The Righteousness of a Violent Prayer
Introduction: The Insolence of Autonomy
We live in a sentimental age. It is an age that has mistaken niceness for virtue and has consequently concluded that the God of the Old Testament must be some sort of embarrassing, hot-tempered uncle that we keep in the attic. The modern evangelical mind, particularly in the West, is often squeamish when it comes to the imprecatory psalms. These are the prayers that call for judgment, that ask God to bring down His heavy hand upon the heads of the wicked. We read them, and our therapeutic sensibilities are offended. We wonder if we can really sing such things in church without frightening the visitors.
But this discomfort is a symptom of a profound theological sickness. We have forgotten that the opposite of love is not hatred, but indifference. A righteous man is not one who floats through the world in a placid state of universal benevolence, smiling benignly at both the rapist and his victim. A righteous man loves what God loves, and therefore, he must hate what God hates. To refuse to pray against wickedness is to make a quiet peace with it. It is to signal that you do not really believe that evil is as evil as God says it is, or that justice is as important as God says it is.
Psalm 10 is a raw, honest cry from a man who is vexed by the apparent prosperity and arrogance of the wicked. The psalmist has laid out his case: the evildoer is proud, he persecutes the poor, he boasts, and in his heart, he says, "God has forgotten; He hides His face; He will never see it." This is the ancient lie of autonomy. It is the belief that a man can carve out a little space for himself in God's world and run it according to his own lusts, free from the divine gaze. It is the creed of the practical atheist. Our verses today are the turning point of the psalm, where the complaint transitions into a confident, violent, and entirely righteous petition for divine justice.
This is not the prayer of a man seeking personal revenge. This is not about settling a petty score. This is a prayer for the vindication of God's own name and the defense of His order in the world. The psalmist is asking God to be God. He is asking God to act in accordance with His own revealed character. And in doing so, he provides us with a necessary corrective to our own limp-wristed piety. He teaches us how to pray when evil struts and puffs out its chest.
The Text
Break the arm of the wicked and the evildoer,
Seek out his wickedness until You find none.
Yahweh is King forever and ever;
Nations have perished from His land.
(Psalm 10:15-16 LSB)
A Prayer for Powerless Evil (v. 15)
The psalmist begins with a startlingly graphic request:
"Break the arm of the wicked and the evildoer, Seek out his wickedness until You find none." (Psalm 10:15)
Let us be plain. "Break the arm" is a prayer for incapacitation. In the Old Testament, the arm is a symbol of strength, power, and the ability to execute one's will. To have a strong arm is to be able to oppress, to seize, to strike. The psalmist is not praying for the wicked to have a bad day. He is praying that their ability to do harm would be utterly shattered. He is asking God to de-fang the serpent, to take away the power that makes the evildoer a threat. This is a prayer for impotence. It is a prayer that the wicked man's schemes would fall apart in his hands, that his enterprises would fail, that his strength would turn to water.
This is a profoundly practical prayer. When we see corrupt politicians devising laws to rob the populace, when we see corporate raiders destroying livelihoods for their own gain, when we see purveyors of filth targeting our children, what should we pray? Should we pray, "Lord, help them to see things from a different perspective?" That is a fine prayer, but it does not go far enough. The psalmist teaches us to pray, "Lord, break their arms. Make them powerless. Let their wicked hands find nothing to do." We are praying for the machinery of their evil to grind to a halt.
But the prayer goes deeper. "Seek out his wickedness until You find none." This can be understood in two ways, both of which are true. First, it is a prayer for a thorough and exhaustive judgment. It is asking God to conduct a meticulous audit of the wicked man's life. Leave no sin unturned, no transgression unjudged. Pursue his evil down every crooked path until the account is settled and the debt is paid in full. It is a prayer for the finality of divine justice, that no wickedness would be left to fester.
