as an opportunity to take advantage of you in some way. There are some people who take delight in doing harm.
There’s also a spiritualized version of this general outlook. It assumes that if we do all the right things–if we read God’s Word regularly, go to church every Sunday, pray often, and avoid serious sin–God will reward us by causing our lives to go well. Bad things won’t happen to us, and we’ll have a happy and prosperous life. God’s desire is for us to have an abundant life, and if we keep ourselves out of trouble He’ll make things go well for us.
When we grow up thinking of this world as a relatively benign place–a place where people will be nice to you if you are nice to them, a world where insects and animals will not harm you if you leave them alone, a world where Christian obedience leads to a trouble-free life–we’re headed for trouble. At some point, this naive, optimistic view of the world will come face to face with reality. And when that happens, people often become bitter and cynical. Life hasn’t turned out as they were led to believe, and many people who experience this never get over their disillusionment. We need help learning to walk with God through all the changes, uncertainties and pain of life as it really is. One of our greatest tools for learning to live as Christians in a fallen world is prayer, but not prayer as we usually think of it. Praying the Psalms can help us cultivate a relationship with God which faces realistically the ups and downs of life in this world that’s full of uncertainty, suffering and evil.
Walter Brueggemann groups the Psalms into three general types: Psalms of Orientation, Psalms of Disorientation, and Psalms of New Orientation. In the Psalms, we see God’s people responding to Him out of the whole range of human experience. There are times, first of all, when things are going well. Our lives seem to be on track and we’re aware of God’s blessing (Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, p. 19). The Psalms of Orientation grow out of these experiences. Here’s an example from Psalm 30: “When I felt secure, I said, ‘I will never be shaken.’ O Lord, when you favored me, you made my mountain stand firm” (Psalm 30:6-7a). We have times when everything is going well and we’re overflowing with gratitude to God for His gracious care and protection. The Psalms of Orientation help us to give thanks for these times.
But not all of life is like that. It’s tempting to only read these Psalms and to neglect all the others, but when we do that we end up cultivating a romanticized spirituality that is not true to real life in this fallen world. So the next category is important: There are times when our lives are full of anguish and pain, seasons of “hurt, alienation, suffering, and death.” There are times when everything seems to be going wrong and we wonder why God is no longer taking care of us (p. 19). The more negative Psalms respond to this side of life. The Psalmist cries out in despair, or in anger, at what is happening. These Psalms are called Psalms of Disorientation. The Psalmist had been comfortable; things had been going well, but now everything is falling apart. Here are the same verses from Psalm 30, but listen to what follows: “When I felt secure, I said, ‘I will never be shaken.’ O Lord, when you favored me, you made my mountain stand firm, but when you hid your face, I was dismayed” (Psalm 30:6-7). He felt like he would never be shaken, but then God hid His face, and the Psalmist says “I was dismayed.” He became disoriented. Abraham Kuyper was the prime minister of Holland, but he was also a theologian and a preacher. He said this: “When for the first time... the cross with its full weight is laid upon our shoulders, the first effect is that it makes us numb and dazed and causes all knowledge of God to be lost.” We find ourselves shocked and dazed and disoriented. We feel weak and vulnerable, as if the bottom has dropped out of our world. The Psalms of Disorientation grow out of these experiences, and they can help us pray during these times.
But the process doesn’t end there. There are also times when God intervenes in surprising ways, and we are “overwhelmed with the new gifts of God, when joy breaks through the despair. Where there has been only darkness, there is light” (p. 19). We can see this in the next verses of Psalm 30: “To you, O Lord, I called; to the Lord I cried for mercy: ‘What gain is there in my destruction....’ You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing to you and not be silent. O Lord my God , I will give you thanks forever” (vv. 8-12). The Psalms of New Orientation reflect the surprise of God’s grace. We were overwhelmed, all hope seemed to be gone, but then God intervened and changed everything. There’s a great example of this in the book of Lamentations. Jeremiah had prophesied for many years predicting the destruction of Jerusalem, and now it has all come true. Lamentations is Jeremiah’s cry of despair in the midst of all the suffering and destruction around him. He reaches a low point in chapter three: “He has broken my teeth with gravel; he has trampled me in the dust. I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is. So I say, ‘My splendor is gone and all that I had hoped from the Lord’” (3:16-18). He’s given up hope. He no longer looks for help, even from the Lord. But then, just three verses later he says this: “Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (vv. 21-23). This is one of those “turns of surprise when we are overwhelmed with the new gifts of God, when joy breaks through the despair.”
Psalm 120 is a Psalm of Disorientation. The Psalmist is sick of living in a world full of lies and violence. “I call on the Lord in my distress, and he answers me. Save me, O Lord, from lying lips and from deceitful tongues.” Or, “Deliver me from the liars, God! They smile so sweetly, but lie through their teeth” (The Message). He complains that he is living in Meshech, among the tents of Kedar. These tribes live thousands of miles apart, so he doesn’t want us to take this literally. These names represent certain qualities. Here’s how Eugene Peterson describes them: “Meshech and Kedar are place names: Meshech is a far-off tribe, thousands of miles from Palestine in southern Russia; Kedar a wandering Bedouin tribe of barbaric reputation along Israel’s borders. They represent the strange and the hostile. Paraphrased, the cry is, ‘I live in the midst of hoodlums and wild savages; this world is not my home and I want out’” (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction). He wants to live in peace, but they want to fight. He’s tried being nice to them, in the hopes that they will respond in a positive way. But they haven’t. “I am a man of peace; but when I speak, they are for war.”
