Looking in Triumph on my Foe (Psalm 54)

¹ Save me, O God, by your name;
vindicate me by your might.
² Hear my prayer, O God;
listen to the words of my mouth.

³ Arrogant foes are attacking me;
ruthless people are trying to kill me—
people without regard for God.

⁴ Surely God is my help;
the Lord is the one who sustains me.

⁵ Let evil recoil on those who slander me;
in your faithfulness destroy them.

⁶ I will sacrifice a freewill offering to you;
I will praise your name, Lord, for it is good.
⁷ You have delivered me from all my troubles,
and my eyes have looked in triumph on my foes.

 ___________

Whenever I read this psalm, I think about an opening devotion at a gathering of pastors that I went to during my internship.  The devotion made use of this psalm, which was read by the assembly responsively – except for verse 5.  Verse 5 was entirely omitted, just skipped over.

The reason is rather obvious.  Verse 5 is a prayer for the destruction of those who have slandered David.  It’s a prayer of retribution.  Doesn’t seem very nice.  But even still, my thought at the time was “You can’t do that!  You can’t just cut out verses you don’t like!”

Now, in part my attitude was because as an intern, I knew everything.  (Ha!)  But even still, something seemed off about omitting this verse.  Especially since the deliverance mentioned in verse 7 directly flows from God fulfilling the prayer in verse 5.  This led me into a deeper study of the psalms.  I came to appreciate how to read the psalms through the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) and Ephesians 6:10-20.

Human beings are not the enemy.  They may act as our enemies and treat us as their enemies, but the true enemy for the child of God is always Satan and the powers of spiritual evil.  Our salvation flows from God letting “evil recoil” on Satan, the accuser, the slanderer, and in His faithfulness, He will utterly destroy Satan.  There is nothing wrong at all with praying for the destruction of this evil.  Jesus calls on us to pray daily to be led away from temptation and to be delivered from the evil one, a deliverance that will ultimately be fulfilled in Satan’s destruction.

But regarding human enemies, we are not to pray for their destruction.  We may pray for justice to be done, and for injustice to be eliminated, but we pray for the blessing of those who make of themselves our enemies. We pray that the Lord change their hearts and work reconciliation and healing.

So my prayer today is a lot of “lead us not into temptation” and “deliver us from evil.”  I pray for the spiritual forces of evil to be overcome in my life and in our world.  I am also praying for our confirmation students at St. John’s today who will be spending much of the day at an off-site retreat studying the latter half of the Lord ’s Prayer, in particular these two petitions.

NOTE:

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