Political Prayer
Lord, how my enemies have increased! Many are rising up against me. Psalm 3:1 NASB
Enemies – Have you noticed how often the psalms speak about enemies? This verse from the third psalm is just one example. Psalms 4 and 5 contain the same idea, and, of course, so do many, many others. These psalms are prayers for deliverance from ṣar (adversary, enemy), a word used seventy times in the Hebrew Bible. It describes someone who harasses or torments you. The same consonants also mean “narrow place, distress, trouble, being bound.” What’s most interesting about this is that quite often these prayers are focused on real, external enemies, that is, other people in the world who seek to harm the king. We might apply these psalms to our inner struggles, but their initial context is political. They are fighting words, asking God to get rid of the opponents.
Why should this matter to us? After all, most of us don’t live in kingdoms. We aren’t kings. Our battles are typically thought of as inner struggles. We run to the Psalms to find personal spiritual comfort, not political relief. Our motivation today might be appropriate, but recognizing the ancient environment of these poems helps us realize something very important about the psalms in general. In the ancient world, integrity, righteousness, blame, and favor were public considerations. Our idea of identity as a function of the inner psychological world is new on the human stage. In the ancient world, what mattered was your external reputation, and that meant you wore your identity like a garment for all to see. This is the perspective of Job’s friends. They observe Job’s dire straits and conclude that his circumstances are a reflection of his personal disfavor with God. They look at the outside and draw conclusions about the inside. The psalmist follows the same train of thought. If God really loves me and I am His chosen one, then He should get rid of my enemies because my enemies tell the world that I am not in God’s favor.
Modern religious attitudes have almost (but not quite) eliminated this idea of a public demonstration of divine favor. What I mean is that we have the tendency to claim that our external circumstances are not necessarily a reflection of our inner spiritual condition. The outside is the realm of the Devil’s work (the principalities and powers in high places stuff), and he can do all sorts of nasty things to us while inside we maintain our connection to Jesus. In fact, the inner connection to Jesus means that even if we sin, the link remains. Once we’ve accepted Jesus “in our hearts” (an interior state), nothing can remove that saving grace (Romans 8, right?). We will go to heaven no matter what we do or what others do to us. Of course, there are still leftovers from the ancient view. We still think God should rescue us from bad situations, that He should provide us with peace and prosperity, but if we’re pushed we’ll opt for inner assurance and just grit our teeth. The psalmist doesn’t think like that.
In the ancient world, gods were public personalities and their followers exhibited either their favor or their wrath in public ways. The disciples still hold this view (cf. John 9) which Yeshua corrects (sort of). The psalmist writes in this theological environment, so we should expect him to seek public vindication of his faith in YHVH. If we take the politics out of these psalms, we convert them into spiritual adages rather than real-life empire battles. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make this jump. It just means that our modern applications aren’t what the poet was writing about, and that’s worth remembering.
Topical Index: enemy, narrow strait, ṣar, politics, public, Psalm 3:1
