People love to curse. If it weren’t for cursing, “God” and “Jesus” would virtually disappear from popular American culture.
Few people probably really understand why they curse or what happens when they curse. Cursing gets mixed in with scatological and taboo sexual language, as a learned pattern of speech to express anger and frustration, or to intimidate other people, often mindlessly, like the common use of language of sexual assault to suggest the potential for violent, demeaning aggression, or words for bodily elimination to convey disgust and degradation. Threats and disrespect are elements of cursing, whether threats from human or from divine or supernatural forces.
Incidentally, cursing illustrates one of the many human behavior patterns that are intended to show that people are not intimidated and cannot be pressured into acting against their wills, when what their words actually convey is exactly the opposite, and when a cursing confrontation escalates into violence people react with displays not a their vaunted impenetrable self-possession and self-control but by “losing it,” showing their they are totally lacking in true self-control by overacting, often killing others who have shown them “disrespect,” causing loss of life and property, and ending up dead themselves or in prison for most of their lives.
Why is that? One part of the explanation appears in a song of David in Psalm 109. David has been betrayed, and in this song he prays for God, first and last, to protect, restore and bless him (109.1-5, 21-31) but also, in the middle of the song, to render powerless and punish the man who acted treacherously toward David (109.6-20).
The prayer against this traitor, sometimes called a prayer of imprecation, first asks God to take away from this undeserving person all of the blessings and comforts of life (109.6-16).
Then David takes a different and very interesting approach to the situation. He does not curse this adversary or even ask God to curse him, but rather David seems suddenly to realize that his prayer for God to judge and punish this man was already answered before he asked. The man was judged already, not by David’s will and curses but by his own. This man had already judged himself, David realized, and his curses had fallen on his own head.
David reveals to us here the core truth of the behavior of those who curse others. Whatever effect they may have on their adversaries, the inescapable consequence is that they are cursing themselves.
Psalm 109.17-20:
“He also loved cursing, so it came to him. He did not delight in blessing, so it was far from him.
“He clothed himself with cursing as with his garment, so it entered into his body like water, and like oil it seeped into his bones.
“Let his curses be to him as a garment with which he covers himself, the belt with which he constantly girds himself. Let this be the reward of my accusers from the LORD, and of those who speak evil against my soul.”