Second, and more gloriously, it can be seen as a prayer for the complete eradication of the man's wickedness, which could happen through one of two means: utter destruction or radical conversion. God seeks out his wickedness until He finds none because either the man himself has been removed, or the wickedness within the man has been crucified by grace. The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him your brother. When Saul of Tarsus was persecuting the church, the saints were no doubt praying for God to break his arm. And God answered, not by striking him with leprosy, but by striking him blind on the road to Damascus. God sought out his wickedness and destroyed it at the cross of Christ, and found none left in the new man, Paul the Apostle. We should pray these imprecations with the glad hope that God might answer them in the most surprising way, through the miracle of regeneration.
The Unshakable Throne (v. 16)
From the petition, the psalmist moves to a declaration of bedrock reality. The prayer is not launched into the void; it is anchored in the character of the one being addressed.
"Yahweh is King forever and ever; Nations have perished from His land." (Psalm 10:16 LSB)
This is the foundation of all imprecatory prayer. We can pray for God to act like a king because He is the King. "Yahweh is King forever and ever." This is not a hope or a wish; it is a statement of fact. His reign is not temporary. It does not depend on election results or popular opinion. The wicked man may think he is king of his own little dung heap, but there is a true King on an eternal throne who holds the man's every breath in His hand. The psalmist's confidence is not in the strength of his prayer, but in the sovereignty of the King to whom he prays.
This demolishes all forms of dualism. God and Satan are not locked in an eternal arm-wrestling match where the outcome is in doubt. God is the King; all others are creatures. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to the risen Christ. He is reigning now, at this moment, subduing His enemies. Our prayers for justice are simply asking Him to do what He is already doing, to extend His righteous reign into the dark corners of the world where rebels are still playing king for a day.
And the psalmist provides the historical proof: "Nations have perished from His land." He looks back at the history of Israel and remembers. Where are the Canaanites? Where are the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Perizzites? They were nations who set themselves against the King and His people. They were arrogant, idolatrous, and cruel. And now, they are footnotes in a history book. God promised the land to His people, and He cleansed it of those who defied Him. They perished. They were swept away.
This is a profound encouragement and a sober warning. It tells us that God's judgments are not theoretical. He deals with rebellious nations in history, on the ground. The wicked are not a permanent fixture. Empires that seem invincible can be turned to dust. The psalmist is reasoning from the past to the present. If God did this to the mighty Canaanite nations, He can certainly deal with this one strutting evildoer who is causing trouble now. It reminds us that we serve a God who acts. History is the unfolding story of His kingdom's advance and the progressive ruin of all rival kingdoms.
Conclusion: Praying with an Iron Spine
So what do we do with a passage like this? First, we must repent of our sentimentalism. We must ask God to give us a spine of steel when it comes to evil. We must learn to hate what is truly hateful and to long for the establishment of true justice. This does not mean we become bitter, vindictive people. We are commanded to love our personal enemies, to bless those who curse us. But when we see the enemies of God oppressing the poor, mocking His law, and destroying the innocent, we are commanded to want it to stop. And the way we register that righteous desire is through prayer, sharp-edged prayer.
Second, we must ground our prayers in God's sovereignty. The reason we can pray "Break their arm" is because "Yahweh is King forever and ever." Our prayers are not desperate pleas hurled at an impotent deity. They are appeals to the reigning monarch of the universe to enforce the laws of His own kingdom. We are on the side of the management. We are asking the King to bring His already-established authority to bear on a particular situation.
Finally, we must pray with a postmillennial confidence. The psalmist remembers that nations have perished from His land. We look forward and know that all nations will one day stream to His land, the mountain of the Lord's house. The Great Commission is not a suggestion; it is a prophecy. Christ will have the nations for His inheritance. The knowledge of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. Therefore, when we pray for the arm of the wicked to be broken, we are praying for the removal of an obstacle to the advance of the gospel. We are praying for the clearing of the ground so that the kingdom may be built. These are not prayers of despair; they are the prayers of victors, asking our King to complete the conquest He began at the cross and sealed at the empty tomb.