A time to curse and a time to bless

BY CRAWFORD MACKENZIE

In our local congregation, we, in common with many churches, have several small pastoral groups that meet each week in individual homes, where we study the bible and pray. It is a very special time, with a wide range of ages, experiences, backgrounds and stages in life, but with a common love for the Lord and a bonding that transcends all human barriers.

We have just begun a short series of studies in the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament, not individual psalms but particular themes that run through the Psalter and which deal with almost every human emotion: joy, loneliness, honesty, remorse, sadness, fear, anger. In this we have been helped by James Montgomery Boyce, David O Taylor, John N Day, Gordon Wenham, Erich Zenger, Derek Kidner and CS Lewis.

Inevitably, we will have to consider the Psalms that include cursing, of which there are many. Throughout the centuries these have been a problem to Christians and it is not difficult to see why. They are also often quoted by those who argue against the divine inspiration and authority of scripture as reasons why we cannot believe in the Bible. “How can we take the Bible seriously” they will say, “as it is full of so many contradictions”. A good friend of mine only the other day said just that and gave this as the reason why he had stopped reading it. The authority of the Bible was subject to a higher authority; in his case, that of his own rational mind. So, it is really only a problem for the Christian who believes in the authority, authenticity and inerrancy of scripture. For those who don’t, it should be of little interest or concern.

But here I have a disturbing thought. Could it be that the reason why Christians find these words, of outright hatred and white-hot anger, problematic is that the problem is with us? Could it be that there is something about this God we are missing and just not getting? Could it be that we have not really grasped the absolute horror of evil, the heinousness of sin and where it inexorably leads? Maybe we haven’t stood by the remains of the furnace in Auschwitz and heard the guide tell us to be careful because we are standing among the dust of hundreds of murdered lives. Maybe we have never seen the heaps of bodies burning in Chin state in Myanmar. Maybe we have never been with the pastor visiting a village in the DRC, just a few months ago, and coming across the bodies of men, women and children lying where they were shot, with a single infant still alive in the arms of its dead mother. Maybe we have never recognised the corruption, deceit, lust, selfishness and greed that knocks at the door of our own hearts. Maybe we still think the battleline between good and evil lies not in us, but somewhere out there. 

Christians have found different ways of coping with this ‘problem’.

One was simply to ignore the offending passages. But that is hard to do, if you believe that “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”. So that doesn’t work.

Another is to see that these expressions are wrong and should be condemned. Scripture includes many things that are wrong, David’s sin with Bathsheba

being one. But that doesn’t really work either, because while David’s sin was condemned and he himself confessed it, the Bible, at no point, condemns the writers of these psalms for what they said or for the desire for vengeance which they expressed.

A third, which many have settled on, is the idea that these expressions belong to the Old Testament, while in the New, Jesus and Paul have shown us a better way — how we should love our enemies, how we should bless and not curse. The Psalm writers under this explanation had a limited understanding of things and really didn’t know any better. But this falls too, because love for your enemies was not a new idea or a new command. It is embedded in the Old Testament law and Jesus quoted the proverb which explicitly says we should feed our enemy when he is hungry and give him something to drink when he is thirsty. On the other side, Paul pronounced a curse on Elymas the magician and Jesus himself pronounced a curse on Israel. So, we have love for the enemy in the Old and curses in the New.

What we found most helpful and illuminating, as our own minister pointed out in a recent sermon, was to see what the writers of these psalms were not saying. The writers, who included David and the captured slaves in Babylon, were not describing their commitment to enact revenge on those who brutally persecuted them. They were not saying that they would repay the perpetrators for what was done to them. Their appeal was simply to God for justice. And that is what it is about — Justice. The justice described in the Mosaic law — the principal of equal and just retribution.

Today, when we hear the cry of families of victims of vicious crimes, it is always an appeal for justice, justice for the ones they loved. That’s what they fight for. That’s what they demand from the courts and that is what they never give up on, because it is Justice that is at stake. This is exactly what the writers of the cursing psalms are doing, they are crying out for an equal and just retribution. But for them the appeal is not to a human court, but to the highest court, to the Judge of all the earth. And it is this act of taking it, in all its rawness, to God and leaving it with him, which at once lances that boil, dissolves the rage, neutralises the anger and eliminates the personal desire for revenge. The outburst of outrage is more than just cathartic. It achieves something.

So, we have found, having taken these challenging passages which sound pretty terrible to our ears, taken them head on, unflinchingly, we have found that they do not, in fact, refute the law of love but they complement it, and we see how the curses and the blessings, the love and the hatred stand together in God’s Word, perfectly without contradiction. •

Crawford Mackenzie is an elder in St Peter’s Free Church, Dundee