This is by far the most vivid and awesome of all the “imprecatory” psalms of David, where God’s curses and vengeance are called down upon the Psalmist’s enemies. It is applied to Judas Iscariot in the New Testament, and it is recorded that one old devout minister wrote the one word, “mysterious,” alongside of this psalm in his pocket Bible. That sentiment might sum-up the feelings of many, but as Spurgeon remarks, we are to remember that it is “A psalm of David,” and “not therefore the ravings of a malicious … hot revengeful spirit.” “David would not smite the man (Saul) who sought his blood,” says Spurgeon, “he frequently forgave those who treated him shamefully; and therefore, these words cannot be read in a bitter, revengeful sense, for that would be foreign to the character of the son of Jesse.”
And so, his divisions.
“In the first five verses David humbly pleads with God that he may be delivered from his remorseless and false-hearted enemies. From verse 6 to 20 filled with a prophetic furore, which carries him entirely beyond himself, he denounces judgment upon his foes; and then from verses 21 to 31 he returns to his communion with God in prayer and praise. The central portion of the psalm in which the difficulty lies must be regarded not as the personal wish of the Psalmist in cool blood, but as his prophetic denunciation of such persons as he describes, and emphatically of one “son of perdition” whom he sees with prescient eye. We would all pray for the conversion of our worst enemy, and David would have done the same, but viewing the adversaries of the Lord, and doers of iniquity, as such, and as incorrigible, we cannot wish them well. On the contrary, we desire their overthrow, and destruction.”
A father was asked by his young son whether it was right for a good man to pray for the destruction of his enemies in the way that David did in this 109th psalm. “I paused for a moment,” says the father, “to know how to shape the reply so as to fully meet and satisfy his inquiry; I then said ‘My son, if a murderer should enter this house by night, and murder your mother, and then escape, and the sheriff and citizens were all out in pursuit trying to catch him, would you not pray to God that they might succeed and arrest him, and that he might be brought to justice?’ ‘Yes of course,’ he replied, ‘but I never saw it like that.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the men against whom David prays were bloody men; men of falsehood and crime, and enemies to the peace of society … and unless they were arrested and their wicked devices defeated, many innocent persons must suffer.’”
Imprecations of judgment on the wicked on the hypothesis of their continued impenitence are not inconstant with simultaneous efforts to bring them to repentance. The law of holiness requires us to pray for the fires of divine retribution: the law of love to seek meanwhile to rescue the brand from the burning. The last prayer of the martyr Stephen was answered, not by any general averting of doom from a guilty nation, but by the conversion of one individual persecutor to the service of God.
Anger against sin and a desire that evildoers might be punished, are not opposed to the spirit of the gospel, or to that love of enemies which our Lord both enjoined and exemplified. If the emotion or its utterance were essentially sinful, how could Paul wish that those who preached any other gospel might be “accursed,” and especially, how could the martyred saints in heaven call on God for vengeance, and rejoice in the execution of it? - (Rev. 6 verse 10 and Rev. 19 verses 1 to 6.) Resentment against the wicked is so far from being necessarily sinful, that we find it manifested by the Holy and Just One himself, when in the days of his flesh he looked around on his hearers “with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts.” And then, in the great day of his wrath, he shall say to “all workers of iniquity,” “depart from me ye cursed.”
Consider what would have been the effect if these denunciations had been against the sins of men and not, as they are in these passages, against the sinners. Men would have said, “My sin is denounced, not me.” And what licence that would have given for sin! But man’s sin is identified with himself, and this makes him tremble. God’s wrath rests on him because of his sin. Condemnation awaits him on account of his sin. This is to help to make him anxious to be rid of it.