​“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.” Matthew 5:43-44

That particular “it was said” (among the five in Matthew 5:21-48) might easily have originated as an implication of some of the Psalms. “Enemies” show up quite a lot in the Psalms.
     There is, first of all, prayer against one’s enemies, for example,

▪ “Lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies.” (Psalm 7:6)
▪ “Let death steal over them; let them go down to Sheol alive.” (55:15)
▪ “As for the head of those who surround me,
let the mischief of their lips overwhelm them!
Let burning coals fall upon them!
Let them be cast into fire,
into miry pits, no more to rise!” (140:9-10)

There is also the realization that having enemies causes one to get closer to God:

▪ “Lead me, O Lord, in your righteousness because of my enemies.” (5:8)
▪ “Teach me your way, O Lord, and lead me on a level path because of my enemies.” (27:11)

And there is rejoicing in the suffering of one’s enemies, whether anticipated or already past:

▪ “You strike all my enemies on the cheek.” (3:7)
▪ “All my enemies shall be ashamed and greatly troubled.” (6:10)
▪ “When my enemies turn back, they stumble and perish before your presence.” (9:3)
▪ “The enemy came to an end in everlasting ruins;
their cities you rooted out;
the very memory of them has perished.” (9:6)
▪ “Now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me.” (27:6)
▪ Psalm 18:31-42 is an exultant song of a victorious warrior climaxing with “I beat them fine as dust before the wind; I cast them out like the mire of the streets.” Later comes celebration of “the God who gave me vengeance and subdued peoples under me, who delivered me from my enemies” (vv. 47-48).

There are points where the distinction between personal enemy and national enemy is blurred (and similarly the distinction between “our/my enemies” and God’s enemies). This is to be expected because the Psalms so often speak with the voice of one who represents the nation of Israel (or Judah), sometimes the king himself. The Psalms are thus like much of the Old Testament in its involvement with the fortunes of the nation.
     The lesson taught by defeat, exile, then survival in quite a different form (the Jewish people) was that one of the things thought essential to God’s work on earth—that nation—was not essential, that God’s work and faith in God could go on, even in greater strength, without the nation. It was in the midst of that lesson time that Jesus said “Love your enemies.” A generation after he spoke came the first of two bloody Jewish revolts against the enemies of the time, the Roman Empire.
     The difference between the enemy Psalms and Jesus means that we have to recognize some difference between how God works in our world from one time to another and between what God’s people say in their prayers in the time of the Psalms and what they say now. And as prayers are expressions and shapers of attitudes, then the difference extends to the kind of people we are. We have to read the Psalms—not as people who have no enemies, but as those who do and pray differently than is done in the Psalms, who love our enemies and pray for those who harass us.
     But the Psalms do not, then, become a field we must harvest from selectively, leaving out the “enemy” passages as of no use to our spirituality. There are positive uses of those passages for followers of Jesus.
     First, they are honest expressions in prayer of some of the path toward following Jesus, which we each walk again every time someone becomes a new enemy or an old enemy reappears. To love your enemy, you have to name your enemy, and that might involve first hating your enemy, and what better place to do that than in prayer.
     Second, then, we can join the psalm-singers in their realization that having enemies causes one to get closer to God.
     Third, the “enemy” Psalms are useful when we identify our worst enemies not among other people but with the devil, personal sin, and the weaknesses of our people (whether you identify that with your country, ethnicity, social class, family, or neighborhood). When I think, for instance, of certain thought patterns that I know well but will never tell about, or about the crippling of our national energies by alcohol, I can well make use of prayers for the defeat and death of those enemies.

“O my God, in you I trust;
let me not be put to shame;
let not my enemies exult over me.” (Psalm 25:2)

• The Psalms are 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.