Today’s Passage: Psalm 109
This is a hard psalm, and there is no gentle way into it. It opens with a cry, O God of my praise, be not silent, from a man who has given love and been paid back with hatred. Then come fourteen verses of curse, the longest such stretch anywhere in the book, poured out on one man and on everything that belongs to him. We will teach it as it stands. We will not baptize revenge, and we will not pretend the psalm is not there on the page. Long after David prayed it, Peter took verse 8 as Scripture already spoken over Judas, and that reading is closed to us.
As you read, hold this: In return for my love they accuse me.
Psalm 109:1-5 (BSB)
For the choirmaster. A Psalm of David.
¹ O God of my praise, be not silent. ² For wicked and deceitful mouths open against me; they speak against me with lying tongues. ³ They surround me with hateful words and attack me without cause. ⁴ In return for my love they accuse me, but I am a man of prayer. ⁵ They repay me evil for good, and hatred for my love.
Context Of David, for the choir
The heading hands this psalm to David and to the choirmaster, and that tells us something before we read a word. This was not a private outburst scribbled and shut away in a drawer. It was meant to be sung. No occasion is named, and the picture the words paint is a legal one: a man standing accused, surrounded by charges he cannot un-say, with no court left open to him except heaven itself.
There is a puzzle in the middle of it. Verses 2 through 5 speak of accusers in the plural, and then verses 6 through 19 turn and curse a single man. Some careful readers have wondered whether those middle verses are the enemies’ own curse quoted back against David, for ancient Hebrew carries no quotation marks to settle the matter. Peter, though, does not read it that way. He introduces verse 8 as what the Holy Spirit foretold through the mouth of David, and so this house takes the line the way the New Testament took it.
Be not silent, he begins, because the weapon raised against him is speech itself: mouths, tongues, hateful words on every side. Verse 4 names the wound plainly. He loved these people, and they answered his love with accusation. The Hebrew of the second half of that verse is closer to “but I am prayer,” not simply I pray now and then. His whole answer to the charge is himself, turned toward God and speaking.
Psalm 109:6-10 (BSB)
⁶ Set over him a wicked man; let an accuser stand at his right hand. ⁷ When he is tried, let him be found guilty, and may his prayer be regarded as sin. ⁸ May his days be few; may another take his position. ⁹ May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. ¹⁰ May his children wander as beggars, seeking sustenance far from their ruined homes.
The curse opens in a courtroom and then walks straight into a family. Let him stand accused where I am standing, the psalm asks, and let his very prayer be counted against him as sin, which may be the coldest clause in the whole section. From there it moves on to a shortened life, a widow left behind, and fatherless children begging their bread far from a ruined home. If we flinch at this, the flinch is right, and nothing in these lines is trying to talk us out of it.
Psalm 109:11-15 (BSB)
¹¹ May the creditor seize all he owns, and strangers plunder the fruits of his labor. ¹² May there be no one to extend kindness to him, and no one to favor his fatherless children. ¹³ May his descendants be cut off; may their name be blotted out from the next generation. ¹⁴ May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the LORD, and the sin of his mother never be blotted out. ¹⁵ May their sins always remain before the LORD, that He may cut off their memory from the earth.
Now the curse reaches both forward and backward through time. Possessions are seized, kindness is withheld, the man’s name is wiped out, and even the sins of his father and mother are dragged up and kept on the record before the LORD. In a world where a name living on in one’s children was the nearest thing anyone had to a future, verse 13 is asking for total erasure.
Psalm 109:16-19 (BSB)
¹⁶ For he never thought to show kindness, but pursued the poor and needy and brokenhearted, even to their death. ¹⁷ The cursing that he loved, may it fall on him; the blessing in which he refused to delight, may it be far from him. ¹⁸ The cursing that he wore like a coat, may it soak into his body like water, and into his bones like oil. ¹⁹ May it be like a robe wrapped about him, like a belt tied forever around him.
Verse 16 finally gives the reason for all of it. This is not a man who merely disagreed or gave offense. He hunted the poor and the needy and the brokenhearted, and hounded them even to their death. So the prayer is that such a man be handed back exactly what he spent his life dealing out, wrapped around him like clothing he can never take off.
Study notes Teach the curse. Peter closed verse 8.
Fourteen verses, and there is no gentle version of them. What we have here is Scripture honestly recording rage in the wake of a real betrayal, and that is not the same thing as a command to go and do likewise. Notice that God never speaks a line in this curse, and no one in the poem lifts a hand. Every verb is aimed upward, toward heaven: set over him, let him be found guilty, may his days be few. These are petitions, not plans. And verse 4 has already told us what this man is at the root: he is prayer.
