Vindicate Me, O' Lord!

In this Psalm, David prays in startlingly vivid ways as he asks the Lord to deliver him from his enemies by exacting vengeance upon them. We often struggle with these types of Psalms because we believe them to be in some way, shape, or form, counter to the New Testament ethos to love our enemies. Yet David was a man after God's own heart—and that even includes his plea that God would strike his enemies down, in the inspired words of Scripture we find here. Thus, the question remains: how do we rightly understand the place of imprecatory psalms in the life of the Christian?