The distress of living among wicked people has often been difficult for God’s people. Peter says that Lot, Abraham’s nephew, who lived in Sodom just before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, was “sick of all the immorality and wickedness around him. Yes, he was a righteous man who was distressed by the wickedness he saw and heard day after day” (2 Peter 2:7-8, New Living Translation). Following Jesus brings us into conflict with the ways of this world. In this fallen world, the wicked often prosper and succeed. They oppress others and get away with it, and often it seems like their lives are charmed. The author of Psalm 73 struggled with this problem: “For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong. They are free from the burdens common to man; they are not plagued by human ills. Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence.... This is what the wicked are like--always carefree, they increase in wealth” (Psalm 73:3-6, 12). It’s not very difficult to find examples of this in our own society. And watching this causes us to grieve. But the author of Psalm 120 doesn’t just grieve. He doesn’t just get depressed about it. He cries out to God in his distress. Rather than driving him away from God, his distress causes him to seek God all the more.
Part of the Psalmist’s prayer life involves complaining to God, instead of complaining to others. I’m afraid our tendency is too often just the opposite. Maybe we’re not comfortable with the idea of bringing our complaints to God. Maybe we feel like we need to be at our best in prayer and feel guilty about venting these emotions in God’s presence. These things don’t seem spiritual enough to be part of our prayer lives. But then what often happens is that we vent our frustrations to one another. And things just get worse. We become more angry and resentful at the situation, and the more we talk about it the more we realize our powerlessness to bring about any change.
But the Psalmist also voices his desire for vengeance and justice: “What will he do to you...? He will punish you.” He’s tired of living among these people, and he’s tired of seeing them get away with their lies and deceitful speech. He’s tired of their violence toward those who seek peace. And in his powerlessness, he cries out, “God is going to punish you for this.” He’s not actually addressing them directly. He’s speaking to them in God’s presence, as if they were there.
This desire for vengeance is very common in the Psalms, and Christians often struggle with it. How should we handle these Psalms? Can we pray them at all? Especially in the light of Jesus’ command to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us, and His example when He said “Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing,” it’s difficult to know what to do with these cries for vengeance. One of the most notorious examples is at the end of Psalm 137: “O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us--he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks” (vv. 8-9). Psalm 120 is considerably less brutal, but the desire for vengeance is still there. Eugene Peterson makes this observation: “The Psalmists are angry people. In the presence of God they have realized that the world is not a benign place where everyone is doing their best to get along with the others and that if we all just try a little harder things are going to turn out all right” (Answering God, p. 101).
It’s tempting to try to confine this outlook to the Old Testament, saying that these Psalms belong to an earlier stage of revelation and that the New Testament has canceled them out. It’s tempting to think that we’re beyond these vengeance Psalms. But listen to what Paul says in Romans 12: “Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Romans 12:19). He doesn’t say we should do away with the desire for vengeance, but that we need to leave it with God. And listen to these verses from Revelation: “When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, ‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” (6:9-10). If there’s anywhere we might expect a complete laying aside of this desire for vengeance, it’s before God’s throne in heaven. But here we see these martyrs, who are now in God’s presence, crying out for God to avenge their blood. So, the desire for vengeance is not only in the Psalter, it is also acknowledged in the New Testament.
But this desire for vengeance is also within us. Why do we become so outraged when someone gets off after committing a serious crime? We can dress it up all we want, but the truth is that we want to see these people punished. In the 1980's, Bernhard Goetz was accosted on the subway in New York City by several young men. But instead of giving them his money, he pulled out a handgun and started shooting. What he did had immense popular support, especially among people who had been mugged. Nearly everyone I spoke to felt good about what Goetz had done. It’s not just that people felt he had a right to defend himself against attack. In the minds of many people in our society, the guys who mugged him were finally getting what they deserved. There is within us the desire to see justice done, to see evil people punished for their crimes. When we witness an act of injustice, our natural response is to cry out for vengeance.
But we need to go further. Scripture also makes it clear that God is concerned with vengeance. When Paul says, in Romans 12, that vengeance belongs to the Lord, he is taking the right to vengeance away from us, but he is also saying that God Himself will deal out vengeance with perfect justice. He is even stronger in 2 Thessalonians: “God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord” (2 Thessalonians 1:6-9). God’s vengeance is the other side of His compassion. When He delivers His people from oppression, He also punishes their oppressors, as He did when He delivered Israel from the Egyptians. His vengeance is an expression of His justice. Because God is just, He punishes evil.
