‘Praise be to the LORD, my rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.’ (Psalm 144:1) What are we doing if we pray this psalm as Christians today? For many Christian folk, there is an immediate mismatch between Jesus’ command to love our enemies and a prayer such as Psalm 144 that celebrates God’s equipping for warfare.
In fact, some would go so far as to suggest that such a psalm should not be used in a Christian context. So let’s explore the topic of war in the psalms and see whether we can f ind a way through this conundrum. A helpful starting point is the assertion that God makes wars cease:
Come and see what the LORD has done, the desolations he has brought on the earth.
He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth.
He breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire. (Psalm 46:8-10)
We might wonder, therefore, why war features in the psalms at all! A clue lies in the implication that it is by overcoming enemies that the LORD makes wars to cease. This will be an important theme in our exploration. There is actually little explicit mention of war in the psalms.
There is a great deal of concern for ‘enemies’ or ‘evildoers’ – but always with ambiguity about who these people are. It is reasonable to suppose that they sometimes represented the violent within the Israelite community and at other times represented foreign military powers. In some cases, psalms have traditionally been associated with events in the life of King David, which we could possibly characterise as ‘civil war’. See the superscriptions to Psalms 18, 34, 52, 54 and 59. In these cases, the psalms mainly seek protection for the psalmist, rather than any engagement in conflict.
