Psalm 58
Wisdom in Wicked Psalms
Pastor Svea Merry May 30-31, 2026
Note: This manuscript isn’t a transcript of the sermon, but a planning guide showing what the speaker intends to say.
Good morning! If we haven’t met yet, I’m Svea Merry and I serve here as our Spiritual Formation pastor. We have one final week left in our series through 1 Corinthians and Pastor Rick will take us through that message next weekend.
But today, I have the fun opportunity to do a standalone message and as I considered what would be a wonderful Scripture passage to focus on, what would be helpful for us all in our formation into people more like Jesus, the Psalms came quickly to my mind.
The Psalms are such a beautiful place to turn to to see people expressing their heart for God and to receive encouragement that we can take into our day with us.
I’m excited to read a special psalm with you, Psalm 58, and I invite you to settle in, maybe close your eyes if you like, and be blessed by the word of God.
1Do you rulers indeed speak justly?
Do you judge people with equity?
2 No, in your heart you devise injustice,
and your hands mete out violence on the earth.3 Even from birth the wicked go astray;
from the womb they are wayward, spreading lies.
4 Their venom is like the venom of a snake,
like that of a cobra that has stopped its ears,
5 that will not heed the tune of the charmer,
however skillful the enchanter may be.6 Break the teeth in their mouths, O God;
Lord, tear out the fangs of those lions!
7 Let them vanish like water that flows away;
when they draw the bow, let their arrows fall short.
8 May they be like a slug that melts away as it moves along,
like a stillborn child that never sees the sun.9 Before your pots can feel the heat of the thorns—
whether they be green or dry—the wicked will be swept away.
10 The righteous will be glad when they are avenged,
when they dip their feet in the blood of the wicked.
11 Then people will say,
“Surely the righteous still are rewarded;
surely there is a God who judges the earth.”
Well, I hope that encouraged you! There are some lovely people at the Connection Center or the prayer room who’d love to meet with you before you go. Just kidding.
That psalm probably didn’t have the tone you expected, did it? Seriously, does it surprise you that this Psalm, and others like it, are included in the Bible as inspired Scripture? What do we do with psalms like this that seem so angry and violent. Even offensive? What do we do with Scripture that seems to completely contradict what Jesus taught us about loving others, showing love even to our enemies?
We’ll get to that, but before we answer those questions, let me ask you a different one: Have you ever been so deeply hurt by someone that you wished God would wipe them off the face of the earth? And don’t get all super-pious on me. I see some of you. “Oh, not me. I wouldn’t wish harm on a wood tick.”
The psalm I just read was written by the great King David, the so-called “man after God’s own heart,” and he was so upset, so provoked, he wanted God to break the teeth in his enemies’ mouths. Now, maybe you would never actually take a tire iron to someone’s teeth, but be honest, have you ever been so angry and hurt like David that you wished someone else might? What if God knew you felt that way? What if He knew you were thinking that?
If you have ever had any of those thoughts, you may find tremendous value in learning how to interact with the kind of psalms like what I just read.
Earlier this month, I was down in my storeroom getting out the cushions for our deck chairs and I saw the box of stuff that I kept from my childhood. My curiosity/nostalgia got the best of me and I took the dusty box off the shelf and rummaged around inside. At the bottom of the box, I was delighted/horrified to see my old journals from my high school years. I sat down and read a few pages and oh man, teenager Svea was all over the place.
One day, I wrote with enthusiasm about how great life was and how excited I was for an upcoming event. The next day, I was a total storm cloud. “Life sucks. I hate school. My parents are being totally unreasonable.” The entry after that was back to happy, talking about how much fun I’d had with my friends. The one right after that was a scared, insecure girl wondering if she had what it takes.
Seeing the pendulum of these thoughts in my own adolescent handwriting brought me back to the emotional volatility of those years, and I remembered how those diaries were a safe space for me to vent and unload my most extreme thoughts and feelings. They were where I purged the raw, unfiltered thoughts from my brain.
In some ways, the book of psalms is the diary in the Bible. For the most part, what’s written there isn’t God speaking; they’re the thoughts and feelings of His people, singing praises on one page, crying out in anguish on the next, rejoicing over God’s goodness on another, and yes, like we see in Psalm 58, invoking God’s vengeance on their abusers.
