Third kind of petitionary prayer—the imprecatory 3/3

(1.) Matter of comfort to the saints against those direful imprecations which the wicked world belcheth out against them.  The saints in this sense are a cursed people.  The wicked make the greatest part of the world; the church is a little flock, but her enemies a huge herd; and these cannot wish well to the saints.  Cain, as Luther saith, will hate and kill Abel to the end of the world; the same spirit that was in him remaineth in his seed.  Sometimes when the church of God flourisheth, and hath the sun of outward pros­perity on her side, they may cry hosanna in the crowd—as Shimei, when David was going up the hill of honour, then he could worship the rising sun, and crouch to him whom he had bitterly cursed in his distress—but when ‘they bless with their mouth, but they curse inwardly’ in their heart, Ps. 62:4.  A wicked man cannot wish well to a saint as a saint, as, on the contrary, a saint cannot bless the wicked as such.  ‘Neither do they which go by say, The blessing of the Lord be upon you: we bless you in the name of the Lord,’ Ps. 129:8.  They do, indeed, desire their conver­sion, and therein wish them well, but in the wicked way they are in at present they cannot bless them.  So the wicked can desire the saints should come over to their party, do as they do, and then they would ap­plaud and hug them.  But, let the saints keep close to God, and refuse to run into riot and excess with them, and they are sure to meet with their curse and imprecation; it is not their unblamable and peaceable will free them from their wrath and fury.  ‘I have neither lent on usury, nor men have lent to me on usury; yet every one of them doth curse me,’ Jer. 15:10. But fear not, thou who art a saint, their imprecations. This is but anathema secundum dici; like false fire in the pan of an uncharged gun, it gives a crack but hurts not.  God’s blessing will cover thee from their curse; ‘Let them curse, but bless thou,’ Ps. 109:28.  When the viper flew out of the fire upon Paul’s hand, the bar­barians looked that he should presently drop down dead, but it proved no such matter.  Thus the ene­mies of God and his people have looked one genera­tion after another, when the church, that hath been always laden with their curses, should perish under them; but it lives yet to walk over the graves of all those that have wished it ill.  Alas, poor wretches! what is your imprecation worth?  Truly as your bles­sing can do no good, so neither your curse any hurt, till you can get God to set his seal and say amen to it; which is impossible for you to obtain.

           Did our Saviour so sharply rebuke the rash request of his disciples, calling for fire to fall on them whom they thought deserved it? and will he gratify the lust of your devilish wrath and fury against his own dear people, by pouring on them what you auda­ciously, yea blasphemously, desire of him?  Will nothing serve you but to have God your executioner to hang whom you condemn? and those no other than his dear children, and for nought else but because they dare not be as wicked as yourselves?  Go bid the tender mother imbrue her hands in the blood of her sweet babe, that even now came out of her womb, and now lies at her breast; or the husband betray and deliver the wife of his bosom into the hands of murderers that wait for her life.  Would these be an errand to make the messenger that brings them welcome to loving mother or husband?  But if any such anomalies in nature’s grammar and monsters among men were to be found, yet remember he is a God thou solicitest whose nature is unchange­able and covenant with his people inviolable.  How was God courted by Balak and Balaam with altar after altar, from place to place!  But all to no purpose: ‘Nevertheless the Lord thy God would not hearken unto Balaam; but the Lord thy God turned the curse into a blessing unto thee, because the Lord thy God loved thee,’ Deut. 23:5.  Never was any design carried on with more zeal and passionate desire to effect it than this; one would think that God had said enough to Balaam at first to make him sick of his enterprise, as a thing infeasible, Num. 22:12: ‘Thou shalt not go with them; thou shalt not curse the people: for they are blessed.’  But the liked the work and loved the wages, and therefore baffles his conscience, not telling the messengers all that God said to him, and they also report not all to Balak what Balaam said to them, so loath were both the work should fall: yet we see by the event, that they took but pains to lose their labour, nay worse, to lose themselves, for God made them, and him that set them on this work, to drink the curse which they would so fain have brewed for Israel.

