Chapter Six: What to Do With Your Rage

There are psalms in this collection that most churches never read aloud. Not because they are obscure, but because what they say is uncomfortable enough that the common solution is to leave them out and hope no one notices.

Read Psalm 137:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, weeping when we remembered Zion. On the poplars in that land we hung our harps. For there our captors asked us to compose songs; those who tormented us asked us to be happy: "Sing for us a song about Zion!"

How can we sing a song to the Lord in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand be paralyzed. May my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not give Jerusalem priority above my highest joy.

Remember, O Lord, what the Edomites did on the day Jerusalem fell. They said, "Tear it down, tear it down, right to its very foundation!"

O daughter Babylon, soon to be devastated! How blessed will be the one who repays you for what you dished out to us! How blessed will be the one who grabs your babies and smashes them on a rock! — Psalm 137, NET

Verse nine. There it is. You cannot soften it by reading more carefully. The writer is asking God to treat the children of the enemy the way the enemy treated the children of Jerusalem. This is in the Bible.

The first thing to do with that discomfort is feel it honestly rather than dissolving it too quickly. These are hard words. They are in real tension with "love your enemies." That tension does not disappear by reading more carefully, and anyone who tells you it does is moving too fast.

What These Psalms Are Actually Doing

Every one of these psalms is bringing rage to God rather than acting on it. The writer of Psalm 109 did not attack his enemy. He brought the full weight of his fury to God and asked God to handle it. The writer of Psalm 137 had watched Jerusalem burn and children die. He did not pick up a weapon. He poured out the anguish in the most visceral language he had and left the outcome with God.

These psalms are not the expression of violence. They are the alternative to it. If you have ever sat in a car after a phone call and wanted someone to pay for what they did — not in theory, in your body — these psalms were preserved for you. You do not have to edit your rage into something that sounds more spiritual before God will receive it. Bring it here. Say the true thing.

Deuteronomy 32:35 says plainly: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay." Paul quotes this in Romans 12:19 in the context of forbidding personal vengeance. The logic is this: justice belongs to God, not to you. Which means you can bring the injustice to God, fully and without softening it, and leave it there. He already knows what you feel. The psalm gives you the words to say it honestly.

Psalm 44 shows the same logic from the community's angle. This is the whole community that has been faithful, done everything the covenant required, and still suffered. "Yet we have not forgotten you; we have not been false to your covenant. Our hearts had not turned back… But you crushed us." The community brings a structural grievance to the God who made the covenant. The psalmist is not in sin. He is in the dark, and he is saying so with full force.

The New Testament Does Not Abandon These Psalms

In John 2:17, when Jesus drives the money changers out of the temple, the disciples remember a line from Psalm 69 — the same psalm that calls down wrath on those who oppose God's purposes. Jesus is not embarrassed by the association. In Acts 1:20, the early church reads Psalm 109 as the word behind what happened to the one who betrayed Jesus. These were not uncomfortable texts the apostles quietly avoided. They were load-bearing texts they reached for to explain what had just happened.

Bring it here. Say the true thing before God about what was done and what you want done about it. Leave the justice in His hands, not because you have stopped caring, but because He is the only one who can handle it rightly.

The formation question: Is there something you have been too polite to say to God? The Psalms are inviting you to stop being polite.