The Boomerang Effect of Malice Text: Psalm 140:9-11
Introduction: The Hard Prayers
We live in a sentimental age. It is an age that has mistaken niceness for virtue and has concluded that the most loving thing you can do is to never, under any circumstances, offend anyone. Our modern worship songs reflect this; they are often filled with a sort of vague, therapeutic deism where Jesus is my celestial boyfriend and all the enemies have been airbrushed out of the picture. But the God-breathed songbook of the Church, the Psalter, knows nothing of this saccharine sentimentality. The Psalms are earthy, robust, and at times, terrifying. They are full of enemies, slanderers, violent men, and prayers that God would deal with them justly and finally.
These prayers are called the imprecatory psalms, the cursing psalms, and they are a stumbling block for many modern Christians. We are taught to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, and so we should. But we are not taught to do so in a way that requires us to pretend that our enemies are not, in fact, enemies, or that their evil is not, in fact, evil. To pray for your enemy's repentance is a good thing. But to pray that God would thwart their wicked plans, and that He would do so in a way that vindicates His own righteousness, is also a profoundly good and necessary thing. The two are not at odds.
The imprecatory psalms are not outbursts of personal vindictiveness. They are not the rantings of a man who has lost his temper. They are inspired prayers for the justice of God to be manifested in the world. They are prayers that recognize that the central conflict in the universe is not between me and the man who slighted me, but between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness. When David prays like this, he is praying as the Lord's anointed, beset by treacherous men who hate him because they hate the God who anointed him. His enemies are God's enemies. And so he prays for God to act like God.
These prayers are an appeal to the highest court in the universe. They are a refusal to take matters into one's own hands. Instead of seeking personal revenge, the psalmist hands the case over to the only righteous Judge. He is asking God to uphold the moral order of the universe that He himself established. He is praying for poetic justice, for the natural consequences of sin to come home to roost. He is praying, in effect, that the wicked would be snared in the very traps they set for the righteous. This is not hatred; it is a profound love for justice, righteousness, and the glory of God's name.
The Text
"As for the head of those who surround me, May the trouble from their lips cover them. May burning coals be shaken out upon them; May He cause them to fall into the fire, Into bottomless pits from which they can never rise. May a slanderer not be established in the earth; May evil hunt the violent man speedily.”
(Psalm 140:9-11 LSB)
The Logic of Lex Talionis (v. 9)
We begin with the principle of righteous retribution.
"As for the head of those who surround me, May the trouble from their lips cover them." (Psalm 140:9 LSB)
David is surrounded by a conspiracy of wickedness. He identifies the "head," the ringleader, the chief strategist of this opposition. And what is his prayer? It is a prayer for a perfect, symmetrical justice. The weapon they used against him was the "trouble from their lips." They used slander, lies, malicious accusations, and deceitful words to try to destroy him. Their mouths were the source of the mischief. So David prays that this very mischief would boomerang back and cover them. He is asking that they be forced to wear their own verbal filth as a garment.
This is the principle of lex talionis, an eye for an eye. Not in the sense of personal vengeance, but as a principle of divine judgment. God's judgments are never arbitrary; they are fitting. They are tailored to the crime. Haman builds a gallows for Mordecai and ends up swinging from it himself. The enemies of Daniel conspire to have him thrown to the lions, and they and their families end up as lion chow. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. And those who live by slander will be undone by slander. This is not a bug in the system; it is the central feature of God's moral government.
The "trouble from their lips" is not just noise. Words create worlds. Their words were intended to create a world in which David was ruined, disgraced, and dead. David prays that God would turn that creative, destructive power back on its source. He is asking God to make the liars inhabit the lie. He wants them to drown in the sea of their own malevolent speech. This is a prayer for sanity. It is a prayer that reality would reassert itself against the unreality of the lie.
We must understand that slander is not a small thing. It is verbal murder. It is an attempt to kill a man's reputation, his standing, his livelihood. The ninth commandment, "You shall not bear false witness," is a guardrail against the kind of societal chaos that erupts when truth is no longer valued. When men's lips are filled with trouble, the foundations of justice tremble. David's prayer is that God would shore up those foundations by making the troublemakers accountable for their own trouble.
The Fire of Divine Judgment (v. 10)
The prayer intensifies from poetic justice to a terrifying image of divine wrath.
