The Two-Edged Sword of Praise

Psalm 149

If you want to be challenged in your prayer and worship life, then this is the psalm for you. Let’s deal with the easy parts first. 

The psalm invites us to praise the LORD with a new song. He is worthy of our praise because He is our Maker, King, adorns the humble with salvation, and takes pleasure in His people. The beauty and greatness of the LORD calls us to be glad in Him, to rejoice, to sing, to dance for joy, to even exult in His glory. The high praises of God should rightly be in our throats both day and night. 

So far, so good. 

But the high praises of God in our throats are joined with the two-edged sword in our hands. The first half of verse six completes the “praise the LORD” section that we are more comfortable with while the psalm pivots in the second half to the “execute vengeance” section that carries through the end of the song. This is not just one phrase that we could comfortably ignore, but half of the psalm. 

The honor for the godly ones, and that is what the psalm calls it, is to execute vengeance on the nations, to punish the peoples, to bind their kings with chains, to bind their nobles with fetters of iron, and to execute on them the judgment that is written. 

I don’t remember those words in the Baptist Hymnal.

One of the things I like about the psalms is that it gives us freedom to pray anything, to pour our heart out before the Lord, to literally say anything to the King of Kings. We can express our frustration at why He is taking so long to deliver us. We can question His love, wondering if He has forgotten how to be good. We can pray all sorts of things, and God is gracious to hear us out. 

And that includes things that we should not pray. In our pain, we ask God to do things that are not in His will. Even in our wisdom, when things are going well, we often pray for things that are best answered negatively by a God who loves us.

In my mind, this means that some of the prayers in the psalms are the heart cries of people in pain, and, while understandable, they are not “theologically correct.” Just like the many Bible stories where we are to learn from their negative example (for example, David and Bathsheba), perhaps we are also to learn from the insufficient prayers of the people in pain. In other words, we learn what not to pray. 

But we do have to face the fact that many of our favorite Bible stories include the execution of justice by a human as a servant of the Lord (for example, David and Goliath).  Remember the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal? After calling down fire from heaven, what did the prophet do? He slaughtered the prophets of Baal by the Brook of Kishon (see 1 Kings 18.40). He took up the two-edged sword and executed on them the punishment that was written. The high praise of God was on his lips and the two-edged sword was in his hands. 

It is challenging to read a psalm like this while also preaching through the New Testament book of Philippians. In that apostolic letter, we are called to suffer for the sake of Christ, to suffer the loss of all things, to even become like Him in His death. I can’t imagine Paul telling the saints in Philippi to take up the two-edged sword and to execute judgment upon the nobles of the city who had Paul beaten with rods. 

For the last 2000 years, the church has wrestled with the role of violence for the follower of Christ, especially when it comes to war. Many Christian groups have taken the pacifist stance, arguing that all forms of violence are against the commands of Christ. On the other hand, Saint Augustine developed the “just war” theory to explain when it is morally justifiable to use violence in war.  

What this psalm does for us is to combine praise of the LORD with the execution of justice. We dare not pick up a two-edged sword unless the praise of the King of Kings is on our lips and in our heart. We must know that He alone is the Giver of Life. We must surrender to Him alone as the King of Kings. We must delight in His salvation, knowing that we ourselves ought to be objects of His wrath but have become objects of His great love. It is only through these eyes that we could ever pick up the sword of justice. 

The Lord called David, Joshua, Elijah, Gideon, and many others to be instruments of His justice in this world. If the Lord ever puts me in that situation, I hope that the high praises of God so rules my heart and my hands that all will be done to His glory.  

But more than that, I pray the Lord never puts me in that situation. Is that a right way to pray?

This article is part of a yet to be published work by Pastor Todd Pylant entitled, “Ancient Problems, Modern Prayers.”