           (2.) A word to the wicked.  Take heed that by your implacable hatred to the truth and church of God, yo do not engage her prayers against you.  These imprecatory prayers of the saints, when shot at the right mark, and duly put up, they are murdering pieces, and strike dead where they light.  ‘Shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them?  I tell you that he will avenge them speedily,’ Luke 18:7, 8.  They are not empty words—as the imprecations of the wicked poured into the air, and there vanish with their breath—but are received into heaven, and shall be sent back with thunder and lightning upon the pates of the wicked.  David’s prayer unravelled Ahithophel's fine-spun policy, and twisted his halter for him.  The prayers of the saints are more to be feared—as once a great person said and felt—than an army of twenty thousand men in the field.  Esther’s fast hastened Haman's ruin, and Hezekiah’s against Sennacherib brought his huge host to the slaughter, and fetched an angel from heaven to do the execution in one night upon them.

Third kind of 1/ petitionary prayer—the imprecatory 2/3

3. When praying against the persons of those that are open enemies to God and his church, it is safest to pray indefinitely and in general: ‘Let them all be confounded...that hate Zion,’ Ps. 129:5; because we know not who of them are implacable, and who not, and therefore cannot pray absolutely and per­emptorily against particular persons.  There may be an elect vessel for a time in open hostility against God and his church, whom afterward God may conse­crate to himself by converting grace, and so make him a holy vessel for the use of his sanctuary.  We do, it is confessed, find some in Scripture prayed against by name.  So Moses prayed against Korah and his comp­lices, Num. 16:15; and Paul against Alexander the cop­persmith, ‘The Lord reward him according to his works;’ but these and other in the Scripture had an extraordinary spirit, and not to be patterns for us in this case.  Elias called for fire from heaven upon the captains, but the disciples were soundly chid for a preposterous imitation of this act, who had not his spirit, ‘Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of,’ Luke 9:55.  Pray thou for vengeance against all the im­placable enemies of God, and leave him to direct thy arrow to its mark. Ahab was hit, though the arrow was shot at a venture by one that may be thought not of him.  Prayers are sorted in heaven before their answer returns.  Some of those emperors for whom the church in the primitive times prayed, yet proving implacable enemies to God and his people, felt the weight of those imprecations, which in general they put up against the adversaries of the truth.

1. In praying against the implacable enemies of God and his church, the glory of God should be prin­cipally aimed at, and vengeance on them in order to that.  ‘Arise, O Lord, and let thine enemies be scat­tered.’  As the sun, when it hath dispelled the vapours that muffled it up from our sight, breaks out in the glory of its beams; so God, by taking vengeance on his enemies, and scattering them in their wicked imagina­tions with which they endeavoured to obscure his glory in the world, doth display and make visible the splendour of his attributes before his people’s eyes. The saddest consequence which attends the pros­perity and success of God’s enemies in the world, is their pride and blasphemy against God, his truth, and church.  Then they belch out their horrid blasphemies against heaven; then they mock the poor saints, and pierce them with the sharp sword of their mocking language, while they say unto them, ‘Where is now their God?’  But when God takes to himself power and strength, and confounds these giants and sons of the earth, by tumbling destruction upon their heads in the midst of their wicked enterprises; when he recoils their own plots they have charged against his church upon themselves—making them go off like a pistol in their pocket—to procure their own death and ruin; now the reproach is taken off, and they have an answer given to their question, ‘Where is now your God?’  He is at their throat, he is with his sword of vengeance vindicating his glorious name upon them.  When Julian the Apostate was slain—and con­fessed at whose hand he received his fatal blow, in crying, vicisti Galilæ—thou hast conquered, O Gali­lean—then Libænius, his scoffing sophister, had his question, ‘What is the carpenter’s son now a do­ing?’ —which a little before he had put to a Christian in scorn of his Saviour—thrown in his teeth to the confusion of his face, and found the Christian’s answer—that he was making a coffin for his master —prove truer than he was aware of.  It cannot but be a joyful day to a saint, that prizeth the honour of his God above his own life, when he sees even the wicked —that before denied a providence, and thought all events were thrown out of blind fortune’s lap, as if the world were but a lottery, wherein everyone had his portion by chance—now forced by the remarkable appearance of his power and wisdom in saving his people, and destroying his implacable enemies, to confess, ‘Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth,’ Ps. 58:11.  The exaltation of the glorious name of God, every saint doth, and should, aim at, in the prayers wherein he imprecates vengeance.  ‘Let them be confound­ed...let them be put to shame, and perish, that men may know that thou, whose name alone is Jehovah, art the most high over all the earth,’ Ps. 83:17, 18.  Now from this head of imprecatory prayer, there is—

