Breaking Teeth

Break their teeth in their mouth, O God!

Break out the fangs of the young lions, O LORD!

Psalm 58:6

Imprecatory psalms (those that pray for curses) aren’t the sort of psalms we turn into praise choruses. That is probably just as well, as a visitor to a church service might wonder about a congregation that harmonizes, “Wash Your feet in the blood of the wicked.” Still…

Psalm 58 is one of those psalms. In it David ask the Lord deal with the wicked by “breaking their teeth in their mouth,” and he adds an enigmatic parallel thought, “Break out the fangs of the young lions, O Lord!” Hmm, as Christians, what are we to make of such statements?

I pondered this yesterday as I waited for my first root canal to get started. And since the dentist was running late, I waited a while, prepped in the dental chair with a bib dangling from my neck. This permitted his assistant the opportunity to explain in excruciating detail the procedure. “These are the drills we use,” she said, holding up a tray of needle-like steel bits. “They have spirals on them so they can bring the nerve up and out.” She held them close so I could see. “There are several of them because they come in differing sizes.” Some of those needles looked an inch long, and I started to wonder how far into my tooth they would go.

Just then the dentist walked into the room, clutching the x-ray of my tooth. “It’s a long one, isn’t he?” he said to his assistant, pointing at the picture. “Really goes up there.” (“There” was a reference to the bone above the tooth.) “So,” he said, turning to me, “you have these three roots on this tooth, and I will drill into them and excavate the pulp and nerve from each of them. Then, once I’ve removed all that, I’ll pack it with filling, starting down at the bottom and working my way up.”

Ouch.

All joking aside, though, it wasn’t that bad. The dentist numbed the side of my face, and apart from the uncomfortable feeling of having his entire fist in my mouth, I was fine. And as I sat and listened to the drill, I thought how blessed I was to live in this century and not in previous ones.

Until recently, the ‘cure’ for most dental ailments was extraction, even though an effective treatment for cavities was known as early as the tenth century. And this had a lot to do with the methods for clearing out decay. The drilling out of a cavity from the tenth century until the eighteenth century required a superhuman fortitude in the patient and a high degree of dexterity in the dentist. The major drawback of those drills was the slow rotation of the bit. The dentist, holding the metal spike between his thumb and index finger, manually worked it back and forth, all the while forcefully bearing downward.

Not until the eighteenth century was there a mechanical drill, about the size of a hand-held clock and with a clock’s inner rotary mechanism. And not until George Washington’s personal dentist, John Greenwood, adapted his mother’s spinning wheel to rotate a bit was there an even moderately rapid, foot-pedaled dental drill. Unfortunately, the intense heat generated by its quick rotation was itself a drawback; although this was compensated for by a shorter period of discomfort.

As I sat in the chair listening to my dentist’s modern high-tech drill, I was thankful that his water-cooled model spins in excess of a half-million turns a minute. Quicker, and I suspect, less painful.

But let’s go back to Psalm 58. What is it, exactly, David is asking? Well, I think my current state provides some helpful insight.

As I left the doctor’s office, still numb, I received these instructions: “Be careful, your tooth (or what’s left of it) is fragile, and you’ll want to avoid chewing anything hard until your other dentist puts the crown on. So, eat soft foods, and, until the anesthetic wears off, be careful not to chew the side of your cheek.” And, then, “You’ll want to start taking Ibuprofen, as you’ll probably start to feel some pain when the numbness goes away.”

This prediction proved true. By evening, the side of my face had settled into a dull ache that has persisted through to this morning. So, pain and difficultly with eating. Pretty humbling.

This points at one of David’s desires. He desires God’s enemies, the wicked, to be humbled. He wants them to come face-to-face with their mortality and their inability to perpetuate their health. Broken teeth are humbling. They limit your regular activities and cause you to act and react like an invalid.

The parallelism included in the verse points at another one of David’s desires. He asks that the fangs of the young lions be broken. In this, he likens the wicked to young lions, those who are able to hunt with the full vitality of youth. And what do these lions use to triumph in the hunt? Their fangs, of course. So, by asking God to break the ‘fangs’ of the wicked, David is asking God to take away their ability to exact pain and death.

One other interesting thing to consider here is that David, that great man of war, turns to the Lord with his request. He recognizes his dependency on God, and he does not seek, on his own, to ‘break the teeth’ of the wicked. Rather, he asks the Sovereign Lord to do so, using whatever means He considers appropriate. In doing so, I believe, David recognizes and affirms that vengeance and judgment, ultimately, are the Lord’s.

There is more that could be said, but I think we can deduce this, that, at least, David is asking the Sovereign Lord to humble and disempower the wicked.

While the dentist was working on my tooth, I watched the television on the wall behind him. It was set to a news channel, and I could see continuing coverage of the Boston bombings. This seemed appropriate, in light of the things I had been considering. The wicked had acted and we were witnessing the pain and grief they had caused. And now the questions were being raised: To whom can we turn? Who will bring justice?

The answer today is the same as it was in David’s day -- the Lord. We should turn to the Lord. We should ask Him to bring justice.

As we seek to cope with these horrific events, let’s remember the admonition of scripture: “Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” says the Lord.” (Romans 12:19) And let’s go to Him in prayer and ask Him to “break the teeth” of the wicked.