So, God is a God of justice, who will exercise vengeance on those who persist in oppressing others, and He has created us in His own image, with an innate desire for justice. The problem for us is, what do we do with this sense of outrage that wells up within us? If we’re not permitted to take vengeance, but are at the same time created with a desire for justice, how do we deal with the emotional turmoil that results from injustice, either committed against ourselves or those we care about. What do we do with our God-given emotional response to the evil things people do to one another? How do we get from where we are to where God is calling us to be? How do we let go of the rage that wells up within us?
Praying these Psalms of Vengeance is a good first step. They help us give voice to things we probably wouldn’t express otherwise, things we may not even want to face in ourselves. Rage is similar to grief. If we try to suppress it, it will reappear in some other form and will do much damage. It needs to be expressed and articulated. We need to recognize and take ownership for our rage, and then we need to yield it to God’s wisdom and providential care, saying to God “but you know best how to deal with this.” Praying these Psalms gives us a way to express these powerful feelings, feelings which can turn into bitterness, or something worse, if we don’t deal with them. Walter Brueggemann says this: “The Psalms serve to legitimate and affirm these most intense elements of rage. In such speech, we discover that our words (and feelings) do not destroy the enemy, that is, they are not as dangerous as we thought. Nor do our words bring judgment from heaven on us.... Our feelings brought to speech are not as dangerous or as important as we imagined, as we wished, or as we feared. When they are unspoken, they loom too large, and we are condemned by them. When spoken, our intense thoughts and feelings are brought into a context in which they can be discerned differently” (Praying the Psalms, p. 59).
We often move too quickly to the point of forgiveness and grace, without facing fully what is really in our hearts. When we do that, the result is less than what God is calling us to. Eugene Peterson says some wise things about dealing with hatred: “Hate is our emotional link with the spirituality of evil. It is the volcanic eruption of outrage when the holiness of being, ours or another’s, has been violated. It is also the ugliest and most dangerous of our emotions, the hair trigger on a loaded gun. Embarrassed by the ugliness and fearful of the murderous, we commonly neither admit or pray our hate; we deny it and suppress it. But if it is not admitted it can quickly and easily metamorphose into the evil that provokes it; and if it is not prayed we have lost an essential insight and energy in doing battle with evil” (Answering God, p. 98). We need to admit it, and then bring it before God in prayer. Praying these Psalms helps us give expression to these things in God’s presence, where they can then be transformed. But until we’ve faced the truth, we’re not able to move ahead. We can’t forgive until we’ve faced the depth of our anger and hatred. God commands us to forgive, but to get there we first need to express, in His presence, our desire for vengeance.
“Hate is similar to hurt. Hurt brings us to our knees crying for help. Hate brings us to our feet crying for justice. It is often the first sign that we care. Prayer doesn’t legitimize our hate. It uses our hate to get us moving. We bring it into God’s presence where we learn that he has ways of dealing with what we bring him that are both other and better than what we had in mind. But until we are in prayer, we are not teachable. It is better to pray badly than not to pray at all” (Answering God, pp. 99-100). When we’re crying out for vengeance, we’re not at our best. But if we try to suppress our feelings, our anger will drive us away from God. We come before God as we are, not as we wish we were.
Praying these Psalms can also serve as a safety valve for our emotions. Brueggemann observes that in our society, where there is no place to express these feelings, violence is much more likely to break out. As far as we know, the Psalmists never take action to avenge themselves. Even in the most violent of these Psalms, the situation is committed to God and left in His hands. And we know that David refused to take vengeance on Saul, even when he twice had the chance to kill him. He said: “May the Lord judge between you and me. And may the Lord avenge the wrongs you have done to me, but my hand will not touch you” (1 Samuel 24:12). David trusted God to take vengeance, but he refused to do it himself. Many of the people who criticize these Psalms think they are primitive and brutal. We’re more civilized now. We know better. But given the escalation of violence in our society, do we really think we’re better off than these ancient people? Far better to cry out to God in this way and then leave the whole thing in His hands than to take vengeance ourselves, as so many are doing these days.
It’s significant that the first Psalm in this group is a lament, a cry of distress. The Psalms of Ascent were probably chanted by pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. The people of Israel were expected to go up to Jerusalem three times each year to visit the temple. The New Living Translation calls these Songs “for the ascent to Jerusalem.” The Message titles them “Pilgrim Songs.” These songs were useful to pilgrims on their way to the holy city, and they are useful to us, on our pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem. And this first one is a song for starting out. We begin with a realization that this world is not what we had hoped. It’s full of lies and deceit and violence. It’s a place where the wicked prosper, where bullies usually don’t get what they deserve, where the strong take advantage of the weak. We begin our pilgrimage crying out in despair: “Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live among the tents of Kedar! Too long have I lived among those who hate peace.” This world is not a benign place, so we cry out to God and begin our pilgrimage toward that better place which He has promised. “Psalm 120 is the decision to take one way as over against the other. It is the turning point marking the transition from a dreamy nostalgia for a better life to a rugged pilgrimage of discipleship in faith, from complaining about how bad things are to pursuing all things good” (Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p. 24). May God strengthen us to walk with Him until that day when we stand in His presence and hear Him say “well done, good and faithful servants.”
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