Hellfire and Damnation

Preached 7/7/02

Judgment

Preached by: Dr. Paul R. Smith

West Side Presbyterian Church

Seattle, WA

Contact: office@wspc.org

HELLFIRE AND DAMNATION

[Psalm 109:1-20]

Prayer for Illumination - Heavenly Father, these are harsh and difficult words and often we pass over them. We seldom if ever use them in worship. They seem somehow beneath those who have known God’s grace and mercy. Yet they are the words of your inspired scripture and they have been given to us to learn, and I pray that we might understand the truth that you want us to know from this word. Lord, I confess that my knowledge, my understanding is severely limited, and yet I pray that your Spirit might reflect truth in our hearts, that we might be honest about the questions we raise and the answers we consider, and that in the end we might feel we have drawn closer to understanding you, to understanding your heart, and to understanding ourselves and our broken world. I pray these things now in the name of Jesus, AMEN.

Message

I suppose there are few images more repugnant in our society than that of the sweaty evangelist, shirt sleeves rolled up, eyes blazing, fists pounding on the pulpit, recounting with vindictive glee the tortures of hellfire and damnation awaiting unrepentant sinners. Novelist Sinclair Lewis probably gave us the most vivid example of this hypocrisy in his creation of Elmer Gantry, the charismatically engaging, but scandalous Midwestern salesman turned preacher in the 1920s. “Sin. Sin, Sin. You’re all sinners,” we hear him cry. “You’re all doomed to perdition. You’re all goin’ to the painful, stinkin’, scaldin’, everlastin’ tortures of a fiery hell, created by God for sinners, unless, unless, unless you repent.” We, of course, are all well above such crass and vulgar displays. Benign and tolerant, civil and urbane, the last thing we would do today is pronounce judgment on evil.

So if we take the Scriptures seriously, if we really believe 2 Timothy 3:16 that “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” we find ourselves profoundly uncomfortable with certain of the Psalms, like Psalm 109 that we have just read this morning. Taken as a group, these are called “imprecatory Psalms” because they pronounce “imprecations,” or curses upon people perceived to be our enemies, presumably God’s enemies. Walter Kaiser, one of my professors from years ago and currently the president of my seminary, defines an imprecation as “an invocation of judgment, calamity, or curse uttered against one’s enemies.”

If we are willing to listen, we find them often, not only in the Scriptures, not only in the Psalms, but in the Prophets as well, and sometimes even on the lips of our Lord. “Let the wicked be put to shame and lie silent in the grave,” David says in Psalm 31. “Let their lying lips be silenced, for with pride and contempt they speak arrogantly against the righteous.”

Or in Psalm 35 that we looked at last week:

May those who seek my life be disgraced and put to shame; may those who plot my ruin be turned back in dismay. May they be like chaff before the wind, with the angel of the LORD driving them away; may their path be dark and slippery, with the angel of the LORD pursuing them.

Pretty vivid images!

Break the teeth in their mouths, O God; tear out, O LORD, the fangs of the lions! Let them vanish like water that flows away; when they draw the bow, let their arrows be blunted. . . . like a stillborn child, may they not see the sun. [Psalm 58]

“Do not grant the wicked their desires, O LORD; do not let their plans succeed,” we quoted from Psalm 140 in our bulletins this morning.

Let the heads of those who surround me be covered with the trouble their lips have caused. Let burning coals fall upon them; may they be thrown into the fire, into miry pits, never to rise.

Or, hardly pausing for a breath, we follow the escalating invocation of curses in our text from Psalm 109, a creative list of curses upon our enemies [109:6-15].

We find ourselves, in the face of these imprecations, overwhelmed with what C. S. Lewis describes as “the spirit of hatred which strikes us in the face . . . like the heat from a furnace.” And I confess I haven’t even quoted the worst one yet: Psalm 137, “Happy is he who dashes your little ones against a stone.”

But my problem is that I do indeed believe that “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” so I must face these calls for hellfire and damnation and I must see what I may learn in them of a God whom I have come to know as both righteous and full of grace. There was a time when I was reluctant to do so, but I have learned over the years in my study of the Scriptures that very often our most profound discoveries come from exploring the most difficult and even the most distasteful texts. We ought not to avoid them. As Lewis says once again, “Where there is cover we hope for game.” Serious treasures rarely lie scattered on the surface. We have to look more deeply, but there we may find something of great value.