Reading what’s modeled for us in the psalms is one of the best ways for us to gain confidence that we can be authentic and blatantly transparent with God in all our thoughts and feelings. God knows things aren’t all sunshine and rainbows for us all the time. And He wants us to walk with us through it all, especially the hard stuff. Of the 150 Psalms, did you know that about a full third of them are what we call psalms of lament? A lament being a passionate expression of feelings like anguish, sorrow, or deep regret.
And within the psalms of lament, there’s a specific subset of psalms known as the imprecatory psalms. Psalm 58 that I read for you is a classic example of an imprecatory psalm. The word imprecatory comes from the Latin word imprecarefrom which we get our modern word to imprecate which means to invoke, wish, or pray for a curse on one’s enemies. Imprecatory psalms express not only the anguish of the writer, but include a desire for divine vengeance, a plea for God to curse or bring destruction to evil people.
If you want to read other notable imprecatory psalms, I’ve included this list on the message outline for you to explore later, and fair warning, they’re pretty brutal, but what you’ll find is that they’re written by people who are being mistreated and are calling out to God to exact judgement and vengeance on those who are acting unjustly.
It’s possible that your reaction to this category of psalms may be influenced by your generation. One of the most common theological questions asked by people in my generation and older has long been why God allows good people to suffer. The classic: “Why do bad things happen to good people” question.
But, a fascinating article published by Christianity Today this month written by a college professor noticing something in his Gen Z students suggests that if you’re in Gen Z or younger, you’re likely asking the opposite question. You may be more troubled by why if God is real, why He doesn’t stop bad people from doing evil. Why doesn’t He strike down the people practicing injustice and penalize the corrupt. The question instead has become “Why don’t bad things happen to bad people.” The imprecatory psalms resonate with these questions.
What we read in these psalms demanding vengeance can be disturbing. And they don’t sound very Jesus-like. But it is incredibly significant that they are included in our Holy Scriptures. Because even if the psalmist’s words may not reflect the way of Jesus revealed later in Scripture, they validate the reality of the agony experienced by the evil around us, and yes, the desires we have for cruel people to get what they have coming.
I think it’s remarkable that the Bible doesn’t shy away from this. Scripture doesn’t sweep the dark side of the human experience under a rug like it’s an unfixable error in God’s programming of humanity. Instead, the dark, imprecatory psalms affirm that we can say, to God, everything we think and feel, even the thoughts we have that aren’t very beautiful.
I’m going to offer that there are two errors that people make with psalms like these, but in between what are equal and opposite errors, there are also two huge benefits to these psalms. Let’s look at each of these in turn. The first error is to skip over them, ignoring them altogether.
I once heard a godly older lady say that she finds these psalms so disturbing that she’s scribbled them out in her Bible so she won’t be offended by them. Besides just finding them upsetting, her reasoning for this is that she doesn’t like the way they depict God and she doesn’t want to relate to other people’s anger, resentment, and negativity as she’s seeking to grow into a person who is all about love for all people, including the people who have wronged her.
And I see her point and appreciate her motivation. But, even if her motivation is good, I think there’s a miss at best, and a pretty big danger at worst, in intentionally ignoring something in our Bibles that God saw fit to include.
Remember that as we read the Bible, we need to read each book in light of its genre. The Psalms are poetry; artistic, emotive thoughts. Reading Psalms is like getting to read the diaries of artistic authors, the sketchbooks of lyricists. Many of them are David’s poems, lyrics to songs he wrote.
In contrast to the historical books about David’s life, like 1 & 2 Samuel, Psalms are not records of actual events. They are thoughts of God’s people. It would be a bad interpretation of Scripture to read a psalm such as Psalm 58 at face value and think that because David said He wanted God to do these vindictive things, God did them.
Also, even though all Scripture is God-breathed and inspired by God, to this lady’s point, that doesn’t mean that everything we read in Scripture is desirable to God. The psalms are not all prescriptions for how we ought to feel or think either about ourselves, about God, or our enemies. And they’re not necessarily the best place for us to derive what’s true about God.
