Praying within the Tension

Similarly, believers should pray for the persecuted among the true Israel, the church of Jesus Christ. The oppression of God’s people this psalm describes is not something with which most Christians in the Western world can identify. Many of our brothers and sisters elsewhere, however, are all too familiar with it. They wake up every morning and go to bed at night with a keen awareness that it could be their last day alive, or at least outside of a prison cell, simply because they profess faith in Christ. Someone needs to be an advocate for them like the psalmist was for persecuted Israel. Believers everywhere must step up to that role and cry out to the Father on behalf of our spiritual siblings who are suffering for their faith.

Pray for God to Show His Consistency

Psalm 83:9-15

A second prayer in this passage is for God to act in the current situation the same way he’s acted in the past—to be faithful and true in the present to the way he’s demonstrated who he is and what he does in the past. He calls to mind how God has glorified himself through some of the great victories he’s brought about in Israel’s history.

In the fashion of young children recounting the great Bible stories they learned in Sunday school, the psalmist first appeals to two of Israel’s great campaigns recorded in Judges 4–8. Regarding the current enemies, he wants God to “deal with them as [he] did with Midian” (v. 9) by the hand of Gideon, who overcame his adversary with just three hundred men, armed only with trumpets, jars, and torches (Judg 7:19-25). The psalmist asks God to make their rulers like Midian’s four rulers (v. 11). He destroyed them because they wanted to destroy Israel.

The songwriter also refers to the story of Deborah and Barak. He asks God to do to the current oppressors what he did to “Sisera and Jabin at the Kishon River” (v. 9), when he sent heavy rains that enabled Israel to defeat the Canaanites in their iron chariots and to deny them an honorable burial by spreading them like “manure” (v. 10). And the psalmist goes on in verses 13-15 to ask God to bring natural disasters like he did in Judges 4–5. He wants God to be consistent with his judgment in the past, cursing them with the same devastation they intended for Israel (v. 4).

Regarding his present battle, the psalmist’s resounding cry in these verses is, “Lord, do it again!” He’s asking God to exercise the same divine force as in those great Bible stories. And that’s how we should pray today when we’re asking God to defend and deliver his children. We don’t need to ask him to make us like the great judges of the Old Testament so we can deliver ourselves. We need to appeal to these great Bible stories in which he showed himself strong on behalf of his people. We need to revisit those tales of his strength from the past and cry out, “Lord, do today what you did back then.”

Beloved, the lesson for our children in the great stories of the Old Testament is not, “Be like these heroes.” Do we really want our children to be like Gideon, who doubted God’s wisdom and then set up idols that people worshiped even after his great victory (Judg 8:22-28)? Do we want them to dream about being strong like Samson, who was the Old Testament poster child for arrogance, sexual immorality, and spiritual infidelity (Judg 13–16)? Do we truly want our kids even to aspire to be like Deborah and Barak, whose victory was short-lived and who still needed a better judge to rise up after them (Judg 6:1-10)? These Bible characters were not heroes! They were men and women who needed God to do for them what they couldn’t do for themselves and whose lives testified that Israel still needed a righteous Judge and Deliverer to give them true victory.

Believers can and should appeal to the same Bible stories we learned in Sunday school when praying for national Israel. We should ask God to be consistent with the way he’s sovereignly rescued his people and defeated their enemies at critical junctures throughout biblical history. In addition, we should pray for our persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ around the world by not only appealing to those same Bible stories but by invoking the promises of Christ to go to battle on behalf of his own. He assures us that “the gates of Hades will not overpower” his church (Matt 16:18) and that his sheep “will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28). On behalf of our suffering fellow believers, we’re obligated and privileged to ask our Lord to be consistent with what he’s pledged regarding his care for his disciples and the overthrow of their enemies.

Pray for God to Show His Compassion

Psalm 83:16-18

The first two prayers in this psalm come down on the side of God’s eradicating his enemies and thereby ending their oppression of his people. But at the end of this psalm we see the tension similar to what Spurgeon addressed, and that frees us up to live and pray within it. Here we catch a glimpse of God’s showing compassion toward them for a larger purpose—that everyone on the planet would know and revere his glorious name.

