Tag Archives: who is our enemy?

But They’re Mean

Leave a reply

Jeremiah 18:18-23

Some people find in hard to be charitable toward people who mistreat them. When someone does us wrong, we like to believe “they’ll get what’s coming to them.” Jeremiah prayed that God would take care of the people he considered his enemies. He even prayed that God would never forgive them, never blot out their sin. In other words, “Send them to hell, Lord, because they’re mean to me.”

Jeremiah’s prayer is recorded in Scripture. God-breathed. So is this a prayer God wants to hear from us?

Hardly.

I believe this prayer is in the Bible as an example of how we ought to pray about our enemy, Satan; how we ought to pray about sin in our own hearts. I don’t think I’m wrong to spiritualize Jeremiah’s prayer in light of what Jesus taught us about our attitude toward people and our attitude toward sin.

We are to love and pray FOR our human enemies. Yet we are to hate and shun evil. We are to do good for those who mistreat us, and destroy the evil inside us.

So I will pray that God will annihilate the evil in me, never to raise its ugly head again. And I will pray that God will save the people entrapped by evil, even if they are mean to me.

Psalms 133-141; Get ‘im, God

Leave a reply

Satan is my enemy. And when the psalmists talk about their’s, I can’t help but think of mine.

Please don’t read the psalms and picture your ex, or that person at work who makes your life miserable. They are not your enemies. We live after the cross where Jesus taught us to love those people, do good to them, pray for them. If we are reading psalms and thinking, “Yeah, God, crush that person who hurt me,” we are not praying according to Scripture.

I am struck this morning how often psalmists, when talking about their enemies getting what they “deserve,” express a determination to keep their eyes on God, to praise Him, to bow down before Him.

Can you pray that someone for whom Christ died suffers physical or financial ruin, and look Jesus in the eye at the same time? Can you pray that God will cause pain in someone’s life, and honor the Savior, too?

But I can pray that God will crush Satan, that God will defeat Satan in my  life and yours, that God will show no mercy on my spiritual enemy, and that Satan will experience the fullness of God’s wrath.

As I read these psalms, I replace any reference of an enemy with the name of Satan. And I can know that is a prayer that God hears and answers. When I pray, “Get him, God,” the ‘him’ is Satan, my enemy and yours.