The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

by N.T. Wright

All the earth! Well, the seraphim in Isaiah’s vision declared that the whole earth was full of YHWH’s glory (Isa. 6.3). With that to one side of us and the answering hymn in Revelation 4 to the other, why should we not look out on the fruitful earth around us, whether it be mountains and lakes or simply a plant on a windowsill, and celebrate the fact that it is all singing praise to its maker?

What some had experienced, or might hope to experience, in the tabernacle or Temple (the tent or house being filled with the glory of YHWH) was now to be hoped for in terms of the whole creation. That, we may assume, is part, at least, of what Jesus taught his followers to pray for when they were to say, “Thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven.”

Then comes the moment, at the heart of the psalm, that I regard as one of the great lines in all of scripture, a moment that draws together Genesis and Proverbs and looks on to the poetry of Saint Paul. God has created the world in such a way that the great lights of the sky—the sun and the moon—bring order to the life of animals and humans alike. Observing this, the psalmist celebrates the amazing multiplicity of God’s creation and the fact that it is done “in wisdom,” wisely: You have made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting. You make darkness, and it is night, when all the animals of the forest come creeping out. The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God. When the sun rises, they withdraw and lie down in their dens. People go out to their work and to their labor until the evening. O YHWH, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. (104.19–24)

This is the line of thought that Paul picks up in the glorious poem of Colossians 1.15–20, in which he sets out, after the fashion indeed of a Hebrew psalm, the balanced account of all things being created in, through, and for the Messiah and then all things being redeemed in, through, and for him. Paul leaves us in no doubt that he is picking up this tradition of “creation through wisdom,” joining together Genesis 1 and Proverbs 8.

The “wisdom” by which the one true God made the world and all its creatures is to be identified with and as the one we now know in and as Jesus the Messiah.

Once we learn to understand the overlap of time in the Psalms (past and future both coloring the present), once we learn to understand the overlap of space in the Psalms (God’s glory now in the Temple, now in the Torah, now in the whole of creation), it is not too great a stretch to see that “matter” itself, the material world, is designed to be flooded with God’s glory. And if this is so for the whole creation—trees and seas and birds and animals—it is so above all for human beings.

The mode in which that glory is to be seen in the present is praise.

So, as with time and space, we are invited to stand at the intersection of original created matter and the matter of new creation, the original matter that reveals God’s power and glory and the new creation that will be flooded, saturated, with God’s presence and glory. And we do not, of course, stand there as mere outside observers. We, being ourselves part of that extraordinary picture, find our own stories within the larger narrative of creation—our own small but significant stories of wine and bread, of work and rest, of death and new life, and, through it all, of praise.

The Psalms do not, that is, offer us an answer for “the problem of evil.” But they are clear where the answer is not to be found. It is not to be found where the pantheist wants to find it, suggesting that “evil” is merely a matter of our perception and that the world just is the way it is and we should get used to it. Nor is it to be found where the dualist wants to find it, suggesting that the whole of “matter” (and time and space as well) is bad, evil, dangerous, seductive and that we should find ways of escaping it all in a detached spirituality in the present and in a distant nonmaterial “salvation” in the future.

Instead, the psalmists again and again celebrate the promise that the creator of the world will renew his creation, “judging” it in the sense of pronouncing definitively against all that has corrupted and defaced it, and putting it right once and for all.

Once again we move to a “new song,” perhaps an indication that these songs are looking ahead to the new things that YHWH is going to do, further revelations in action of his character as creator and judge. He has already “made known his victory,” the victory won by his “right hand and his holy arm,” so that all the ends of the earth can see it (98.2, 1, 3, reminding us of Isa. 52.7–12). Now, as his people praise him uninhibitedly and summon all the earth to join in, they are to look to the future and celebrate the fact that he will return at last to put the whole world right:

Time: the past of creation, the future of judgment, and the present of celebration are drawn together.

Space: what was promised for the Temple is now promised for the whole world.

And now matter: we find ourselves standing at the fault line between the original material of creation and the new, restored, glory-fille...

Seedtime and harvest, like day and night, are built into the present creation as signposts, indications that the God who made the world has new purposes yet to be unveiled. Jesus himself used the same image to speak of his own forthcoming death and resurrection (Jn. 12.24).

The Psalms themselves indicate that the human beings who sing them are actually being changed by doing so. Their very innermost selves—which include their physical selves—are being transformed. How can such a thing be? This is perhaps one of the hardest things for people today to grasp, but once we allow the Psalms (along with the rest of scripture) to shape our worldview, there is no reason not to see the point. As with other strands in the Psalter, I suggest that we resist the temptation to see all of the remarkable claims made by the writers as flowery metaphors (there are plenty of those, too, of course) and probe carefully to get to the actual truth.

The writer is determined to tell us that when people study the Torah and determine to keep it, they are changed by doing so. They become different people—not just “inwardly” but in ways that interconnect with every aspect of their physical body, too.

Every thought we think, every act we perform, and especially every habit we adopt and develop creates pathways in our brains. That’s why a habit is what it is: something that, initially difficult or even impossible (think of learning a foreign language or a musical instrument), gradually becomes, as we say, “second nature.”

But there are real physical changes involved in all habit formation, even though many of them remain invisible.

We find ourselves at the intersection of the times, the overlap of God’s space and our own, and the place where the ultimate new life of resurrection is already making inroads into our material being. That is the place to which Jesus himself came. It is where he hung in agony on the cross. It is the place he made his own in a new way when he rose again and breathed his Spirit on his followers. It is the place where he has promised to meet with us and to make himself known through us.

Time is not merely linear or merely cyclic. As time moves forward, the Psalms, by their content but also by their poetry and music, invoke the past and anticipate the future.

Similarly with space: heaven and earth really are designed to meet together in the Temple, and the Temple, for which the Psalms were written in the first place, is itself not there for its own sake but because it is the bridgehead into God’s whole new world.

Similarly with matter: God delights in all that he has made, both as it is and as it wi...

The Psalms speak of change, but more importantly they are agents of change: change within the humans who sing them, and change through those humans, as their transformed lives bring God’s kindness and justice into the world.

To worship without using the Psalms is to risk planting seeds that will never take root.

Much of what the Psalms are designed to do, they are designed to do as a complete set.

We should say or sing the puzzling and disturbing bits along with the easy and “nice” ones. We should allow the flow and balance of the entire set to make their points, with the sharp highs and lows of the Psalter all there to express and embody the highs and lows of all human life, of our own human lives.

(I once heard Billy Graham say that he read five psalms every day because they taught him how to get along with God, and a chapter of Proverbs every day because it taught him how to get along with other people. Psalms and Proverbs right through, every month: a great discipline.)

Churches and Christian groups of whatever tradition should be wary of taking too many steps down the road, whether in mission or in liturgy or anywhere else, without the Psalms as the deep, fast-flowing river washing the steps of the church day by day and hour by hour.

The Psalms, which Jesus himself sang and within which he was formed in his vocation, not only describe this transformation but are part of the God-given means of bringing it about.

Jerusalem has been a place of conflict as well as of celebration for three thousand years, and somehow its continuing sorrows still function as a kind of symbol of the out-of-jointness of the whole world. Misunderstandings, bad memories, unintended consequences, and plain old-fashioned sin, pride, guilt, and fear all jostle together and make the city one of the most painful, as well as one of the most beautiful and evocative, places on earth.

The Psalms were there long before us, and they will sustain generations yet to come. They are, in that respect as in so many others, a reflection of the faithfulness of the God of whom they speak.