The psalmist knows that the global acclaim of who God is and what he does will somehow come about through the mysterious tension between destroying his enemies altogether and turning their hearts toward him. This tension is nowhere more vivid than in verses 16-17. Seeing how the psalmist prays in these verses helps guide our understanding of how we should pray the previous two prayers in this song. He asks for God to both shame his enemies and save them.

Three requests mark the author’s prayer for God to shame his enemies and condemn them completely, just as he’s asked God to do in verses 1-15. First, he asks that God make their facial expressions show their fear of him (cf. Dan 5:6). Second, the psalmist prays for them to be completely disgraced so that they are no longer formidable military foes but rather terrified enemies running for their lives. Third, he prays that all their plans are foiled and they are utterly destroyed. Needless to say, the psalmist’s prayer list comprises a series of vivid requests for God to show his strength in complete judgment.

These appeals for God’s terrible sword, however, are tempered in almost oxymoronic fashion by the psalmist’s prayer “that [these enemies] will seek your name, Lord” (v. 16). In the same breath in which he asks for their destruction, he asks for their salvation! Although he wants these enemies defeated, he compassionately appeals that—once they see the demonstration of God’s power—they will realize the foolishness of their ways and cry out to God for his mercy. Somehow the psalmist acknowledges a place for the richness of God’s salvation in the midst of his awful judgment.

The psalmist’s ultimate desire is that even God’s enemies would know that he is the one true God who is sovereign over the whole planet (v. 18). God doesn’t just reign over Israel—or America for that matter. He controls the destiny of the entire universe. So he’s not interested in merely defending his name as the God over one nation. In the Old Testament God’s “name” is always a reflection of his nature. He wants his name—who he is and what he does—to be acclaimed by all nations.

Such is part of the mystery that characterizes the imprecatory psalms. At times—under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit—the psalmist appears to be calling fire down from heaven out of one side of his mouth while pleading for God’s mercy out of the other. That must be our posture as we read these psalms and learn to pray from them. As we pray for God’s kingdom to come and for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, we pray in this tension. Out of one side of our mouths we pray that Jesus Christ might reign in righteousness and condemn those who oppose the gospel. Out of the other side of our mouths we pray that those same opponents of the gospel will repent of their sin and place their faith in Christ.

All the while we know that both of those things can’t happen in the same person’s life. Someone who opposes the gospel can’t be damned forever and yet at the same time repent and be saved. However, we must remember that salvation and eternal destiny is the business of God, not of his children. Our business as his children is to pray for justice and to pray for grace. We don’t have to understand how the two can be friends but simply to be faithful to pray for both. We pray for both to the end that God’s acclaim will be widely known among all people.

Conclusion

The tension between awful judgment or merciful salvation actually shouldn’t baffle us as believers in Christ. Those two realities that appear to be in juxtaposition to each other actually are at the heart of the mystery of the gospel. They’re reconciled in the two-dollar theological word propitiation. In Greek one of the words translated by it came to denote the mercy seat, or covering, of the ark, which foreshadowed reconciliation by the blood of Christ. God “presented [Jesus] as an atoning sacrifice [propitiation] in his blood, received through faith, to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his restraint God passed over the sins previously committed” (Rom 3:25; cf. Exod 25:17-22; 30:6; Heb 9:5). A related Greek word also translated by “atoning sacrifice” similarly refers to Christ becoming our substitute and assuming our obligations, thus expiating and covering our guilt by the vicarious punishment he endured (1 John 2:2; 4:10).

On the cross Jesus incurred the wrath of a holy God in our stead. He died the death that we should have died. In so doing, he provided mercy and forgiveness for those who would believe. Both judgment and salvation happened at the same time. As Christ followers, that‘s the end to which we must pray for enemies of the gospel. Maintaining this tension between asking for judgment and for salvation, we pray through the lens of the gospel for every nation on the planet and every citizen of those nations to believe in Christ and bow to the “Most High over the whole earth” (v. 18).

Reflect and Discuss