Cursing our enemies?
by Philip on Apr.21, 2009, under Sunday Nights, Thoughts
A few weeks ago during our Wednesday night series on Lamentations, the concept of cursing our enemies during prayer came up. It seemed as if there are multiple places in the Bible where people call on God to be wrathful towards the speaker’s enemies. This creates a potential problem with other teachings of the Bible to love our enemies. As I was recently encouraged to investigate this more, I came across one persepctive that I wanted to see other people’s opinions of. God has the right to curse people and be vengeful towards them because he is God. We, on the other hand, do not have that right. The potential way to merge these ideas is that the speaker is actually speaking a curse from God. I thought this idea was interesting, but I am not sure how justified it is. Share your thoughts.
June 1st, 2009 on 9:41 am
I’ve been thinking about this question, and I haven’t come upon any easy answers. I do feel like there’s a difference in some actions and characteristics of Old-Testament God vs New-Testament God. Specifically, God calling one group of people to wipe out another raises some questions…did he not create, love, and have a plan for those people he commanded be killed? It sometimes seems like the God who curses enemies and actively kills people is some kind of severe God who was operating in a barbaric world with different rules. It’s difficult for me sometimes to reconcile the two.
As far as the idea that the speaker is actually speaking a curse from God, that’s interesting to me. Maybe the only way we can really be in the clear to bring harm and severe actions against others, but MAN we’d better be sure about what we’re hearing. Do you feel like God still operates this way? I can think of a few groups who claim to be carrying out His willed actions, but I don’t feel like any of them are actually in the right.