"May burning coals be shaken out upon them; May He cause them to fall into the fire, Into bottomless pits from which they can never rise." (Psalm 140:10 LSB)
This is not the language of the faculty lounge. This is the language of ultimate realities. The "burning coals" are a frequent biblical image for God's purifying and consuming judgment. It was fire and brimstone that fell on Sodom and Gomorrah. It was coals from the altar that brought both cleansing to Isaiah and judgment upon the city. The Apostle Paul quotes a similar image from Proverbs in Romans 12, telling us to feed our enemy, for in doing so we will heap "burning coals on his head." While some interpret that as shame, the context in Romans 12 is about leaving room for God's wrath. Your kindness to your enemy is a precursor to the wrath of God if he does not repent. Here in Psalm 140, David is praying for that wrath directly.
He asks that they be cast "into the fire, into bottomless pits from which they can never rise." This is a prayer for finality. This is not a prayer for a temporary setback for his foes. It is a prayer that their evil enterprise be brought to a complete and irreversible end. The "bottomless pits" speak of a judgment that is total and from which there is no escape. This is the language of Hell. David, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is looking past the immediate historical threat and is praying in line with God's ultimate judgment against all unrepentant wickedness.
Is it right for a Christian to pray this way? Yes, provided we understand what we are doing. We are not praying for our personal enemies because they cut us off in traffic. We are praying against the implacable, ideological enemies of Christ and His kingdom. We are praying for the final victory of God. We are praying for the day when all wrongs will be righted and all evil will be judged. In short, we are praying, "Your kingdom come, Your will be done." And the coming of that kingdom necessarily means the overthrow of all rival kingdoms. To pray for the wedding feast of the Lamb is to pray for the great supper of God where the birds of the air will feast on the flesh of the wicked (Rev. 19). You cannot have one without the other.
The Law of Moral Consequences (v. 11)
The psalm concludes this section with a statement of moral principle, a law of the spiritual universe.
"May a slanderer not be established in the earth; May evil hunt the violent man speedily." (Psalm 140:11 LSB)
This is both a prayer and a proverb. It is a request and a statement of how things ought to be, and how, under God's government, they ultimately will be. "May a slanderer not be established in the earth." The word "established" means to be made firm, secure, lasting. David is praying that the work of the liar would have no permanence. He wants their kingdoms of deceit, built on the shifting sands of falsehood, to collapse. Liars can have temporary success. Slanderers can win tactical victories. But David prays that they will not be able to build anything lasting. Why? Because God is the God of truth, and His kingdom is the only one that is eternal. All kingdoms built on lies are temporary rebellions, destined for the ash heap of history.
Then he says, "May evil hunt the violent man speedily." This is a magnificent and terrifying personification. Evil is not a passive thing. It is an active, predatory force. The man who embraces violence, who makes evil his tool, will find that the tool has turned on him. The evil he unleashed into the world will turn around and hunt him down. It will become a relentless predator, and he will be its prey. The man who lives by violence will be pursued by violence. The man who lives by treachery will be hounded by treachery. Sin has consequences, and those consequences have teeth.
The word "speedily" is important. This is not just a prayer for eventual justice in the sweet by-and-by. It is a prayer for God to act now, to intervene in history. This is a postmillennial prayer. It is a prayer that recognizes that God's justice is not just reserved for the final judgment but is something that breaks into our world here and now. We are to pray for and expect God to vindicate His people and judge His enemies in time, on earth, as a down payment and a sign of the final judgment to come.
Conclusion: Praying with the Grain
So what do we do with a passage like this? First, we must refuse to be embarrassed by it. This is the Word of God, and it is profitable for us. These psalms teach us to hate evil as God hates it. They teach us to love justice as God loves it. They guard us from a flabby, sentimental faith that has no categories for the wrath of God.
Second, we must pray them with the right heart. We are to distinguish between our personal enemies and the corporate enemies of God. We are to offer forgiveness to the man who insults us. But we are to pray for the downfall of the abortion industry, the collapse of secularist tyranny, and the confusion of those who make war on the Church of Jesus Christ. We are to love the sinner, which means we must pray that they be rescued from their sin. And sometimes, the most loving thing for a man caught in a web of violent evil is for his entire evil enterprise to be brought crashing down around him, so that in the rubble, he might be brought to repentance. Or, if not, that his capacity to do harm would be destroyed.
Finally, we pray these prayers with confidence, because they are prayers that are aligned with the revealed will of God. We are praying with the grain of the universe. We are asking God to do what He has already promised to do. He has promised to judge the wicked. He has promised to vindicate the righteous. He has promised that His kingdom will crush all other kingdoms. When we pray the imprecatory psalms, we are simply looking at the battle lines, choosing our side, and asking our King to win. And He will.