Speaking of imprecatory prayers, how are we to truly pray for those who are wicked, for God's judgment, salvation, or both?

Well that's an interesting question- about how to pray for those who are rejecting God. While it might feel very righteous to say you should never pray for the judgment of God, the fact is that the book of Psalms is filled with prayers of judgment, prayers for God to judge the wicked. Now we would put the wicked though into two categories, just very broadly speaking. There are the wicked that are recalcitrant, that are hardened in their hearts, they have no fear of God, they know who God is. They have no desire to do anything remotely godly. They are the ones that wreak havoc in the world, they're the ones that cause destruction, they're the ones that seem to rise to power and cause great chaos in every nation on earth. And for them, we honestly we pray for them. 1st Timothy 2 tells us to pray for our leaders, but we also pray for relief from them, and we pray for the Lord's mercy.

But there's also the category of the person that has heard the gospel or perhaps hasn't yet heard the gospel, and they're genuinely hurting in their own sin. They're hurting because of the consequences of sin, and they're they're seeking in some darkened way. The Holy Spirit opens their hearts to be saved, and when we rejoice in that, and we're thankful for that. And so I think the easy thing to say is that only the Lord knows the destiny of all of the wicked, whether they're going to be saved, or whether they're not going to be saved.

We pray for the Lord's will to be done, but there are plenty of examples in Scripture of praying for relief from oppression, relief from those who are wicked. I also see in Scripture that God gets great glory when very wicked men repent. King Manasseh goes down in history as one of the darkest, most wicked kings in all of the history of the southern kingdom of Judah, but at the end of his life, he repents, and he becomes a servant of the living God. So God is glorified in that. And so you pray for relief from injustice, but you also pray for the salvation of the lost.