This, by the way, was my first serious assignment in seminary. Professor Meredith Kline, a very fine Hebrew scholar from Westminster Seminary, assigned me the imprecatory Psalms as, I suppose, sort of my “baptism by fire” into the Old Testament Poetical Books. I was hopeful of resolving the problem for future generations of Bible scholars, but I learned mostly that many fine theologians and Bible students disagreed quite heatedly on the explanation of these inspired curses.

A number of scholars whom I greatly admired, like the great German theologian Gerhard Kittel, whose Dictionary of Theological Words in several volumes is on my shelf, and Henry Halley who wrote the popular Bible Handbook, seemed to believe that these Psalms were simply hate-filled, diabolical expressions of malice, certainly unworthy of those who follow Jesus. But I think this explanation will not do. These Psalms are not presented to us as anomalies. In fact God himself speaks such judgment, and most surprisingly, in the words of Jesus, who gives us the most vivid picture of the torments of hell. I don’t think we can dismiss them that easily.

Derek Kidner, who wrote one of my favorite commentaries on the Psalms, suggests they are poetic hyperbole–exaggeration in order to make a point. “The passages on which we may be tempted to sit in judgment,” he writes, “have the shocking immediacy of a scream, to startle us into feeling something of the desperation which produced them.” They do have this effect, of course, and that is good. C. S. Lewis in his Reflections on the Psalms points out that the almost vicious response of the Psalmist to what is admittedly deliberate and inexcusable injury helps us to see the seriousness of injustice and the depth of the pain in the response it provokes. And we do need to do that because we often don’t realize, when we’ve mistreated or abused someone, how hostile a reaction we might have created.

But this does not sound like hyperbole to me. There is a straight-forwardness about it which indicates the Psalmist means precisely what he said. He is not exaggerating. And in any case, God’s Word does not elsewhere condone exaggeration to make a point.

Some, like Matthew Henry in his popular commentary, suggest that these are not actually curses, but simply predictions of what must inevitably take place. But nothing about these Psalms sounds like a prophecy. They are prayers, petitioning God to get about the business of judgment. Don’t neglect this! Don’t be silent! Judgement is required! It is more than a prediction. It is clearly calling for judgment.

Dispensationalists, who have influenced the thinking of many of us here, tend to dismiss these imprecatory Psalms as examples of living under law instead of under grace, but once again, I think this is the easy way out. In any case I cannot accept the dissecting of Scripture which is inherent in this approach. The Scriptures of both the Old and the New Testaments speak with one voice about both holiness and grace, about both justice and mercy. It is not new in the New Testament. In fact it was Jesus himself in the Sermon on the Mount who said,

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law.

The Old Testament quite as much as the New calls us both to obedience and to forgiveness, both to law and to grace.

No, all these explanations seemed to me to skirt the issue. They are too convenient--attempts to explain away what seems stark and overt. I mean there is a judgment pronounced here, and we need to face that. Just because God’s Word is difficult does not give us warrant to dismiss it. So every time I returned to the imprecatory Psalms, without having really resolved what they are about, I had to ask myself: Is it, under any and all circumstances, wrong for us to desire retribution for acts of evil?

In a very practical and unavoidable way, we were all faced with this question after the horrific attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center last September 11. Now, it’s not just an imprecatory psalm. Now, it’s getting personal. As I watched the black smoke billow from the towers as terrified occupants leaped to their death from the upper floors, and then watched the towers collapse in an enormous pile of rubble, literally pulverizing the bodies of thousands of innocent victims, I could not help but conclude that I was watching stark, unmitigated evil!

And I, for one, found myself profoundly uncomfortable with how one group would have us respond to those acts of violence. “Oh, we must seek to understand; we must forgive,” we were told, and it all sounded pious and charitable. At least it was intended to, but somehow it came across to me as rather spineless and (I have to use this) pusillanimous. You can look it up, but it’s like a sniveling coward who refuses to confront the neighborhood bully. And you know what folks? I don’t think that’s noble. There’s a time when the bully needs to be confronted, and it is not noble to excuse what he’s done. Every fiber of my being as I watched that transpire wanted to scream: NO! This is pure, unadulterated EVIL! And we are not more humane if we let this act go unpunished–we are far less! To allow such an act to stand is to disavow our responsibility for humanity, for what is good and right and true.

