Psalms 69:22

PRAYER FOR THE OVERTHROW OF UNGODLY ENEMIES

"Let their table before them become a snare;

And when they are in peace, let it become a trap.

Let their eyes be darkened, so that they cannot see;

And make their loins continually to shake.

Pour out thine indignation upon them,

And let the fierceness of thine anger overtake them.

Let their habitation be desolate;

Let none dwell in their tents.

For they persecute him whom thou hast smitten;

And they tell of the sorrow of those whom thou hast wounded.

Add iniquity unto their iniquity;

And let them not come into thy righteousness.

Let them be blotted out of the book of life,

And not be written with the righteous."

Up to this point in the psalm, "Christ and his passion have been foreshadowed,"[9] but here the impassable gulf between the Type and the Antitype, between David and Christ, begins to widen before us. Christ prayed for his enemies; David cursed his; Christ was not willing that any should perish, but here David actually prayed for his enemies to be blotted out of the Book of Life.

We should not judge David too harshly. He lived before the Great Atonement was made on Calvary. He could not possibly have known all of the horrible terrors that would be involved in one's being cast out of God's Book of Life; but Jesus knew all things; and from an infinitely higher level he gave his Life that all men might be saved from eternal death.

From the human standpoint, David's enemies fully deserved the imprecations heaped upon them; and the infinitely sad thing is that, as proved by Paul's use of these very words, the wicked persecutors of Jesus indeed suffered the full measure of David's imprecations upon the wicked in this passage.

"Snare ... trap" (Psalms 69:22). These prophetic words were applied by the apostle Paul to the hardening of Israel in the times of Christ. He added the word "stumblingblock"; but as John Murray stated it, "All three of these words are closely related, and precise distinctions of meaning are not to be pressed."[10]

The meaning that Paul assigned to the passage is that, their `table' was such things as the Law of Moses, and the religious institution of Israel, and that such privileges were misused by Israel, not for teaching the Gentiles the knowledge of God, but for the nourishment of Jewish conceit. (See the full discussion of this in Vol. 6 of my New Testament series, pp. 379,380.)

Exactly what David meant by these words as applied to the enemies of his times is not known. One possibility is that "the table" refers to the privileges of the kingship, which became a trap for Saul and his followers through their abuse of such privileges in the persecutions of David.

"Pour out thine indignation upon them ... let thine anger overtake them ... let their habitation be desolate ... let them not come into thy righteousness ... let them be blotted out of the book of life" (Psalms 69:24-28). It is impossible to think of a more terrible curse than this one. Rather than meditate upon this line by line, we shall rejoice that Christ has indeed taught us a more wonderful reaction to the resentment one naturally feels against those who hate and persecute us without cause.

Jesus taught us to "go the second mile," to "give the cloak also," to "turn the other cheek," to "pray for them that despitefully use us," and to "overcome evil with good." May God help his children to walk in the way of the Master.