Sorry, Dave

There is something seductive and dangerous about the sentiments expressed in Psalm 7. The subtitle of the psalm indicates that it is a shiggaion, which an online Bible dictionary I consulted defines as “a lyrical poem composed under strong mental emotion; a song of impassioned imagination accompanied with suitable music; a dithyrambic ode.” I have no clue what a “dithyrambic ode” is supposed to be, but the rest of the definition rings true. Psalm 7 is an impassioned plea for deliverance from the writer’s enemies.

Consider the following: “Save me from all my pursuers, and deliver me, / or like a lion they will tear me apart; / they will drag me away, with no one to rescue” (vv. 1–2). Or this: “O let the evil of the wicked come to an end, / but establish the righteous, / you who test the minds and hearts, / O righteous God” (v. 9). Or this gem: “If one does not repent, God will whet his sword; / he has bent and strung his bow; / he has prepared his deadly weapons, / making his arrows fiery shafts” (vv. 12–13).

Now, if you know anything about me, you know that the last of those three examples—the one describing divine violence—gives me theological heartburn, and there is plenty more of that to go around in this short song. But I am willing to lay my qualms aside for a second to observe that these examples leave no doubt that the psalm has earned its status as a shiggaion: strong emotion and mental distress abound. The psalmist (David, according to the subtitle) is clearly undergoing an existential and theological crisis. He is facing persecution and threats despite his self-proclaimed blamelessness (I know, I know, but that’s David for you). He can’t understand why this is happening, and he calls on God to defend his life and honor.

Okay, second’s over. Back to my qualms and heartburn.

The problem as I see it is not merely that David assumes that God’s nature is as violent as his own, which would be bad enough, but worse is what we find in verse 6: “Rise up, O Lord, in your anger; / lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies; / awake, O my God; you have appointed a judgment.”

Did you see what he did there? It would have been harmful enough to say of the nonviolent God, “Lift yourself up against the fury of your enemies,” but what David says takes it up several more notches: “Lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies.” That’s what I mean when I call this verse seductive and dangerous. It’s seductive because who doesn’t want to equate one’s own enemies with God’s? It’s dangerous because it’s a short step from praying that God would wreak havoc upon these mutual opponents on our behalf to deciding to take matters into our own hands and save God the trouble. Isn’t that the way holy wars get started? If my enemies are also God’s enemies, that clearly gives me license to destroy them without a second thought.

My understanding of the Divine—and you can sing this along with me if you’ve heard it before—is that God is essentially nonviolent. All the language of divine violence in the Scriptures is a projection of the writers’ own bloodlust onto God. It’s character assassination on a massive scale. Let me state it as clearly as I can: God does not kill. God acts with violence toward neither God’s own enemies (because God doesn’t have any) nor ours.

People—with all their faults and foibles—wrote the Bible. Other people—with all our faults and foibles—read it, and somewhere along the line somebody decided to attribute all the words of the Bible not to the human authors but to God. But the Christian faith tells us that Jesus Christ is the true and perfect Word of God, so if certain words and ideas in the Bible don’t measure up to what we know of God’s nature and character through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and the continuing witness of the Holy Spirit, we are free—nay, obliged—to reject them.

God does not kill. Sorry, Dave, but you’ll have to take responsibility for your own violent tendencies. As must we all.