Psalm 59 is another of the psalms (the “imprecatory psalms”) that we have to think of as having their origin before Jesus’s words in Matthew 5. The psalm says:

Rouse yourself to punish all the nations;
spare none of those who treacherously plot evil.

God will let me look in triumph on my enemies.

For the sin of their mouths, the words of their lips,
let them be trapped in their pride.
For the cursing and lies that they utter,
​consume them in wrath;
consume them till they are no more,
that they may know that God rules over Jacob
to the ends of the earth. (Psalm 59:5, 10, 12–13)

Then Jesus said:

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ​so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. ​For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? (Matthew 5:43–46)

Psalm 59 would have been one of the texts quoted by those who taught “You shall . . . hate your enemy.” Jesus tells his disciples “You can’t do that any more!”
     But Jesus was certainly able to come up with a hotheaded outburst: “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49). Judgment remains a reality.
     The only way I know to read Psalm 59 today is to hear it as words of Jesus — “and in him there is no sin” (1 John 3:5) — rather than as, for instance, my own words. I can’t, for instance, pray to God that he will keep my enemies alive so everybody can see them suffer (Psalm 59:11), because I myself am, at least sometimes, among the enemies of God and of his man Jesus. I must begin and end each day with confession of sin, and never does an opportunity arise for me, as a disciple of Jesus, to call down fire on my enemies. Jesus could say, while he was being pursued to death, “God will let me look in triumph on my enemies” (Psalm 59:10). God’s presence and work in the world are concentrated into that one man, Jesus, and his enemies face judgment.
     Judgment will come “when he [Jesus] delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:24–26). Death is the enemy of all humanity, so it is our enemy that Jesus will destroy. He will do that for all of us, but there will those of us who, even to the end, will ally themselves to death and to “every rule and every authority and power” rather than to Jesus. Just as we can find ways to make ourselves enemies of Jesus every day, so there will be those who persist in that dangerous position to the end.

• The Bible is quoted here from the English Standard Version (2011).
• These posts on the Psalms are in aid of the reading of the Psalms—one a day through the first five months of 2022—by members, attenders, friends, et al. of Together Church, Wyoming, MI.