For example, Psalm 13 says, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” or in Psalm 44: "Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake! Do not cast us off forever!" We know from the rest of Scripture that God never forgets His people, and He doesn’t sleep on them. So, it’s important to understand that what we read in the psalms isn’t always true about God even if they are the true feelings of the writer.
And we all have difficult feelings from time to time. Sometimes we have thoughts we’d maybe not admit we have. Maybe like David, you’ve been wronged by someone in tremendous ways. Maybe you’ve been cheated on, stolen from, abused, or harmed. Maybe, like him, you’d like to be avenged and see your enemies hurt at least as bad as they’ve hurt you.
In light of that, we can choose to do one of a couple of things. Like the lady who wishes these dark psalms weren’t in her Bible, we can pretend our desires for revenge against those who have wronged us don’t exist and wall off that part of ourselves, keeping the responses to our wounds buried so that no one knows, even attempting to hide it from God.
Or we can experience the first of two huge benefits we can receive from these psalms, and open every part of our soul to God and let Him shine light into the depths of our deepest, darkest emotions, bringing us into an even more honest, authentically intimate relationship with Him.
The imprecatory psalms remind us that we can safely have transparency with God about all our feelings, every one of our thoughts, even our nasty ones.
For followers of Jesus, intimacy with God is developed by being our truest self with Him and discovering that we are loved and accepted no matter what. We don’t have to pretend with God or hide anything from Him.
Parents, how would you feel if your child was being bullied and was struggling through deep feelings of hurt and anger, but rather than talk with you about it, they tried to hide it from you because they didn’t want you to see them that way? If we who are human parents have a sympathetic reaction to that, how much more does our Heavenly Father want His children to come to Him in everything.
The imprecatory psalms remind us that the healthiest thing we can do in our spiritual life when we are wrestling through hard thoughts and feelings is not to hide those feelings from God, but to deliberately express them to Him, enjoying the relationship that is formed through transparency with Him.
And by naming our emotions, bringing our rawest thoughts to God, even our revenge fantasies like David did here in this psalm, we discover a way to deflate the angst in it all and invite God’s light, love and justice into any situation we face.
Let’s look again at Psalm 58.
The first three verses say:
1Do you rulers indeed speak justly?
Do you judge people with equity?
2 No, in your heart you devise injustice,
and your hands mete out violence on the earth.3 Even from birth the wicked go astray;
from the womb they are wayward, spreading lies.
We don’t know exactly what situation David was facing when he wrote Psalm 58. And that’s ok. We don’t need to know the circumstances that inspired this psalm in order to benefit from it. But what we can tell is that David and his people are experiencing life under oppression from some very unjust rulers. He clearly feels he’s under attack from powerful people who are not playing fair, who are violent, habitual liars. And he’s tired of taking it from them.
This brings us to the second benefit we can gain from reading imprecatory psalms: they remind us that when we feel attacked, oppressed, or are suffering an injustice, we don’t have to just sit silently and take it, we can cry out to our God, not only for help but also to expect Him to act on our behalf. These psalms remind us of the benefit of seeking God’s action.
Listen again to the next section of Psalm 58 speaking of the threat represented by the evil rulers:
4 Their venom is like the venom of a snake,
like that of a cobra that has stopped its ears,
5 that will not heed the tune of the charmer,
however skillful the enchanter may be.
That’s amazing and terrifying poetry. David compares the people threatening him not only to venomous snakes, but to a snake charmer’s snake that has gone rogue. That’s next level writing, isn’t it? I mean the threat of a random snake is bad, but how much more ominous is the picture of a cobra that is now so out of control that even its experienced handler is in danger?
I have never seen a cobra snake charmer in real life, but I once tent-camped on a small island with a rattlesnake. One summer when our kids were much littler, we took our younger 4 camping on a beautiful granite island on Lake George in the Adirondack mountains near where Steve’s parents lived. Accessible only by canoe, about half the island had sweet smelling pine trees, the rest was open to the sunshine. 360 degrees of water for easy swimming and fishing. It was lovely. We had just gotten our campsite fully set up and the kids were getting into their swimsuits when one of the young boys screamed, “Rattlesnake!”
