God Did Not Raise You So You Could Show Them

The Prayer Point That Brought the House Down

Picture a vigil. The fluorescent tubes are too bright, the plastic chairs have been defeating spines since before the choir was formed, and the leader has just announced the next prayer point. Everywhere I have been disgraced, Lord, raise me up to become their leader.

The room answers at once. Feet stamp. Somebody near the front is weeping, and she is not weeping for the kingdom of God. She is weeping because she has a list, the list is long, and everyone on it is about to hear about themselves. Anyone who has spent enough nights at Nigerian prayer meetings knows this scene, or one very like it. Under all that noise, a small cold question is waiting for someone to ask it.

What exactly are we asking for?

It could be that we are asking for the work of God to go forward and for the people in our care to be served. It could also be that we are asking for a front row seat at the humiliation of everyone who ever doubted us. The two prayers can use identical words, and the congregation will shout them with identical volume. God, who hears what sits under the words, knows which one is being prayed.

Before going further, though, the angry person deserves a fair hearing. Most people who pray that prayer have been genuinely wronged.

What the Angry Psalms Are Actually For

Whoever has been lied about, sacked unfairly, cheated of an inheritance or humiliated in front of the whole village doesn’t need a lecture on turning the other cheek. Not first, anyway. They need to know that the Bible has room for their rage, and it does. Scripture doesn’t tidy up the grief of wronged people for polite company.

Consider the psalm written by exiles beside the rivers of Babylon, people who had watched their city burn and their children die.

“O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!”

— Psalm 137:8 and 9 (ESV)

Nobody reads that aloud on a Sunday morning if they can help it. Yet it sits in the Bible, uncensored, and it is there on purpose. Psalm 94 opens with the same cry in cleaner language (“O LORD, God of vengeance, O God of vengeance, shine forth!”), and it ends its first three verses with a question that every oppressed person has asked: how long shall the wicked exult? Even in the last book of the Bible, the martyrs under the altar cry out in the voice of the Psalter.

“O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”

— Revelation 6:10 (ESV)

So the question is not whether Christians are allowed to want justice. They are. Erich Zenger, the German Old Testament scholar, argued in A God of Vengeance? that these psalms are best read as laments, the honest speech of people suffering violence, and he thought they still have a place in how believers pray. Miroslav Volf came at the same ground from the wreckage of the war in the former Yugoslavia. His argument, as I read it, is that a person can only give up violence if they believe God will deal with violence himself. A God who did not mind injustice would be a God not worth worshipping, and someone who gave up revenge without believing that would simply be giving up on justice. Volf’s own hard remark was that the idea comes easily in a quiet suburban house and badly in a land soaked with innocent blood.

Nigerians don’t need the point explained. After military rule ended, President Olusegun Obasanjo set up a panel under the retired Supreme Court justice Chukwudifu Oputa to hear what had been done to people between 1966 and 1999. The commission finished in 2002. Its report was never officially published, and it was a coalition of pressure groups, the Civil Society Forum, that released it in January 2005. If you are a family that stood in that queue to testify, you will understand why a country gets hungry for someone, anyone, to say that the wicked will not simply win.

Two Men Who Could Have Settled Scores

The psalmists, however, do something the vigil prayer does not. They hand the case to God and leave the room. The cry is addressed to the judge, and the sentence is left in his hands. The vigil prayer asks God to promote the plaintiff so that the plaintiff can deliver the sentence in person.

Take Joseph, since he is the man everyone reaches for. He was seventeen when his brothers threw him into a pit at Dothan, and the story does not spare us the picture of them sitting down to eat while he was in it. Slavery followed in the house of Potiphar, then a prison term he did not earn because a powerful man’s wife lied, then two full years in which a cupbearer he had helped simply forgot him. If any man in the Bible had earned a revenge fantasy, it was Joseph.

Yet when Pharaoh needed a dream explained and Joseph was finally brought up from the cell, he did not say watch me. He said, as far as the story tells it, that the answer would come from God. And the end of the story, when his brothers were frightened and entirely in his power, is the strangest part.

“Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”

— Genesis 50:19 and 20 (ESV)

Am I in the place of God? Joseph never claims the evil was small, or tells his brothers it was nothing. He names it. You meant evil against me. What he refuses is the judge’s chair. The famine ran for seven years, and the grain stored in the good years fed Egypt and the families around it. His elevation had a purpose, and the purpose was bread.

David’s story begins from the same insult. When Samuel came to Jesse’s house to anoint a king, the family lined up seven sons and, by the account in 1 Samuel 16, left the youngest out with the sheep. God’s word to Samuel that day is worth keeping close.

“For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.”

— 1 Samuel 16:7 (ESV)

David was anointed in front of his brothers, and the next thing the narrative shows him doing is carrying on with ordinary work. When he later talked himself into a fight with Goliath, the credentials he offered Saul were a lion and a bear he had dealt with while minding his father’s sheep (1 Samuel 17:34 to 37). Nobody had clapped for any of it. The road to the throne turned out long, and Saul spent a great deal of it trying to kill him. Twice David had Saul at his mercy and walked away, and nothing in the record suggests he spent those years rehearsing how his brothers would look when he returned in glory.

Picture a young man in Ibadan whose uncle gave away his school fees money, and who watched cousins he had once helped pass him at a wedding without a greeting. Years later he becomes a person of some standing, and the first thing he notices is how often he checks who in the hall has seen him arrive. That checking is the thing to be afraid of. It does not need an enemy to be present. It only needs a memory and a room.

The Table Laid in Front of Enemies

Here is the verse that most vigils reach for when the prayer point gets going, and it deserves a slower reading than it usually gets.

“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.”

— Psalm 23:5 (ESV)

The popular reading runs like this. God will seat me at a banquet, my enemies will be made to stand at the wall and watch me eat, and they will be sorry. It is a satisfying picture. It is also a picture the verse does not draw. Look at what the text actually says. The enemies are present, yes, and they are not removed. But they are not described. They don’t weep, they don’t apologise, and nobody confesses to having been wrong about you. All the attention of the verse falls on the host, the table, the oil and the cup. The psalm is about being fed and being safe while the people who wanted you gone are still in the room.

Another scene in David’s life shows what that table looked like when he was on the other side of it. In 2 Samuel 17 David himself is the man in flight, hungry and worn out, with Absalom’s rebellion behind him. Three men meet him at Mahanaim with beds, basins, wheat, barley, lentils, honey and cheese, because, as the text says, the people are hungry and weary and thirsty in the wilderness. One of the three is Machir, son of Ammiel, from Lo Debar.

That name should sound familiar. Lo Debar is the place where, some chapters earlier, Jonathan’s crippled son Mephibosheth was found living in Machir’s house. When David became king, with the house of Saul no longer a danger to anyone, he asked a question that nobody in his court would have expected.

“Is there still anyone left of the house of Saul, that I may show him kindness for Jonathan’s sake?”

— 2 Samuel 9:1 (ESV)

The king did not ask whom he might settle accounts with. And Mephibosheth, a man who had every reason to expect a knife, was given a seat at the king’s table. The place called Lo Debar, a name Strong’s and the NAS concordance gloss as pastureless, ended up supplying the food that fed the king when the king was the hungry one. Whatever else you make of that, it is hard to read it as a story about winning an argument.

I should be honest, though, that David’s record does not make him a saint of forgiveness. In 2 Samuel 21, after a three year famine, David handed seven of Saul’s descendants over to the Gibeonites, who hanged them. Mephibosheth was spared, the text says, because of the oath between David and Jonathan. The same king who laid a table for one grandson of Saul gave seven other members of Saul’s house to the Gibeonites. David was a political animal in a violent age, and his kindness was real and also partial. He makes a poor hero for a tidy story about revenge refined into mercy, and the New Testament doesn’t leave the matter with him.

What to Pray Once the Anger Is Said

What the New Testament says is simple enough, and it isn’t gentle about the part that costs us. Proverbs had already told us not to say I will repay evil, and to wait for the LORD. Paul takes the ancient line and gives it a purpose.

“Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’”

— Romans 12:19 (ESV)

Paul doesn’t say the vengeance will never come. He says it isn’t ours to carry, and a few lines later he finishes the thought with a sentence every wronged person should print and keep somewhere visible: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21, ESV). Jesus pushes the same direction, saying in Luke 6:27 and 28 to love your enemies and pray for those who abuse you.

