The Terrible Meek: The Justice of the Lamb Text: Psalm 137:7-9
Introduction: An Unfashionable Prayer
We come now to a portion of Scripture that makes modern Christians blush. It is a passage that many would prefer to quietly excise from their Bibles, or at least to treat as a regrettable outburst from a less enlightened time. Our therapeutic age, which prizes niceness above all other virtues, simply does not know what to do with a prayer that ends by calling for the violent death of enemy infants. We are taught to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek, and to pray for those who persecute us. And so we must. But we are also taught to sing the Psalms, all of them, and this means God intends to shape our hearts with prayers like this one. If we are embarrassed by this psalm, it is not the psalm that is the problem. The problem is us.
This is an imprecatory psalm, a psalm that calls down curses and judgment upon the enemies of God. And let us be clear: this is not a fit of personal pique. This is not the prayer of someone who was cut off in traffic. This is the corporate lament of a covenant people who have been ravaged, whose holy city has been burned, whose Temple has been desecrated, and whose children have been murdered before their eyes. This is a prayer born of profound trauma and righteous indignation, offered up by those who know that vengeance belongs to God, and who are therefore bold enough to ask Him to exercise it.
To understand this psalm, we must first dispense with the sentimentalism that passes for piety in our day. The God of the Bible is a God of justice, which means He is a God of wrath. His love is a holy love, which means it burns against all that is unholy. If we do not have a theology that can accommodate a prayer like this, then we do not have a biblical theology. We have a domesticated deity of our own making, a god who is always nice and never dangerous. But the God who is a consuming fire will not be managed. He will not be tamed. He will, however, teach His people how to pray, and sometimes, this is what it sounds like.
This prayer is not an abandonment of the New Testament ethic of love, but rather its necessary foundation. It is only because God takes sin and injustice this seriously that the cross is not a tragic waste, but a glorious triumph. It is because the wages of sin is truly death, a violent and bloody death, that the grace offered in Christ is so breathtaking. This psalm, in all its raw and terrible honesty, reminds us of the stakes. It reminds us what we were saved from, and it reminds us of the coming judgment from which Christ is our only refuge.
The Text
Remember, O Yahweh, against the sons of Edom
The day of Jerusalem,
Who said, “Tear it down! Tear it down
To its very foundation.”
O daughter of Babylon, you devastated one,
How blessed will be the one who repays you
With the recompense with which you have recompensed us.
How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your infants
Against the cliff.
(Psalm 137:7-9 LSB)
The Treachery of a Brother (v. 7)
The prayer for judgment begins not with the primary aggressor, Babylon, but with a treacherous relative: Edom.
"Remember, O Yahweh, against the sons of Edom The day of Jerusalem, Who said, 'Tear it down! Tear it down To its very foundation.'" (Psalm 137:7)
The Edomites were descendants of Esau, Jacob's brother. They were family. When the Babylonian armies besieged and destroyed Jerusalem in 586 B.C., the Edomites did not just stand by; they actively cheered on the destruction. They were gleeful participants in the downfall of their brother, Judah. The prophet Obadiah gives us the lurid details: they stood aloof, they rejoiced over their brother's ruin, they looted his goods, and they even cut off the fugitives who were trying to escape. Their cry, "Tear it down! Tear it down!" was a cry for total annihilation. It was a fratricidal curse.
And so the psalmist prays, "Remember, O Yahweh." This is not a request to jog God's memory, as though the Almighty might have forgotten. It is a covenantal appeal. It is a plea for God to act upon what He knows, to bring the facts of Edom's treachery into the courtroom of His justice. God had promised to bless those who blessed Abraham's seed and to curse those who cursed them (Genesis 12:3). Edom had cursed Judah with venomous glee. The psalmist is simply asking God to be true to His own word. This is a prayer for God to uphold His own character.
There is a profound principle here. The greatest animosity often comes not from outright enemies, but from apostate brothers. The deepest wounds are inflicted by those who should have been friends. Cain's hatred of Abel, Esau's of Jacob, the Pharisees' of Jesus. In the history of the church, the most vicious persecutions have often come from those who claimed the name of Christ but denied His power. This prayer reminds us that God sees and remembers every act of treachery against His people. He is the ultimate arbiter of family disputes, and His memory is long.
Lex Talionis for the Tyrant (v. 8)
Next, the psalmist turns his attention to the main perpetrator, the empire that acted as God's hammer of judgment but did so with monstrous cruelty.