           

Third kind of petitionary prayer—the imprecatory 1/3

           Third. Imprecatory prayer; wherein the Chris­tian imprecates the vengeance of God upon the ene­mies of God and his people.  On such a sad and sol­emn errand are the saints’ prayers sometimes sent to heaven, and speed as effectually as when they go to obtain blessings for themselves and the church of God.  And no wonder, for they are perfumed with Christ’s merits, and thereby are as acceptable to God as any other they put up in his name.  ‘And the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God,’ Rev. 8:4.  Now what kind of prayers these were is clear by the next words, ‘And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast it into the earth: and there were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake,’ ver. 5.  By which is signified the dreadful judgments which God in answer to his saints’ prayers would bring upon the wicked world, whose bloody persecutions of the church, and fury against the truth of God, made the saints to cry to heaven for vengeance upon them; and that it should come inevitably come as thunder, lightning, and earthquakes, that can be resisted by no power or policy of the greatest monarch on earth.  Thus, as at the firing of some cannon planted against a city, you may see its turrets or wall come tumbling down; so, upon the prayers of the saints, great judgments were certainly to befall the enemies of God and his church. Now, the path wherein the Christian is here to tread being very narrow, he is to be the more cautious that he steps not awry.  He is, in this part of prayer which is imprecatory, like one that drives a chariot on the brow of a steep hill, who, if he hath not the quicker eye and steadier hand, may soon spoil all.  The high­est strains of a saint’s duty run nearest the most dan­gerous precipices, as the most mysterious truths are soonest perverted into the most damnable errors.  I shall therefore first lay down a few particulars which may serve as a rail to compass in this duty, for the better securing the Christian from falling into any miscarriage about it.

1. Take heed thou dost not make thy private particular enemies the object of thy imprecation.  We have no warrant, when any wrong us, presently to go and call for fire from heaven upon them.  We are bid, indeed, to heap coals upon our enemy’s head, but they are of love, not of wrath and revenge.  Job sets a black brand upon this, and clears himself from the imputation of so great a sin: ‘If I rejoiced at the des­truction of him that hated me,...neither have I suffered my mouth to sin by wishing a curse to his soul,’ Job 31:29, 30.  He durst not wish his enemy ill, much less deliberately form a wish into a prayer, and desire God to curse him.  Our Saviour hath taught us a more excellent way: ‘Bless them that curse you,...and pray for them which despitefully use you,’ Matt. 5:44.  I know this is counted a poor sheepish spirit by many of our gallants.  Go pray for them? No, send them the glove rather, and be revenged on them in a duel by shedding their blood.  This is the drink-offering which these sons of pride delight to pour out to their revenge.  Or, curse them to the pit of hell with their God damn them oaths!  O tremble at such a spirit as this!  The ready way to fetch a curse from heaven on thyself, is to imprecate one sinfully upon another.  ‘As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: as he clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment, so let it come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones,’ Ps. 109:17, 18.  Moses, I suppose, has as noble a spirit as any of these that style them such men of honour; yet, did he draw upon Aaron, or fall a cursing of Miriam, when they had used him so unworthily?  I trow not, but bears all pa­tiently.  Nay, when God declares his displeasure against Miriam for this affront put upon him, see how this holy man intercedes for her with God, Num. 12. This is valour of the right make, to overcome evil with good, and instead of seeking revenge on him that wrongs us, to get the mastery of our own corruption so far as to desire his good the more.  Thus our Lord, when he was numbered amongst transgressors, even then ‘made intercession for the transgressors,’ Isa. 53:12; that is, those very men which used him so bloodily, while they were digging his heart out of his body with their instruments of cruelty, then was he begging the life of their souls with his fervent prayers.
2. When thou prayest against the enemies of God and his church, direct thy prayers rather against their plots than person.  Thus the apostles, ‘And now, Lord, behold their threatenings,’ Acts 4:29.  Not, ‘con­found their persons,’ but, ‘behold their threatenings;’ and so they leave their case with the Lord to right it for them.  So David, ‘O Lord, I pray thee, turn the counsel of Ahithophel into foolishness,’ II Sam. 15:31. Indeed, did do more, he destroyed plot and plotter also; and in this sense the saints may oft say with the prophet, ‘Thou hast done terrible things we looked not for’—by pouring out his vengeance on the per­sons, when they have only prayed against their wicked designs.