Psalm 94:1-2
O Lord, God of vengeance, O God of vengeance, shine forth! 2 Rise up, O judge of the earth; repay to the proud what they deserve!
Prayers like this often make us uncomfortable. Sometimes they even scare us. I often feel that to pray “repay the proud what they deserve” would be to pray for my own condemnation. I am and can practically be so very proud at times. But the Lord has judged His people’s pride (the cross) and is judging His people’s pride (conviction) continually in sanctification. Yes, God’s people are proud and He disciplines us with the rod at times. But praying for the “God of vengeance” to “shine forth” is not praying for the judgment of the Saints, but for the judgment of evil men, institutions, and nations. It is to pray that the practitioners and promoters of evil are judged… meaning destroyed or incapacitated as we saw in Korah’s rebellion (evil in the Church) or in Og of Bashan’s defeat (evil outside the Church) recently in our Opus Dei readings from the Od Testament in Numbers. Do not be afraid to pray imprecatory prayers, prayers that are against evil, along with your prayers that are for righteousness. My suggestion is that you pray first for the salvation of the Church’s enemies, for we should love and pray for our enemies, then pray secondarily for their destruction. Why? Because desires mercy. He does not rejoice in the death of the wicked. He was willing in the person of His Son to bear our iniquities and sorrows. When we love as He loves then and only then will we be able to appropriately pray imprecatory prayers.
Here is a link for Open Doors USA, a Christian non-Profit that tracks persecution worldwide. It is a good place to practice some imprecatory praying. Let’s pray for our brothers and sisters that are enduring persecution and against the proud that are “eating the Lord’s people as bread.” (Psalm 14:4)