I was alarmed but not really concerned. Even if he truly saw a snake, it was probably just a little garter snake, right? Steve and I ran over to him, and nope. He was right. About a car-length in front of him was a 3-foot long rattlesnake shaking its tail at him.
Steve, his body acting faster than his brain, picked up a rock and threw it at the snake, missed it, and then realizing now that the snake was even madder, yelled to the kids, the line that has become a Merry family classic: “Kids! Bring me a continuous supply of rocks!!” They hopped to it like soldiers on a battlefield and Steve went to war, pelting the menacing serpent with rocks until at last, he’d crushed it with enough blows that it finally died.
The kids whooped and hollered, their daddy the hero! After all our heart rates returned to normal, and we were positive the rattlesnake was totally dead, the boys, being boys, asked if we could leave the carcass out where they could see it, as you see in the picture, a grotesque symbol of victory over the threat. For the days we were there that snake’s body served a couple of purposes: we let the kids believe (and I tried to convince myself!) that if there were any other snakes around, they would see it and stay away—no we never saw another snake, and yes, you better believe my head was on a swivel the whole time!— but it was also incredibly sweet to hear the boys walk by and say things like, “Daddy sure showed that snake.” The kids saw their daddy as the snake crusher hero and to this day, it remains one of our favorite stories.
So, when I read the rest of Psalm 58, and hear the desperation in David’s voice about the threat of the venomous, out-of-control, snake-like enemy that is out to get him, I see him yelling for his Father God that he knows and loves and trusts like my kids yelled for their dad.
6 Break the teeth in their mouths, O God;
Lord, tear out the fangs of those lions!
7 Let them vanish like water that flows away;
when they draw the bow, let their arrows fall short.
8 May they be like a slug that melts away as it moves along,
like a stillborn child that never sees the sun.9 Before your pots can feel the heat of the thorns—
whether they be green or dry—the wicked will be swept away.10 The righteous will be glad when they are avenged,
when they dip their feet in the blood of the wicked.
11 Then people will say,
“Surely the righteous still are rewarded;
surely there is a God who judges the earth.”
Yes, this psalm is dark and grotesque, and doesn’t portray God’s righteousness in the way the Bible usually does. But there is great beauty to be found in it.
When verse 10 talks about the righteous being glad when they are avenged, when they dip their feet in the blood of the wicked, I see in that what I saw in my kiddos celebrating the victory over the serpent every time they walked by its carcass. In the same way they celebrated their daddy, the snake crusher, saving them from the threat, David seems to be anticipating the same thing suggesting that when his people see how God will deal with what they’re facing from these unjust rulers, when God comes through for them as he believes God will, they’ll say, “Surely the righteous still are rewarded; surely there is a God who judges the earth.”
Psalms like this one are so important to remind us that we can cry out to our snake-crusher Father God and ask for Him to act on our behalf.
The imprecatory psalms have long been cherished by oppressed peoples. They have given voice to enslaved and victimized peoples throughout generations, not as a way to celebrate evil, but to seek justice for the evil being done to them. They paint for us, in graphic color, the truth that we can cry out to God and demand that He deal with the evil that harms us.
And in doing this, these psalms are consistent with the teaching in all of Scripture. Jesus tells us to show love to our enemies but that doesn’t mean that God intends for the enemies of His people to get away with it forever. All throughout Scripture, and these imprecatory psalms uphold this, we’re encouraged to pursue justice. But when it comes to our desire for vengeance, we’re encouraged to bring that to God and to let Him be the one who acts.
God says in Deuteronomy 32, that vengeance is His to take on those who are against His people and the Apostle Paul re-affirmed this in the New Testament, reminding us that when we are afflicted by evil it isn’t our role to inflict evil back. Romans 12 says, “Do not repay evil for evil. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.”
And God is so wise and good in this. Think about Steve and our little boy facing that mad rattlesnake again. Our son didn’t have enough maturity, physical or otherwise, to safely deal with that threat without potentially making the situation even worse and getting gravely injured himself. Dad stepped in because he had a bigger perspective and a better ability to handle it.
