Christian Life in the Psalms

Week 6: From Trials to Trust

We have reached a kind of watershed in our course through the Psalms. The first week was an introduction to the Psalter as the prayer book of the church. We looked at the contention of Athanasius of Alexandria, a representative of the pastors and theologians of the early church, that the Psalms give Christians an appropriate form of discourse for every kind of circumstance, a way of addressing God, whether in need, or in joy, or in pain, or under persecution, or in any other circumstance, that will meet our needs. In praying the words of the Psalms we are treading a well-trod path, but more importantly a path laid out for us by God himself. The Lord himself—that is, the same living Word of God who became incarnate for our salvation in Jesus Christ—is present in the words of the psalms. And so these psalms are the most powerful prayers that we can utter; they are able to defeat and overthrow the power of whatever demons may assault us and attempt to derail us.

In the second week we looked at how doctrine becomes doxology. That is, we looked at the way in which the mental act of believing that God is the maker of heaven and earth can be transformed into an act of the will whereby we offer ourselves in submission and worship to God. In the words of Psalm 8, "O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens." Gazing upward at the physical heavens—that is, at the stars; but it doesn’t have to be the stars, does it? We may gaze at the stars, or at Niagara, relentlessly pouring its uncountable tons of water, or at Kilimanjaro, or at the amazing little rotifers you can see, if you have a microscope, churning away in a drop of pond water; or at a baby’s small fingers, reaching and grasping; or you can supply your own favorite example. Wherever we turn, we find all the molecules and constellations of creation crying out, in the words of the hymn, "The hand that made us is divine." Or do we not? Because if we don’t, we’ve become blind to the wonder around us, and we need to immerse ourselves again in Psalm 8, Psalm 19, Psalm 29, until our numbed reflexes are restored to their intended vitality and we are moved to "ascribe to the Lord glory and strength, ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name, worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness," to return again into the temple and join the host that cries out "Glory!" —and in so doing fulfill the purpose for which we were formed from shapeless matter, and in that fulfilling find also the God-given grace of true enjoyment.

In the third week we breezed through some observations about the structure of the Psalter, and also through the several types of psalms identified by scholars, and some of the poetic features of the Psalter. (If you missed this you can find some of the material on the website that Tom Branscom has been maintaining for this course.) But the main theme for that week was the celebration in the Psalms of the Torah of YHWH, that is, the Lord’s instruction, or to use the traditional though in some aspects inadequate translation: the Law of the Lord. It’s fine and good to be lost in admiration and worship when you gaze up at the stars, but this sense of creaturely unworthiness before the divine glory does not in and of itself tell you how to act in this or that circumstance of daily life. For that we are given scripture to lead us and make us wise; and Psalm 1, Psalm 19, Psalm 119 celebrate this gift. When we pray these psalms, we acknowledge that God’s written word in Scripture is a gift of grace. It gives us a way of sinking our roots deeply into the well-watered ground alongside the river of the Spirit’s own presence. It isn’t a matter of rules, of dull dos and don’ts. In Psalm 119, we pray "your decrees are my heritage forever; they are the joy of my heart. I incline my heart to perform your statutes forever, to the end." Psalm 1 pronounces happy the one whose delight is in the law of the Lord—delight. Why delight? Because it is life-giving. We do not delight in Scripture or worship Scripture rather than rejoice in the grace that comes to us in Jesus Christ. No. We recognize in Scripture the word of Christ himself, the testimony of the one Word that was in the beginning, and is, and ever shall be.

In the fourth week we spent a bit of time looking at some of the esoteric-looking langauge that shows up in the superscriptions to the Psalms. (Again, you can find that material on the web site if you missed and want to check it out.) But the real theme for the week was history in the Psalms. Many of the psalms reflect upon the history of God’s dealings with Israel; they recite especially the foundational story of Israel’s formation by God’s act of liberating his people from bondage in Egypt and leading them out into a new land. And we asked: what happens when we make these psalms our own? In what way has God led you, or led me, out of some kind of bondage? In what way has God, despite our own repeated failings, remained faithfully committed to a covenant promise made to us? Does that record, or that experience, of God’s past faithfulness give us any kind of comfort and confidence as we move forward?

Finally, last week we looked at the messianic psalms. (Most of this is not yet on the web site, but I’ve started writing it up and hope to eventually give it to Tom.) We noted that when our earliest forebears in the Christian faith were confronted with the shock of the arrest and execution of the one who they had hoped would become the anointed successor to King David, and then with the equally stunning reports of his resurrection, they ransacked the Scriptures (meaning the Old Testament) and found throughout, but especially in the Psalms and in Isaiah, something it seems no one had ever noticed before: testimony that the Messiah would suffer and die for our sins and on the third day rise again. And so we speak of messianic psalms, psalms embodying a narrative line in which the real protagonist, behind the surface picture of an Israelite king, or in some cases of an unidentified suffering Israelite, is Christ himself. But really then we can go on to find Christ not only in Psalm 22 or Psalm 110 or other psalms explicitly cited by the New Testament or by later Christian teaching as prophesying events of Christ’s life; as we have already noted, for the Christian who prays the psalms there is a sense in which every psalm is messianic; Christ is there incarnate in words, in words that give verbal expression to our own experience just as in the incarnation he embodied it. And the fact that that experience is in part negative, painful, and distressing brings us to the point of these next three weeks.

This week is titled "From Trials to Trust" in the syllabus. We look at psalms that complain to God about present life circumstances. Back to these in a moment. Next week, titled "From Wretchedness to Righteousness," is a look at the seven "penitential psalms"—so called, as with the "messianic psalms," in Christian tradition, not in Jewish tradition. When Martin Luther posted his 95 theses, the first was this: "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said ‘Repent’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance." The seven psalms listed in the syllabus for next week provide a script for that life of repentance; when we pray them we confess our own failings and throw ourselves anew onto the mercy that God has extended to us in Jesus Christ. The following week, titled "From Cursing to the Cross," takes up the most difficult parts of the whole Psalter, the imprecatory passages, the places where anger at the way the psalmist has been mistreated flames out into white-hot hate speech of an intensity that can leave us queasy. We can’t simply ignore such language, because this too is part of Scripture. As Christians we find in these psalms an acknowledgment that there is real evil in the world, profound evil that stirs our indignation because it really does merit absolute damnation. So we must learn that vengeance does not belong to us but to the Lord, and we can meditate on the way in which Christ took upon himself this burden of condemnation and bore it to the cross. —I myself will be away those two weeks, so Chris will have sole charge of those two sessions. Then finally in the last week of the course we will look at "The Psalms and the Victory of God"—a closing note of triumph.