Let God Take Care of It

Psalm 109:1-5  ¹ O God, whom I praise, do not remain silent, ² for wicked and deceitful men have opened their mouths against me; they have spoken against me with lying tongues. ³ With words of hatred they surround me; they attack me without cause. ⁴ In return for my friendship they accuse me, but I am a man of prayer. ⁵ They repay me evil for good, and hatred for my friendship.

Life got you down? Have you been falsely accused by wicked and deceitful people? Has your friendship been repaid with evil? Don't get even. Let God take care of it.

While other psalms have been about praise or the natural world, Psalm 109 is about payback. However, this is not payback in the usual sense. This is about divine payback. David, the author, has had people treat him very poorly, and in return he asks God to do some things to these people. Here are the things that he asks God to do.

• Appoint an evil man to stand against him so that he will be found guilty in a court of law
• Have his prayers condemn him
• Shorten his life so another takes his place of leadership
• Make his children fatherless
• Make his wife a widow
• Make his children become wandering beggars
• Have all his property seized by creditors and plundered by strangers
• Have all his descendants cut off and blotted out from the next generation
• Remember the iniquity of his fathers
• Never blot out the sin of his mother
• Always remember their sins so that their memory may be cut off from the earth

A little extreme? Probably, but the key point I want to make here is that these are all things he asked God to do. These are not things that he said he would do to them. We are not given the exact time in his life when he wrote this psalm, but it is safe to say that he was in a position to exact some sort of revenge upon his enemies at this time. However, he left it to God to take care of the situation.

David's attitude stands in direct contrast to the prevailing attitude of society where those who exact revenge upon evil people are glorified. This attitude is most notably reflected in popular movies, especially action movies where an individual or a team of individuals take the law into their own hands against evildoers. However, we should not think that we can avoid partaking in this attitude simply by avoiding watching movies and television. The desire for revenge comes from within the human heart, and the only way to silence it is to surrender our hearts to God.

Help me Lord to fully surrender my heart to you, so that when I am mistreated I will not look to myself, but to You, for help.