Yesterday, I discovered a disgusting and infuriating injustice. My bicycle—my beautiful practically-brand-new-50th-birthday-present bicycle—was stolen from what I thought was a perfectly secure location: locked with an expensive bicycle lock to the steel railing directly in front of our apartment door on the 4th floor of our locked apartment building.

This is simply a violation of the vilest sort, perpetrated by the basest of creatures, who has no right to live among civilized people!

Maybe, you can tell I am still ticked. But yesterday morning, I was probably blistering the paint off the walls as I ranted and raged (as one can only do when he is alone) against the low-life who could plot and execute such a calculated act of pure evil. It is a good thing for him I did not catch him during those moments, because I was quite prepared to cut out his liver and feed it to the crows!

In the midst of my ranting, I even prayed along those lines, tongue in cheek of course, because praying that way is not really allowed. My wife says praying that way even tongue in cheek is not allowed, either. (She’s probably right!)

But it seems like it used to be allowed. Prayers that are pretty intense made it into the Psalter, in any case—prayers calling for judgment and even a curse against one’s enemies.

There are actually quite a few “imprecatory prayers” in the Bible. But among the most intense is at the end of Psalm 137, where the author writes with a shocking degree of candor:

Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is the one who repays you
according to what you have done to us.
9 Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.

Such a prayer seems vindictive, to say the least. It was likely the very real and natural emotion of one who had seen unspeakable horrors committed against his people, perhaps against his own family, perhaps, the sort of things, that would make a stolen bicycle seem like an act of kindness by comparison.

I doubt that I can speak here satisfactorily to the issue of integrating Scripture texts of the sort that look favorably on the crushing of baby heads with other Scriptures that require us to love our enemies. (And they must be integrated.) But I believe the key to such integration is to read them in the light of the cross of Christ.

In Genesis 3:15 we find the first messianic prophecy of Christ within the context of head crushing. Sometimes called the Protoevangelium, this first glimmer of the gospel communicates the good news that the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent, while the serpent will bruise his heel. We understand this to be a prophetic reference to Christ and the crucifixion. The seeming defeat of Christ at the cross was, in fact, His crushing victory over Satan.

Psalm 137 is in some ways an imprecatory prayer against the seed of the serpent.

Our Epistle reading on Sunday (from Ephesians 6) reminded us that we do not fight against flesh and blood but against spiritual powers and darkness. And we do well to keep this in mind when we are tempted to see the people we love as the enemy. It would be simplistic, however, to gloss over the imprecatory prayers in Scripture, as some try to do, by suggesting they applied strictly to spiritual enemies.

The enmity foretold in Genesis 3 between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman indicates a flesh-and-blood conflict. Indeed, the history of the world since the very beginning has seen nothing but violent conflict between nations and individuals alike.

Injustice and evil abound in our physical world. And righteous judgment is precisely what is needed to make things right again. We need someone with the power and wisdom to destroy evil and restore justice.

It seems clear that at times in history God has done just that, exercising severe judgment against individuals and nations for their great wickedness and injustice. The reality of the crushed heads of the “seed” of all who stand as enemies of God is both a temporal fulfillment of the retributive prophecies and a brutal depiction of the ultimate crushing of Satan’s head by Christ at the cross.

The wonderful paradox of the cross, however, is that Christ took on Himself the retribution deserved by the enemies of God (including you and me), so that they (we) might be reconciled as friends of God. HE was crushed for our iniquities.

Our Old Testament reading on Sunday (from Isaiah 59) picks up these themes of both retribution and redemption, and even the wording of Psalm 137 (cf., v. 18):

The Lord looked and was displeased
that there was no justice.
16 He saw that there was no one,
he was appalled that there was no one to intervene;
so his own arm achieved salvation for him,
and his own righteousness sustained him.

He put on righteousness as his breastplate,
and the helmet of salvation on his head;
he put on the garments of vengeance
and wrapped himself in zeal as in a cloak.
18 According to what they have done,
so will he repay
wrath to his enemies
and retribution to his foes;
he will repay the islands their due.
19 From the west, people will fear the name of the Lord,
and from the rising of the sun, they will revere his glory.
For he will come like a pent-up flood
that the breath of the Lord drives along.

20 “The Redeemer will come to Zion,
to those in Jacob who repent of their sins,”
declares the Lord.

And so, in conclusion, I will temper my prayers regarding my bicycle thief by praying that Christ the Redeemer, who has in His own body suffered the retribution due, will come to him offering redemption. But I suppose there is nothing wrong in also praying the thief will find no pleasure and satisfaction in his sins, and that he will know nothing but restlessness until he comes to his knees in repentance. Indeed, I pray the same for myself.