At last! I finally accomplished one of my life’s goals this weekend. I emailed the other Stream editors, so they could enjoy the moment with me. In that email I pasted in a link to a page at Right Wing Watch, a project run by the stridently activist left-wing group People for the <cough> American Way. I’d made their list at last. It was the first time they’d mentioned my name as someone to watch out for.

“Ahh, to have arrived!” I closed my email. A couple colleagues wrote back to “welcome” me to the club.

We Really Do Have Enemies

It was all very tongue-in-cheek, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Christians and other conservatives have real enemies. Up until a few weeks ago I’d have said it was all very social, rhetorical, and political. They’re not shooting yet, I’d have said. Now the best I can say is, they’re still not shooting at very many of us.

So it seemed more than providential that my daily reading in the Psalms that day put me in Psalm 59. We’ve got enemies; David had them a whole lot worse.

The superscript there says he wrote it “when Saul sent men to watch his house in order to kill him.” David was in a whole lot more danger than I am.

If you already know the story, try to forget it a moment. Put yourself in David’s place. When he prayed this prayer, he had no idea how the story would play out.

Read it that way, and maybe you’ll be struck, as I was, by what a model prayer it is for us to pray for our enemies today.

Enemies? David Had Them.

It’s an honest prayer, first of all, nothing “spiritualized” about it, nothing brushed under the rug. David has enemies. They want to kill him. It’s not his fault, either. He doesn’t claim to be faultless, but he sure hasn’t done anything deserving the kind of threat he’s under.

These enemies are godless, and they’re evil. Verses 6 and 7 sound all too familiar:

“Each evening they come back, howling like dogs and prowling about the city. There they are, bellowing with their mouths with swords in their lips — for ‘Who,’ they think, ‘will hear us?’”

They sure don’t think there’s any God paying attention to what they do. But David knows. And in faith (verses 8-10) he calls on God for victory. He even expects to win, as God protects and fights for him. But what does this victory look like? What did he pray for his enemies?

Here’s what I see in it: He prayed that they would lose so they might win.

What to Pray for Our Enemies

Win? How? What could that even mean? I have to jump ahead in order to answer that, starting with two jumps all the way into the New Testament.

Jesus famously taught us (Matt. 5:44) to love our enemies, and pray for those who persecute us. That instruction would be horribly confusing if we thought it meant we should pray for their success, or even their wellbeing; not while they’re dead set against God and His ways.

There’s just one ultimate blessing we can be absolutely sure God would want for them: that they would “know … the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom [He has] sent” (John 17:3).

How to Pray for Our Enemies

David lived centuries before Christ, yet amazingly, that’s exactly what he prayed for his own enemies. We have to jump just a little forward in the psalm to see that. In verse 13b he prays that “that they may know that God rules over Jacob to the ends of the earth” (verse 13b). It sounds a lot like John 17:3 to me!

He’s praying a blessing on them: That they might know the truth of the God who created and loves them. That would be true victory for them. That’s the ultimate destination he prays they’d reach.

That They Might Lose

The path getting there isn’t so pretty, but it’s instructive, too. Let’s run it backwards from there. “Consume them in wrath,” he says in 13a; “consume them till they are no more.” Ouch! Sounds like he’s calling for fire to fall on them and leave them a pile of ashes.

He’s not, though. He’d just finished asking God, “Kill them not, lest my people forget; make them totter by your power and bring them down, O Lord our shield.”

He wanted them to live. There’s no contradiction here with “consume them.” We do this psalm’s author a real disservice if we think he thought “kill them not” was consistent with, “burn them to a crisp.” No, what he certainly must have meant was that their strength, their power, their advantage would be consumed, until it was no more.

That They Might Win

Then possibly, they might recognize (from verse how “the sin of their mouths, the words of their lips, [had caused them to] be trapped in their pride.” Then they, too, might “know that God rules over Jacob.” David’s own people would remember, too (see verse 11 again).

This is a blessing we can pray for our enemies. Insofar as they are fighting against God, they need to lose. They need to lose the public battles, and they need to be chastened in their pride. If they’re fighting us because we legitimately represent God and His ways, they need to lose there, too.

We should pray for them to experience all those losses. We may have to suffer necessary losses of our own along the way, too, as none of us is perfect in following our Lord.

But we can pray for our enemies to suffer those losses. It’s perfectly consistent with our Lord’s instruction to love them, to pray for them, to bless them. But only if we keep in mind the victory we still want them to experience: the eternal life that comes from knowing God the Father, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent.

Tom Gilson (@TomGilsonAuthor) is a senior editor with The Stream and the author or editor of six books, including the recently released Too Good To Be False: How Jesus’ Incomparable Character Reveals His Reality.