Curse Words

Have you ever caught yourself wishing that someone were dead? Seriously – have you wanted to see someone struck by lightning?

Two of the Apostles did. The “sons of thunder” – James and John – wanted to see a whole village turned to cinders because the people there refused to welcome Jesus. They wanted to do the Elijah thing and call down fire from on high.

It is so striking to me that John is involved in this whenever I read that passage from Luke 9: 51-55. This very Apostle leaned on Jesus at the Last Supper. He is said to have truly known the heart of the Savior. John crafted a legacy in his writings as the “Apostle of Love.” His first gospel references “love” some 39 times and his first letter uses the term 21 times.

Even this one who walked with the Son got agitated enough to want blast away a whole bunch of people. I take comfort in this reality. It says to me that the ones who were so close to Jesus during His time earth were a whole lot like you and me.

Curse words. We think them. Some of us do our best not to use them. We bite our tongues. And yet in moments of anger and stress such words do get said.

Isaiah said as much when he stood before the Lord in His glory: “… I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. …” (See Isaiah 6:5.)

Profanity. That’s the category of speech to which such talk belongs.

We are told these sayings are not proper. The character of our culture was such that we used to count curse words as undignified, improper, impolite, and just plain wrong. One popular comedian crafted a whole routine around “seven words you can never say on TV.” He rattled off those words and got a lot of laughs. That was decades ago.

Nowadays, some of this these very words are all over the airwaves. Yes, words that used bring threats from our moms about washing out our mouths with soap are now bandied about quite casually.

Such is the nature of man. We allow ourselves to get down and dirty all too often. Our souls “cleave to the dust” (Psalm 119:25).

God knows this; He has always known this. “For He knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14). It was the Lord who chose the raw material of which we are formed.

Imprecatory Language

As we have gone through the Psalms, we have seen that this book of the Bible is the one that is dedicated to helping us with the ways that we feel. The songs given to us through these pages are glad and sad, joyful and mournful, happy and harsh, heart-lifting and heart-wrenching.

Yes, the words we read in Psalms run the gamut of emotional outbursts that break forth in the course of our lives. The Lord made holy and right provisions for us.

He even supplied things to sing when we long to the see the worst happen to our enemies. Hold on there. Did not Jesus teach us to love even our enemies? Well, let’s read it: “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

Love? Bless? Do good? To our enemies? To those who use and abuse us? That is the ideal standard that the Savior communicated in His Sermon on the Mount (see Matthew, chapters 5-7).

It is a standard that is well beyond our reach in the natural. We cannot do this at all without the power of the Holy Spirit “shedding the love of God abroad in our hearts” (Romans 5:5).

Lord, help. Please.

Part of His merciful kindness is that our God has made space for us to use strong, outrageous language that is so contradictory to what He taught in the gospels. Share on X

Part of His merciful kindness is that our God has made space for us to use strong, outrageous language that is so contradictory to what He taught in the gospels.

The theological designation for these songs of anger is this: imprecatory. The definition literally means “songs that call down a curse.”

Eugene Peterson, the pastor/teacher who gave us The Message translation of the Scriptures, described these psalms as words we really need to learn in order to survive. He said, “We need to learn to cuss without cussing.”

Catch this instruction: We can go to certain psalms and give voice to profane thoughts and feelings we have without having to resort to crying our profanity our loud.

Big, Ugly Anger

There are snippets of imprecatory sayings dropped into a number of the songs in our Bibles. Two psalms, in particular, really seem to push the envelope – Psalm 109 and Psalm 140.

Psalm 140 is a diatribe against mischievous plotters and evil speakers. Face it; we do get to points in our lives where we we’ve had enough. Actually, the Lord shall get to that point in the final judgments listed in the book of Revelation. So again, such thoughts and feelings in us do not distance us from Him who saved us.

How are we to answer these moments of big anger? God says to sing and pray this:

“Let burning coals fall upon them! Let them be cast into fire, into miry pits, no more to rise! Let not the slanderer be established in the land; let evil hunt down the violent man speedily!” (Psalm 140:10-11).

Notice the exclamation points that punctuate each sentence. These words are to be shouted. Here’s the thing, however. These shouts are to be shouted to the Lord.

The ending lines of this psalm reveal a confidence in God. The writer expresses the expectation that justice shall served – in God’s way, in God’s time. “I know that the Lord will maintain the cause of the afflicted, and will execute justice for the needy. Surely the righteous shall give thanks to your name; the upright shall dwell in your presence” (Psalm 140:12-13).

Similar expressions of this sentiment are found at the close of Psalm 109, a more extended and graphic plea for the Lord to administer a pounding to the wicked and the deceitful.

The writer begins with a most vehement and shocking cry to God regarding what he wants to see happen to his foe: “Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand” (Psalm 109:6).

You read that right: This prayer asks that the offending party be turned over to the devil. He wants there to be Hell to pay.

It gets somewhat uglier in this psalm. The prayers for judgment are extended to the family of the oppressive one. “May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow! May his children wander about and beg, seeking food far from the ruins they inhabit!” (Psalm 109:9-10).

Whoa, Lord! Is this any way to approach You, the God of all grace?

It is. This is mercy. We really shouldn’t be saying these kinds of things about anyone. But God lets us say them. He encourages us in fact to say them to Him and to Him alone.

We are soil – that’s the bottom line. Soil fashioned by Him to house the souls that we are. And since the curse of sin we are tragically seeded with all manner of thorns and thistles we’ve allowed to proliferate due to sin.

We are soil – that’s the bottom line. Soil fashioned by Him to house the souls that we are. And since the curse of sin we are tragically seeded with all manner of thorns and thistles we’ve allowed to proliferate due to sin. Share on X

The Gardener of our hearts sees it as a healthy thing for our weeds to sprout. Bring your cusses to the surface and then the Maker is free to do His cultivation. The result of our honesty and His holy attention is fruitfulness.

So sing to the Lord even these songs of agitation. Set loose what would leave you withered and wasted. Sing a song like Psalm 109 all the way to its end:

“With my mouth I will give great thanks to the Lord; I will praise him in the midst of the throng. For he stands at the right hand of the needy one, to save him from those who condemn his soul to death” (Psalm 109:30-31).