The Cursing and the Christ: A Prayer for Justice Text: Psalm 109:6-20
Introduction: The Scandal of Imprecation
We live in a sentimental age. Our generation has mistaken niceness for virtue and has consequently concluded that the God of the Old Testament must have been some sort of embarrassing, ill-tempered relative that the New Testament tries to politely ignore. And nowhere does this discomfort flare up more acutely than in the imprecatory psalms. These are the psalms that call down curses on the heads of God's enemies. And Psalm 109 is perhaps the fiercest of them all.
Modern evangelicals, steeped in a therapeutic, consumeristic faith, don't know what to do with a passage like this. It feels vindictive, personal, and frankly, a bit un-Christlike. We are, after all, the people who are told to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. So we tend to skip over these psalms, or we try to explain them away as a pre-Christian, sub-standard ethic that Jesus came to correct. But this is a profound error. The New Testament doesn't discard these psalms; it quotes them. The Apostle Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, quotes this very psalm to explain the treachery of Judas Iscariot (Acts 1:20). This is not an embarrassing relic; it is inspired prophecy.
To understand this psalm, we must first dispense with the notion that justice is somehow contrary to love. Biblical love is not a squishy, sentimental tolerance of all things. True love rejoices with the truth, and that means it must hate falsehood. True love desires righteousness, which means it must despise wickedness. To love the lamb is to hate the wolf that would devour it. A God who is indifferent to evil would not be a God of love; He would be a moral monster. The imprecatory psalms are not the whinings of a petulant man seeking personal revenge. They are the Spirit-inspired prayers of God's anointed, calling for God to vindicate His own righteousness in a world that is in open rebellion against Him. They are a surrender of vengeance to the only one who can execute it perfectly. They are prayers for justice.
This psalm, in its raw intensity, forces us to confront the reality of evil, the holiness of God's law, and the ultimate destiny of those who set themselves against the Lord and His Anointed. And as we shall see, it points us directly to the cross, where the greatest curse in history was poured out upon the head of the only innocent man who ever lived.
The Text
Appoint a wicked man over him, And let an accuser stand at his right hand. When he is judged, let him come forth a wicked man, And let his prayer become sin. Let his days be few; Let another take his office. Let his sons be orphans And his wife a widow. Let his sons wander aimlessly and beg; And let them search for food from their ruined homes. Let the creditor seize all that he has, And let strangers plunder the fruit of his labor. Let there be none to extend lovingkindness to him, And let there be none to be gracious to his orphans. Let those who follow him be cut off; In a following generation let their name be blotted out. Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before Yahweh, And let not the sin of his mother be blotted out. Let them be before Yahweh continually, That He may cut off their memory from the earth; Because he did not remember to show lovingkindness, But persecuted the afflicted, the needy man, And the disheartened to put them to death. He also loved cursing, so it came to him; And he did not delight in blessing, so it was far from him. But he clothed himself with cursing as his garment, And it came into his inward parts like water And like oil into his bones. Let it be to him as a garment with which he wraps himself, And for a belt with which he constantly girds himself. This is the reward of my accusers from Yahweh, And of those who speak evil against my soul.
(Psalm 109:6-20 LSB)
Lex Talionis: The Law of the Harvest (vv. 6-8)
The psalmist, having laid out his case in the opening verses, now unleashes a torrent of curses. This is not personal vengeance; it is a prayer for God to apply His own stated principles of justice.
"Appoint a wicked man over him, And let an accuser stand at his right hand. When he is judged, let him come forth a wicked man, And let his prayer become sin. Let his days be few; Let another take his office." (Psalm 109:6-8)
The prayer begins with a request for retributive justice, what the Romans called lex talionis, the law of retaliation. The enemy has been a false accuser, so let a true accuser, Satan himself (the word for accuser is satan), stand at his right hand, the place of the prosecutor in court. Let him be ruled by a man as wicked as himself. Let Herod have a Herod to rule over him, and Stalin a Stalin. When he is brought to trial, let his own wickedness condemn him. Let the verdict be guilty.
The curse goes even deeper: "let his prayer become sin." This is a terrifying thought. When a man's heart is so set in rebellion, even his attempts at piety are an abomination to God. His prayers are not pleas for mercy but are manipulative attempts to use God for his own ends. Think of the Pharisees who, for a pretense, made long prayers. God is not mocked. For the impenitent heart, the very act of prayer, which should be a means of grace, becomes another layer of condemnation.
