 Psalm 137-9, why is it okay to say, quote, blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock, unquote. This is directed at the children of Babylon. Crushing the skulls of babies sounds like an atrocity, not judgment. It isn't merely descriptive, but rather a blessing upon the murder of babies. Yeah, this implication, I mean, it's very easy for us to look at that and sort of view this as an isolated event with sort of no context. But the logic of it, I mean, it's poetic language which doesn't mean that the Psalmist isn't really wishing it because the Psalmist is wishing for his enemies to be judged, whether that means every last person or not is a different issue, different but related issue. But let's just take the language for what it is. My view of implication, and I'll be honest, I think we've had this question maybe a long, long time ago or we did it somewhere. I can't remember what it was, maybe in the series on Leviticus. But my view, I'll be honest, is a minority position. And it's not an insignificant one though, but it is gonna be a minority position. So in a nutshell, I look at imprecatory prayer as deriving from the Abrahamic covenant. Okay, Genesis 12, one through three. And in that passage, God himself tells Abraham that he will curse anyone who curses him, treats him lightly and his descendants. In other words, God's children. So if someone treats them with contempt, God says, I'm gonna judge them. So when the Psalmist or anyone else prays for God to judge people, even killing them, even killing their relatives or their children, the basis of wanting that to happen, there's a context to it. And specifically in Psalm 139, I mean, the questioner brought up Babylon. Babylon had a long, long, long history of again being the bad guy in the Old Testament, specifically toward the people of God, toward Israel. So the Psalmist is in effect asking God to remember Genesis 12, one through three. The Psalmist is not going to take the matter into his own hands. What imprecatory prayers and imprecatory Psalms really mean is that the person is angry or in anguish and saying, God, I want you to remember that you said, those who do X, Y, Z to us, those who treat us with contempt, you will judge, you will curse them. I am asking you to do that. I'm asking you to remember this covenantal promise and take care of business. Even to the nth degree, even to these horrific sort of over-the-top kind of descriptions, but the Psalmist is not going to act on that emotion. The Psalmist is asking God to take care of the problem, to judge the evildoer in whatever way God sees fit. And I think that all this, that's important because at the heart of it, it's not a biblical justification for you to get angry at someone and lash out at them. It's actually the opposite. It's a biblical injunction for you to tell God just how you feel, even in really dark terms. You're telling God just how you feel in the case of the Israelites. I mean, they'd seen all this happen to them a hundred times over. We're going through the book of Ezekiel. This is the kind of stuff you get that especially in an episode, I think it might have been the last episode with the Assyrians. I mean, it gets even worse than that. And this is what they had experienced. And so for the Psalmist to say, what gives? God, you need now to turn around. I mean, you could say, well, I get it. We apostatized, we went worship of the gods. This is what happens. But that doesn't take away the Abrahamic covenant. The Psalmist wants justice in the end on the basis of this covenant. And so that's what implication is really about. Now, Christians, the question comes up, what about Christians? You know, should we pray these kind of prayers? Should we vent this way, like the people of the Old Testament did? I would say, yes, because Christians are the inheritors of the Abrahamic covenant. That is explicitly stated in Galatians 3. So it stands to reason we can ask God to judge our enemies as well. What we can't do is judge our enemies ourselves. We're not supposed to take matters into our own hands. So these prayers at their very heart are pleased to God in very visceral language. For God to judge evil, God to judge that the people who are doing bad things to his kids, his children. For God to remember the original promise, Genesis 12, 1 to 3, and do something about it. And then you just leave it up to God. Implication is not a justification for a Christian or anyone, whether it was an Old Testament Israelite either, for taking matters into their own hands. And that's just, I think, how we need to frame the discussion. It's up to God how he will remove and judge those who oppress and curse his children. That's up to God. It might be something mild. God decides to do or may be something harsh. But that's up to God. That's his job description, and it's not ours. And I would suggest, I really don't think that there are really any coherent alternatives to take the language seriously, but yet realize that the Psalmist isn't asking God permission to do these things themselves. They're just using the most, again, visceral language that you can use, but they're leaving it up to God ultimately. And if God judges the Babylonians a different way, then that's up to God. And the person praying the prayer has to be content with the way God took care of the situation. And it may not be what they want or what they're feeling, but God lets people emote. God lets people tell him exactly how they feel. But the key here is you let God decide. You let God decide what's best. I think lastly, we also kind of get a little offended by the language. We need to remember that the divine warrior imagery from the Old Testament, and that's not just Old Testament. We've talked about this before in the podcast where the description of God as a warrior on the behalf of his children, Israel specifically, that stuff, like in Psalm 68, just plucking out an example, there's a number of divine warrior passages. That language in the Old Testament does in fact get applied to Jesus in the New Testament. Now, the reason for that is the vision of the Messiah coming back at the day of the Lord to judge the nations, to judge Israel's enemies. And if you look at the day of the Lord passages, yeah, people are gonna lose their lives. It's gonna be violent, it's gonna be bad, but that isn't the only way that God judges, but that's part of the picture. So at the return of the Lord, at the day of the Lord, the return of Christ, he is not coming back blowing kisses. He is cast as the judge of the nations. And that's his job to decide how evil gets judged. But he allows us, he allows the psalmist. And again, I would say us as well, to vent. He knows who we are, he knows we're human, he allows us to vent, but the venting is supposed to leave the matter with him and not take things into our own hands.