We need not pretend there are two fair sides to the question of whether a believer may pray these words as personal revenge, because that is simply not what the psalm gives permission for. David hands the whole file over to the Judge; he does not go out into the street and settle it himself. The church has never agreed on one single method for praying lines as hard as these, and this house will not pretend to close that question. What it will not do is cut the psalm out, and what it will not do is baptize revenge.
After Judas was gone, Peter stood up among the brothers and reached for these very words.
"For it is written in the book of Psalms: ‘May his place be deserted; let there be no one to dwell in it,’ and, ‘May another take his position.’" Acts 1:20 (BSB)
The first clause is Psalm 69:25. The second is Psalm 109:8, word for word. Peter names both as the book of Psalms. He introduces the quotation as the Scripture that had to be fulfilled, what the Holy Spirit foretold through the mouth of David concerning Judas. The apostles then choose Matthias. That reading of verse 8 is closed.
Two guardrails hold this reading in place. First, Peter applies one verse only, not the whole curse, and nothing in Acts lays the widow and the beggared children onto Judas. Second, David was not sitting down to write out a coded prediction he already understood. Rather, a real prayer against a real betrayer turned out to have room in it for the betrayal of that king’s own greater Son, when love was again returned as accusation and kindness was repaid with a kiss.
Psalm 109:20 (BSB)
²⁰ May this be the LORD’s reward to my accusers, to those who speak evil against me.
Here the file changes hands. He asks that this be the LORD’s reward to his accusers, not a reward he takes by his own arm. Whatever comes next, he leaves it as God’s business and not his own.
Psalm 109:21-25 (BSB)
²¹ But You, O GOD, the Lord, deal kindly with me for the sake of Your name; deliver me by the goodness of Your loving devotion. ²² For I am poor and needy; my heart is wounded within me. ²³ I am fading away like a lengthening shadow; I am shaken off like a locust. ²⁴ My knees are weak from fasting, and my body grows lean and gaunt. ²⁵ I am an object of scorn to my accusers; when they see me, they shake their heads.
But You, O GOD, the psalm turns, and the ground it now stands on is not the man’s own innocence but God’s name and God’s loving devotion. And then, for the first time, we are shown what all of this has cost him. He is poor and wounded, thin as a lengthening shadow, flicked away like a locust, his knees gone weak from fasting while the crowd shakes their heads at the sight of him. This fury, we learn, was never coming from a comfortable man.
Psalm 109:26-29 (BSB)
²⁶ Help me, O LORD my God; save me according to Your loving devotion. ²⁷ Let them know that this is Your hand, that You, O LORD, have done it. ²⁸ Though they curse, You will bless. When they rise up, they will be put to shame, but Your servant will rejoice. ²⁹ May my accusers be clothed with disgrace; may they wear their shame like a robe.
What he longs for in the end is not some private satisfaction. He wants them to know that this is Your hand, that the LORD Himself has done it. Verse 28 may be the calmest sentence in the whole psalm: though they curse, You will bless. Human cursing and the blessing of God are not evenly matched, and he knows it.
Word study The accuser at the right hand (Psalm 109:6, 31)
Hebrew: שָׂטַן (satan), pronounced sah-TAHN. Strong’s H7853 / H7854. The word means to oppose someone, to stand against him and bring a charge, and as a noun it is simply the accuser.
You can hear that one root running all the way through the complaint. In verse 4 they accuse me; in verse 6 he asks that an accuser stand at the man’s right hand; and in verses 20 and 29 he speaks again of my accusers.
Verse 6 and verse 31 turn on the same verb, יַעֲמֹד (ya’amod), meaning let him stand, and on the same place, the right hand. In an ancient hearing it was the prosecutor who stood at the right hand, though a defender could stand there too. Verse 6 asks that an accuser be installed beside a guilty man; verse 31 announces who has instead taken His station beside the needy one.
Psalm 109:30-31 (BSB)
³⁰ With my mouth I will thank the LORD profusely; I will praise Him in the presence of many. ³¹ For He stands at the right hand of the needy one, to save him from the condemners of his soul.
The psalm does not end in the curse. It ends instead in thanks spoken out loud in public, and it gives that thanks before anything visible has changed. In verse 29 the accusers are still accusing, and yet by verse 30 the same mouth that cried out is already at other work. What this man finally rests on is not that the curses of verses 6 through 19 have landed, for he never once claims that they did. He rests on this: that God stands beside the very person no one else will defend.
In return for my love they accuse me.