Then comes the verse Peter quotes regarding Judas: "Let his days be few; Let another take his office" (Acts 1:20). This is a prayer for his life to be cut short and his position of influence to be given to a righteous man. This is crucial. It tells us that David is not just speaking about some personal enemy; he is speaking prophetically about the ultimate betrayer of the ultimate King. This whole psalm finds its focal point in the treachery of Judas against the Lord Jesus. David's troubles were a type, a shadow, of the suffering Christ would endure.
The Covenantal Curse (vv. 9-15)
The curses now expand from the individual to his entire line, which strikes our modern, individualistic ears as unfair. But the Bible thinks covenantally, not individualistically.
"Let his sons be orphans And his wife a widow... Let those who follow him be cut off... Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before Yahweh, And let not the sin of his mother be blotted out." (Psalm 109:9, 13, 14)
This is not a prayer for innocent children to suffer. It is a prayer for the logical, covenantal consequences of high-handed wickedness to be fully realized. In the biblical worldview, a man's legacy, his name, and his household are all bound up together. When a man sets himself against God, he brings his entire house under the curse of the covenant. Think of Achan, whose sin brought disaster on all of Israel and whose entire family was judged with him. This is not because God is unjust, but because sin is a corporate contagion. The wicked man has poisoned his own well, and his children will drink from it.
The prayer is for total ruin: destitution, begging, seizure of property, and a complete lack of mercy from others. Why? Because this is precisely the kind of man he was. He showed no mercy, so let him receive none. This is the logic of the kingdom. "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy" (Matt. 5:7). The inverse is also true.
The curse extends not only forward to his posterity but backward to his ancestors. "Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered." This is not blaming him for their sin, but rather recognizing that his wickedness is the culmination of a generational rebellion. He has filled up the measure of his fathers' guilt. God is patient, but there comes a point where the line of rebellion is so entrenched that He says, "Enough." The prayer is for God to finally bring the long-delayed judgment and to blot out their very memory from the earth.
The Garment of Cursing (vv. 16-20)
The psalm now gives the rationale for this fierce judgment. It is a perfect application of the principle of sowing and reaping.
"Because he did not remember to show lovingkindness... He also loved cursing, so it came to him... he clothed himself with cursing as his garment... This is the reward of my accusers from Yahweh..." (Psalm 109:16, 17, 18, 20)
The reason for this terrible judgment is laid bare. This man was a persecutor of the weak and helpless. He was merciless. He was a man who loved to curse others. Blessing was not in his vocabulary. Therefore, the prayer is simply that God would give him what he loves. Let the curses he pronounced on others come home to roost. Let them be returned to him, measure for measure.
The imagery is striking. He "clothed himself with cursing as his garment." Cursing was not an occasional activity for him; it was his identity. It was what he wrapped himself in every morning. It was his public persona. The prayer is that this external garment would become an internal reality. Let it soak into him like water, penetrating his very being. Let it get into his bones like oil. Let it become the belt that he can never take off. He made his bed of curses, so let him lie in it for eternity.
The psalmist concludes this section by affirming that this is not his own personal vendetta. "This is the reward of my accusers from Yahweh." This is what God's justice requires. He is simply aligning his will with God's revealed will. He is praying Scripture back to God, asking God to be God and to do what He has promised to do: to judge the wicked and vindicate the righteous.
Judas and the Just One
As the New Testament makes clear, this psalm is ultimately about Christ and Judas. Judas was the accuser who stood at Jesus's right hand, a trusted friend who betrayed Him. He came under the judgment of a wicked man, the corrupt priest Caiaphas. His prayer, if he offered one, was sin. His days were few, and another, Matthias, took his office. His end was destruction.
But the ultimate fulfillment of the curse happened at the cross. Jesus, the truly afflicted and needy man, was persecuted to death. And on that cross, He who knew no sin was made to be sin for us. He who was the source of all blessing became a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). He clothed Himself with our cursing as His garment. The wrath of God, the full measure of the covenantal curse against our sin, soaked into His inward parts like water and into His bones like oil.
All the curses of this psalm, and all the curses of the law, found their target in Him. Why? So that all the blessings of the covenant might be ours. He took what we deserved so that we might receive what He deserved. He was made an orphan on the cross, crying out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" so that we might be adopted as sons. His name was blotted out for a time, buried in the earth, so that our names might be written in the Lamb's Book of Life.
Therefore, we can pray these psalms, but we must do so with fear and trembling, and always through the lens of the cross. We pray them against the enemies of Christ and His church, the principalities and powers, the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. We pray for God's justice to be done on earth as it is in heaven. And we pray them with the humble recognition that, apart from the grace of God in Christ, these curses would be our own just reward. The foundation for all righteous imprecation is the prayer of the cursed one: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Because He drank the cup of cursing to the dregs, we can drink the cup of blessing forever.