I recognize that many of you will disagree with me, and may even be offended by my remarks–I considered long whether I ought to say this at all--but I confess to you that I cheered when our Secretary of Defense took the microphone from one of his staff who was stumbling about, trying to respond to the media’s challenge, and said, “I think it needs to be said that our goal is to kill these people.” And most of us winced and yet we thought, it was an act that ought not to go unpunished.

“Destroy thou them, O God. Let their way be dark and slippery. May ruin overtake them by surprise . . . may they fall into the pit, to their ruin.” I have to confess I don’t have a problem praying that prayer in response to unrepentant and reprehensible acts of evil and violence. And I ought not to have a problem no matter who it is that does it. One of my problems, in all honesty, is that I am too selective in this. We ought not to be selective. We ought to be glad to pray that things would be set right and that evil would be confronted by judgment. And I think I should be less than human, and certainly far less than godly, if I did not desire the destruction of Evil!

But I must be fair about this, and brutally honest, and most of us are unwilling to be. There are several points at which our righteous indignation is vulnerable. In the first place, it would be very dangerous for me to identify my own cause with God’s; yet of course we have a tendency to do just that. At times, David seems to do this, and as he was by God’s admission, “a man after [God’s] own heart,” he may well be warranted in assumptions that I am not free to make, certainly not out of my distorted heart. However, even with David, we are well within our rights to ask him to show us quite precisely how it is God’s will which has been violated, and God’s name which has been vilified. For these (God’s will and God’s name) we too are sworn to uphold.

If, on the other hand, I begin to call down curses on those who have simply disagreed with me, or who have offended me, or who have hurt my pride, then I may justly be called to account for my vindictive spirit. And we must be careful, by the way, to apply this on the national level as well as on the personal level. Nearly every year on the 4^th of July I go back and read some of those great documents: the English Bill of Rights and the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of Independence and Carreen and I are struck once again with how much time is spent in those documents outlining all the things that the other people did wrong. This, you see, is our justification for what we are doing. And they may well have done things wrong and may have stood in need of judgment, but we also need to look at ourselves in all this.

If there is one fundamental truth as a believer which every man or woman needs to recognize, it is that in the end, it is only God’s reputation that matters. I care very much what you think of me, but that is just my pride talking. I do not have leave to defend my own name at the expense of others. The imprecations in the Psalms or anywhere else are only legitimate to the extent that they defend God’s name, God’s honor and God’s reputation–not our own. So we need to be extremely careful as we approach these imprecatory Psalms. There is a tendency to wield them like a weapon in defense of ourselves instead of in defense of the honor of our God.

The implication of all this is that before I am in a position to sincerely and appropriately pray the imprecatory Psalms–for they are after all prayers from God’s holy Word–before I can use them as prayers, I must be willing to subject myself to a rigorous and uncompromising self-examination in the light of God’s Word. We all need to be much more brutally honest about ourselves before we begin to condemn others.

But having said that, in the end, our failure to hate evil is no virtue! That I think is perhaps the most important thing, the most stark thing that I might say today, for that flies in the face of contemporary wisdom. But I will say it again: our failure to hate evil is no virtue! It is, rather, the very worst kind of vice. And we are not God’s friends if we tolerate anything at all which contradicts His holiness–whether we find those things in ourselves, or whether we find those things in our enemies. This is something I learned from the imprecatory Psalms: God cares about holiness and about righteousness, and you and I need to care about them as well.

If we look closely at the imprecatory Psalms, we will find precisely that spirit. The curses in our text from Psalm 109 are not pronounced because we find this person to be personally offensive to us. Rather, the reasons are carefully spelled out, beginning in verse 16. Judge this man because “he never [even] thought [about] doing [an act of] kindness.” He lived his whole life for himself. He never once turned that out to serve somebody else. “[He] hounded to death the poor and the needy and the brokenhearted. He loved to pronounce a curse–“ well let those curses “come [back] on him. He found no pleasure in blessing–“ well then let blessings “be far from him.” You see, there’s a certain justice that’s being asked for here. “He wore cursing as his garment; it entered into his body like water, into his bones like oil. [Well let] it be like a cloak wrapped about him, like a belt . . . forever around him.”

It sounds to me like this man’s attitude and behavior needed very much to be confronted. He’s not just my personal enemy. He is merciless in his treatment of the poor and the needy and the brokenhearted. He is unrepentant about his harsh treatment of others. He shows no inclination whatsoever to treat people with kindness or to put things right. Ought we not to care about such conduct? Ought such an attitude to go unpunished?