That is a hard word for anyone with an honest grievance, and I don’t want to soften it. Nothing in it says the injustice was imaginary, that the wicked will never face God, or that you must feel warm toward a person who hasn’t repented. What changes is the prayer. Say the angry thing to God in full, in the words of the psalms if you need them, with the name attached. Then leave the sentencing where Joseph left it. The judge isn’t you.

There is a practical cost to the other kind of prayer, too. Anyone who spends the waiting years watching the door for enemies to arrive at their feet is not doing the work in front of them. The obsession becomes its own small prison. And a position built on the need to prove something to somebody is a performance, which means it needs an audience, and audiences get bored. One day the crowd that was supposed to be so impressed stops looking, and the person on the platform finds that the whole thing was a mirror.

And ask for the elevation anyway, if you want it, but ask for the right reason. Joseph’s promotion fed a region. David’s reached a crippled man in a hiding place. Neither of them was raised so that someone else could be made smaller, and the prayer worth praying at the next vigil asks for the same shape of future. Raise me so that they can be fed.

When the prayer point comes round again and the room begins to stamp, you will not need to stop anyone. Just take the name from your own list, the one that really hurts, and say it to God as plainly as the exiles did by the river. Then ask him what a table would look like if you were the one who got to lay it. You may find the answer surprises you, and I suspect it will take longer than one vigil to learn.

References

Biblical References

Proverbs 20:22 (ESV). The epigraph and the old wisdom that revenge is handed over to God.
Psalm 137:8 and 9 (ESV). The exiles’ curse, quoted to show that Scripture keeps the voice of the wronged.
Psalm 94:1 to 3 (ESV). The cry to the God of vengeance, quoted in part to show how the angry psalms address their anger to God.
Revelation 6:10 (ESV). The martyrs’ prayer for justice, showing that the plea for vindication continues in the New Testament.
Genesis 37; 40:23 to 41:1; 41:16; 41:29 to 30 (ESV). Joseph’s pit, the forgetful cupbearer, his answer before Pharaoh and the seven years of famine, summarised and not quoted.
Genesis 50:19 and 20 (ESV). Joseph’s refusal to take the place of God, and the purpose of his elevation.
1 Samuel 16:7 (ESV). God’s rebuke of appearances at David’s anointing.
1 Samuel 17:34 to 37; 24; 26 (ESV). David’s lion and bear, and the two occasions he spared Saul, summarised and not quoted.
Psalm 23:5 (ESV). The table among enemies, read closely.
2 Samuel 17:27 to 29 (ESV). Machir of Lo Debar supplying David in his flight.
2 Samuel 9:1 and 4 (ESV). David’s question about the house of Saul, and Mephibosheth’s hiding place in Machir’s house.
2 Samuel 21:1 to 9 (ESV). The Gibeonite demand and Mephibosheth’s being spared, used to keep the account of David honest.
Romans 12:19 and 21 (ESV). Paul’s instruction to leave vengeance to God and overcome evil with good.
Luke 6:27 and 28 (ESV). Jesus’ teaching on loving enemies and praying for those who abuse.

Other Sources

Dash, D. (2008, February 14). More Volf on non retaliation and God’s justice [Blog post]. DashHouse. https://dashhouse.com/2008214more-volf-on-non-retaliation-and-gods-justice-html. Used only to confirm Volf’s thesis and his remarks about suburban quiet and a land soaked in innocent blood.
The New Humanitarian. (2005, January 12). Nigeria: Rights panel wanted three ex military rulers probed for killings. https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/report/52654/nigeria-rights-panel-wanted-three-ex-military-rulers-probed-killings. Source for the panel’s origin, chair, completion in 2002, and the release of its report by the Civil Society Forum.
Volf, M. (1996). Exclusion and embrace: A theological exploration of identity, otherness, and reconciliation. Abingdon Press. Paraphrased, not quoted.
Zenger, E. (1996). A God of vengeance? Understanding the psalms of divine wrath (L. M. Maloney, Trans.). Westminster John Knox Press. Paraphrased, not quoted.

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.