"O daughter of Babylon, you devastated one, How blessed will be the one who repays you With the recompense with which you have recompensed us." (Psalm 137:8 LSB)
Babylon is addressed as a "devastated one," which is a prophecy. She who has devastated others will herself be devastated. This is the principle of lex talionis, the law of retribution: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The punishment must fit the crime. Babylon had measured out destruction, and that same measure would be applied to her. This is not a matter of personal, vindictive score-settling. It is an appeal for the scales of divine justice to be balanced in the public square of history.
The psalmist declares a blessing on the one who carries out this divine sentence. This is shocking to our ears, but it is thoroughly biblical. God uses human agents, even pagan ones, to execute His judgments. The Medes and Persians who would overthrow Babylon were, in this sense, acting as God's deacons of wrath. To be an instrument of God's righteous judgment is to be, in that moment, on the side of the good. When a magistrate orders the execution of a murderer, he is doing a blessed thing because he is upholding the image of God and restraining evil. This prayer recognizes that the destruction of a wicked and bloodthirsty empire is a positive good. It is a cause for blessing.
This is a hard truth for a soft generation, but it is a necessary one. A God who does not judge evil is not a good God. A world where wickedness is never called to account is a moral cesspool. The psalmist longs for justice not just for his own sake, but for the sake of God's holy name, which had been profaned by Babylon's arrogance. He is praying for the vindication of God's righteousness in the sight of the nations.
The Terrible Blessing (v. 9)
We now arrive at the verse that causes the most consternation, the one that is the true stumbling block for modern sensibilities.
"How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your infants Against the cliff." (Psalm 137:9 LSB)
Let us not flinch or try to explain this away. This is a prayer for the violent extermination of the next generation of Babylonians. Why? Because this is precisely what the Babylonians had done to the Israelites. In the brutal warfare of the ancient world, killing the infants of a conquered people was standard practice. It was a way of ensuring that the vanquished nation could never rise again. Their future was literally dashed against the rocks. The prophet Isaiah had foretold this very thing concerning Babylon: "Their infants also will be dashed to pieces before their eyes" (Isaiah 13:16). The psalmist is praying for the fulfillment of prophecy. He is praying for Babylon to drink the cup of God's wrath that she had forced upon others.
This is not an endorsement of cruelty for its own sake. It is a stark recognition that sin has consequences, and that those consequences ripple out through generations. A wicked empire is a corporate entity, and its judgment falls upon the whole. The children of Babylon were the heirs of a kingdom built on blood and idolatry. Their destruction, as horrific as it sounds to us, was the final stroke of the divine pen that wrote "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" on the wall of Belshazzar's palace. The kingdom had been weighed, found wanting, and its future was now forfeit.
But there is a deeper, typological meaning here. Babylon, in Scripture, is more than just a historical empire. It is the archetypal city of man, the great enemy of God's people, the harlot drunk on the blood of the saints. And the "infants" of Babylon are not just literal babies; they are the nascent projects, the budding philosophies, the foundational principles of rebellion against God. To dash the infants of Babylon against the rock is to destroy sin at its root. It is to take every proud thought captive before it can grow into a monstrous act of defiance. It is to kill the seed of rebellion before it can sprout.
The Rock is Christ
And what is the rock against which they are to be dashed? The psalmist may have had a literal cliff in mind, but the whole of Scripture points us to the ultimate Rock. "For who is God, but Yahweh? And who is a rock, except our God?" (Psalm 18:31). The rock is Christ.
Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of the church, a rock of refuge for all who flee to Him. But for those who reject Him, He is the stone of stumbling and the rock of offense (1 Peter 2:7-8). He is the stone that the builders rejected, which will one day fall upon the kingdoms of this world and grind them to powder (Daniel 2:34-35). The judgment that the psalmist called for on Babylon is a foreshadowing of the final judgment that Christ will execute upon all His enemies at His return.
This psalm, then, is a profoundly Christian prayer when understood correctly. It teaches us to hate evil with a perfect hatred. It teaches us to long for the day when all wrongs will be made right, when the tears will be wiped from the eyes of God's people, and when the smoke of Babylon's torment will rise forever and ever (Revelation 19:3). We are not to take up the sword ourselves and dash literal infants against the rocks. Vengeance belongs to God. But we are to pray for His kingdom to come and His will to be done, on earth as it is in heaven. And His will includes the final, decisive, and violent overthrow of all that sets itself up against Him.
When we pray this psalm, we are aligning our hearts with the justice of God. We are saying that we want what God wants. We are asking Him to vindicate His own name, to protect His people, and to bring an end to the tyranny of sin. We are asking Him to remember the day of Jerusalem, but we are also looking forward to the day of the New Jerusalem. And we are taking every infant thought of our own rebellion, our own pride, our own bitterness, and we are dashing them against the Rock. For blessed is the one who takes the beginnings of sin and destroys them upon the foundation of Christ.