In Psalm 5:10, we read, “Declare them to be guilty, O God! Let their intrigues be their downfall. Banish them for their many sins, for they have rebelled against you.“ Do we care that people are rebelling against Almighty God? The One who is sovereign in creation, who loves us with an everlasting love, who desires for things to be good and right? Do we care that our world rebels against Him? We ought to care! There is something drastically wrong with us if we do not agree that rebellion against God is just cause for serious punishment.

Psalm 10 recognizes the need for judgment upon a man who, “in his arrogance . . . hunts down the weak, who are caught in the schemes he devises.” Well, we see this happening in our world today, don’t we? In arrogance a lot of corporate America--at the expense of people who are striving to make a living, striving to serve their families--in arrogance corporate CEOs, for their own profit, hunt down and destroy them in their schemes. “He boasts of the cravings of his heart;” David goes on to say. I’ve known people like that, too. I’ve known people that boast about the most wretched things, the vilest pollutions in their hearts. There is something wrong with that, and we ought to say there is something wrong with that. “He blesses the greedy and reviles the LORD.” Well somebody’s got to recognize that and call it for what it is. You see, it should matter to us very much that no one be allowed to get away with this sort of conduct.

Nevertheless, as one should know from God’s Word, a vindictive spirit is not what this is all about. No matter how great the evil done, if all we want is to revel in the punishment of the wicked, there is something the matter with our spirits. It is true that we should not tolerate evil. But our final lesson from these imprecatory Psalms becomes evident when we look closely to see just what it is the Psalmist wishes to accomplish through these curses. As I look through all the imprecatory Psalms, three major conclusions arise.

The first is that through judgment, the Psalmist desires that God’s character and honor be upheld. That is the first goal. The imprecations in Psalm 83 end with the observation, through this judgment: “Let them know that you, whose name is the LORD–that you alone are the Most High over all the earth.” People need to see you for who you are. You see, his desire in judgment is that God’s name be held up and honored. “I know that the LORD secures justice for the poor,” David writes, concluding the imprecations of Psalm 140, “Surely the righteous will praise your name and the upright will live before you.” You see, if Evil is allowed to prosper, then God’s honor and His holy character are called into question. So the first reason we might take seriously these prayers for judgment, is that the people would know who God is and that He cares about what is good.

Secondly, God’s judgment is an incentive to righteousness. We know that “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” It is good to fear God’s judgment. Psalm 10 says,

Arise, LORD! Lift up your hand, O God. Do not forget the helpless. Why does the wicked man revile God? Why does he say to himself, ‘He won’t call me to account’? But you, O God, do see trouble and grief; you consider it to take it in hand. The victim commits himself to you; you are the helper of the fatherless. Break the arm of the wicked and evil man; call him to account for his wickedness that would not be found out.

Psalm 58 ends with the observation: “Then men will say, ‘Surely the righteous still are rewarded; surely there is a God who judges the earth.” In other words, it is tremendously important that all people continue to know that God is absolutely committed to goodness, and that He will indeed judge our conduct, whether for good or for ill. Our prayer that God will judge evil, then, is a prayer that God will make it clear that we do live in a moral universe. Obviously our society doesn’t want to acknowledge that today. We don’t want to hear that we live in a moral universe. So you and I need to be praying that God make it clear that we do live in a moral universe, and that God does care about what is good and evil. And if that takes judgment at some point, so be it, because something greater is at stake here in the honor of God in a just universe. Without that knowledge, all incentive for right conduct is lost.

Finally, we should desire God’s judgment upon evil, as Psalms like 55 and 140 suggest, so that the spread of wickedness might be halted. Somebody, somewhere has to say, Stop! “Confuse the wicked, O Lord, confound their speech,” he writes in Psalm 55, “for I see violence and strife in the city.” Who among us did not want to pray: Confuse and confound the communications of those terrorists who are plotting violence against innocent people. “Do not grant the wicked their desires, O LORD,” Psalm 140 says, “do not let their plans succeed, or they will become proud.” You understand, in the end, it is tremendously important that God intervene when necessary to keep evil from spreading throughout and polluting what He has created.

Consider the effects of something like pornography, for example. It is rampant in our society, and it’s effects are insidious and devastating. (And unfortunately it is not off in some seedy bookstore--it is as close as a click of your index finger on your computer.) Pornography is demeaning to both the purveyors and the consumers of it’s twisted view of life and humanity. It absolutely pollutes the mind and spirit and ultimately destroys the possibility of healthy relationships. Furthermore, it is fundamentally addictive in nature, so once it has you in its clutches, it becomes nearly impossible to escape. It is a vicious and finally fatal parasite which eats away your soul. And yet the courts of our land, including our Supreme Court, are too spineless and cowardly to confront it.