Similarly, God tells us as His children not to seek vengeance on others ourselves. We don’t have enough maturity, spiritual or otherwise, to deal justly with all the evil in the world without potentially making the situation worse and getting even more injured ourselves. God tells us to let Him handle it because He has a bigger perspective on it all and is far more able than we are to accomplish true justice and goodness that may be out of our reach.
Which brings me to the other error that people make with the imprecatory psalms, and that is in misusing them; to use them inappropriately to curse or wish harm on people directly.
Throughout history, people have used these psalms to justify all kinds of actions and conquests. Recently, imprecatory psalms were in the national spotlight when a Cabinet member used language from a couple of these psalms in a prayer to invoke destruction on Iran.
Now, I’m am not about to make a political statement nor am I commenting on the war. My heart is all about upholding the integrity of Scripture and my comments are solely focused on how we rightly apply it.
Using imprecatory psalms to validate our own actions that cause harm on another person, group, or nation disrespects the essence of the psalms.
These psalms are not intended to be used by someone on the offense. These are defensive psalms. Imprecatory psalms are the screams of oppressed peoples needing God to avenge them.
These are not God-approved curses that we are free to use as we wish so that we can act out against our enemies as we see fit and expect God to be on our side. These psalms are not scripts for us to adopt in our personal conflicts, nor will internalizing them as weaponry honor God or demonstrate a faithful application of Scripture.
Misusing these psalms as a kind of coded language to suggest that God validates our own acts of vengeance is as grave as the opposite error of ignoring them altogether.
So where do we go from here? It’s doubtful that the imprecatory psalms will become your favorite chapters in Scripture, and I’d be disturbed if I saw them as home décor at Hobby Lobby. But, like all of Scripture, they contain great value. I’m so glad God saw fit to include them in the canon of Scripture.
We do well to use these psalms to deepen our intimacy with God through being ever more transparent with Him. We do well to let these psalms inspire us to express every thought, every feeling we have to Him, even the dark ones. And that, like my kids yelling for their dad to come to their rescue on the snake-infested island, we do well to let these psalms remind us that we can cry out to God to act on our behalf in any and all circumstances.
God sees the people and situations that threaten us. He will come through for His people in His time and in His way. And ultimately, He will destroy the evil that harms us. And He has a plan that is even better, and way more thought out, than my husband had with his “continuous supply of rocks.”
He’s been planning His victory over evil from the very beginning. Humanity has been threatened by a snake from the first pages of the Bible. Our adversary, the devil, came in serpent form to deceive Adam and Eve and though he inflicted incredible harm on them and all who have lived since through the evil brought into the world through his lies, we have a supernatural snake crusher for a Dad.
The very first thing God did when Eve admitted eating the fruit the serpent tricked her into eating was to stare down the snake and invoking his own curse, the Lord God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this,
“Cursed are you above all livestock
and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
In this poetic curse, God’s own imprecatory psalm if you will, God foretells and promises the offspring, the one we know as Jesus Christ, who entered our dark world. And though evil crucified him, God’s Son crushed the head of the serpent by defeating death and being resurrected again, and someday soon when he returns, the great Snake Crusher will banish that snake and all like him from our island forever!
So, are you struggling? Angry? Feeling like people who hurt you are getting away with it and you’re not ok with that?
Tell it all to your Father God, He can Him handle it.
Are you mad? Are you crying out for justice against those who have wronged you?
Tell it all to your Father God, Let Him avenge you.
Are you needing to connect with the God will come through to defeat evil and avenge the brokenness in this world?
Tell it all to your Father God, He will one day eradicate all evil and restore life as it was always supposed to be.
Whatever you’re wrestling with today, tell God. Invite Him into the feelings that most overwhelm you, even the ones that you’re not proud of, and watch to see how He acts in it all.
Don’t partition any part of your soul off from Him, even the dark parts. Bring Him into all of it.
Let these psalms not be Scripture that you skip over or trip over. Let them always remind you that we can take absolutely anything and everything we are wrestling with to our Father God who sees us, who knows what we face, and who can be trusted to act with justice and goodness, now and for eternity.
Let’s pray.