What Do I Do With Bible Passages That Deeply Disturb Me?

Don’t force yourself to approve the passage; bring the passage into God’s light.

Some Bible texts are meant to unsettle you. Psalm 137:7-9 is one of them: exiles in grief cry out for justice after Jerusalem’s fall, and the psalm ends with raw, terrible words. Scripture does not pretend the people of God always speak beautifully when they are wounded.

What to do with it

• Read it honestly, not quickly. Let the words be what they are. Disturbance is not failure; sometimes it is the right response to human sin and vengeance laid bare.

• Ask what kind of speech it is. Psalm 137 is lament from the edge of trauma, not a command to imitate. The Bible often records sinful, broken, or incomplete speech without endorsing every line as a model.

• Let clearer Scripture govern the hard text. Jesus forbids personal revenge and commands love of enemies in Matthew 5:44. Paul says, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves” in Romans 12:19. Those passages keep Psalm 137 from becoming a license for hatred.

• Receive the honesty, reject the violence. The psalm teaches that God can hear even our ugliest grief. But the final shape of Christian prayer is the cross: “Father, forgive them” in Luke 23:34, not retaliation.

A faithful way to pray with it

You can say:

Lord, this passage disturbs me. I see the pain behind it, and I do not want to become the kind of person who delights in revenge. Teach me to lament without hardening, and to trust your justice without taking it into my own hands.

The key move

Do not flatten disturbing passages into “nice” ones, and do not read them as permission slips for sin. Hold them in the whole Bible, where lament is real, justice is real, and mercy in Christ is even more real.