So would it not be appropriate for us to pray that ruin overtake those who, without conscience, unleash this squalid and degrading evil upon our society for their own profit, if they will not turn from their evil? That they might be thrown down into the fire, into miry pits from which they cannot rise? That seems an appropriate judgment to me because that’s where they are taking everyone who partakes of what they are offering. May we not pray that God’s wrath might ultimately consume them? I, for one, think there is something drastically wrong with us if we do not ask for God’s judgment on such unmitigated evil. We act as if there’s nothing we can do about this plague. Well, there is something we can do. We can pray about it. We can pray the imprecatory Psalms against pornographers! I’m more confident about them than I am about the terrorists!

Do you see what we are saying here? Our squeamishness about the imprecatory Psalms reveals not a strength, but a serious and ultimately fatal flaw in our character and in our society. What have we become if we cannot condemn what God condemns? What is truly alarming about our society today, and even much of the Christian community, is not that we are too judgmental, but that we no longer care about Evil at all! We do not care enough to condemn it! We have become blind to its horribly destructive effects.

One writer I consulted, Richard Vincent, raises this question, and it is a good one. He asks, “Is there moral virtue or greater spirituality in thinking that we are above these imprecations and their desire for the world-wide recognition of the glory of God and the destruction of evil?” Because, you see, that is what the imprecatory Psalms are about–to see that God’s name is glorified and that Evil is destroyed. Are we any longer zealous for God’s honor? Are we zealous for truth? Are we zealous for righteousness? If not, why not? Perhaps it is time we began once again to consider seriously God’s utter intolerance for sin. Like an abscessed tooth it must be extracted. Like a gangrenous foot it must be amputated. Sure the cost is high, but not as high as the ultimate destruction we shall suffer if it’s not removed. If we do not deal with it, eventually it will consume us body and soul.

God, of course, in His mercy, would prefer to remove the sin and preserve the sinner, and it is entirely right and appropriate that we share this desire for grace. But if the sinner refuses to be separated from his sin, then he leaves God with no choice but to remove him before his malignant spirit infects the whole community.

This, of course, must be God’s judgment and not ours, and that is one of the subtle things that you may not have noticed about the imprecatory Psalms. We are not doing this ourselves. We are asking God to do it at the right time. Only God knows when and if a person is beyond redemption. But that is why it is so appropriate that we not pass over these psalms, but rather let them guide our prayers, for they are a simply a call for God to put things right in this world, to put them right in a timely fashion. They do not in any way preclude His grace. For our part, they are simply an indication that we have come to concur with God’s judgment, but we recognize He, not we, must decide when that judgment should fall. In the interim, we need to be about bearing witness to the good news that no one is beyond redemption before that final judgment falls. Indeed, since we are all beneficiaries of the fact that “the LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love,” as Psalm 103 says, we shall want, as Jesus reminded us, to pray even for our enemies. Not, however, that God should overlook their sin, as we so often do, but that He should turn them from it before that final and entirely appropriate judgment falls.

Closing Prayer - This is a difficult thing for us, Lord. We certainly want to be and need to be compassionate and gracious people, and of course we want to and we ought to tolerate diversity. People don’t have to look like us or sound like us, appreciate the things we appreciate. But may that never confuse the real issue here, the deeper issue, that across all lines of diversity we ought all to care about what is good and what is evil, and we ought all to be committed to promote the good and destroy the evil. We confess that we, however, cannot see things clearly. We fail to see the evil in our own souls, and we sometimes think we see evil in others when it’s not even there. It’s our own prejudice. So we would ask that even in this moment when you have perhaps aroused in us that spirit of righteousness and justice, righteous indignation which is an appropriate sentiment, in these moments still we might recognize the need for ourselves to come under the judgment of your word. We ask that you would help us to recognize the need for each of us to be truly repentant for our sins, to seek your grace. But, Lord, may we never presume upon that grace. May we never use it as an excuse to overlook and to tolerate what is evil. We pray these things now in the name of our Lord Jesus, who did not overlook Evil, who dealt with it straightforwardly, and who now offers us, through that judgment and beyond it, a most amazing grace, AMEN.