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December 14, 2020 - August 23, 2025
“The psalms are at the heart of Scripture and they unlock and express the secrets of our hearts:
a metaphor is a verbal link between the invisible and the visible, between heaven and earth.
A journey through the psalms is the journey of the life of faith. —DENISE DOMBKOWSKI HOPKINS1 The psalms illuminate the mind for the purpose of enkindling the soul, indeed to put it to fire. It may indeed be said that the purpose of the Psalms is to turn the soul into a sort of burning bush. —STANLEY JAKI2
N. T. Wright offers this general word of encouragement: The Psalms are inexhaustible, and deserve to be read, said, sung, chanted, whispered, learned by heart, and even shouted from the rooftops. They express all the emotions we are ever likely to feel (including some we hope we may not), and they lay them, raw and open, in the presence of God.23
Whereas Psalm 1 opens with a beatitude (“Blessed is the one”), Psalm 2 closes with a beatitude (“Blessed are all”). This signals to the reader that everything that lies inside these two psalms functions like a kind of a frame. It’s as if the psalmist were saying, “You get this picture right and you will get the whole Psalter right.”
In Psalm 1 the individual is blessed because he rejects the way of the wicked and embraces the way of the righteous.
Psalm 2, therefore, is a word to the whole community. The community is blessed who trusts the Lord, who trusts the Lord’s anointed ruler, who seeks the Lord, who draws near and keeps torah, and whose hope is in the Lord.
Mays explains that difference this way: To say “I” meant to speak of one’s group as well as one’s person. We bring our identity to a group, differentiate ourselves within it, join it, accept its ways and opinions, expect the group to nurture the individual and to justify itself to the individual.12
Faith is not an individualist transaction between God and me. From the perspective of the psalms, the life of faith involves plenty of personal experiences, but they are never a matter of mere private experiences.
it’s a healthy congregation, it will include people who don’t like what we like, who don’t think like we do, and who talk about God in ways that we find weird, dull, or off-putting. This is a deeply good thing.
When read closely, one of the first things we notice about the Psalter is that these “songs of David” are arranged into five books, each ending with a doxology.4 This fivefold arrangement is significant to how Jews and Christians have used the psalms. They are: • Book 1: Psalms 1–41 • Book 2: Psalms 42–72 • Book 3: Psalms 73–89 • Book 4: Psalms 90–106 • Book 5: Psalms 107–150 Each of these five books functions as a kind of mirror to the five books of Moses.
In his ministry Jesus repeatedly summons the language of the psalms.
In Paul’s letter to the faithful in Rome, he alludes to a host of psalms, including Psalms 14, 18, 19, 32, 44, 51, 53, 69, 116, 117, and 140. In the first two chapters of Hebrews, a chain of nine quotations appears from the psalms, in which the royal psalms and lament psalms feature most prominently. And as scholars frequently point out, the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation, cannot be rightly understood apart from a clear understanding of the psalms.7
Around AD 318, Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, said this about the psalms: “under all the circumstances of life, we shall find that these divine songs suit ourselves and meet our own souls’ need at every turn.”
For Martin Luther, as Roland Bainton writes in Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther, the psalms were “the record of the spiritual struggles through which he was constantly passing.”
The Book of Psalms is full of heartfelt utterances made during storms of this kind. Where can one find nobler words to express joy than in the Psalms of praise or gratitude? In them you can see into the hearts of all the saints as if you were looking at a lovely pleasure-garden, or were gazing into heaven. . . . Or where can one find more profound, more penitent, more sorrowful words in which to express grief than in the Psalms of lamentation? In these, you see into the hearts of all the saints as if you were looking at death or gazing into hell, so dark and obscure is the scene rendered by
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1719, Isaac Watts, who famously sought “to teach my Author [King David] to speak like a Christian,” took Psalm 98 and turned it into the hymn “Joy to the World.”
On December 25, 1996, when David Gergen, the former presidential adviser to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, asked Peter Gomes, the minister serving at the Memorial Church at Harvard University, where people unfamiliar with the Bible should start reading, Gomes answered: My advice has always been start with an accessible book, and I suggest you start with the psalms. Now people will say, “Oh, but the psalms are so pretty and musical; shouldn’t I take something stronger?” If you read the psalms, read them all, and read them at a pretty intense clip—don’t spend all year doing it, do it over the
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In the psalms we find words from God, we find words about God, and we find words to God.
he is a specific kind of Creator (Ps. 104), King (Ps. 5), Lord (Ps. 2), Mighty One (Ps. 62), Shepherd (Ps. 23), Refuge (Ps. 46), Light (Ps. 27), Warrior (Ps. 24), Deliverer (Ps. 81), and Sun and Shield (Ps. 84).
Here we find a Just Judge (Ps. 9) who exacts vengeance against all oppressors, as well as a Merciful One (Ps. 86) who inclines his ear to the cries of the afflicted. This God avenges the vulnerable (Ps. 26), heals the brokenhearted (Ps. 147), protects the widows (Ps. 146), provides for the weak and needy (Ps. 68), forgives the penitent (Ps. 32), and redeems the sinner from sin (Pss. 51; 103).
The goal is also to be trained in faithful silence. That’s part of the idea, scholars suggest, behind the term selah. The term functions as a kind of a pause, both in the text and as an invitation to the reader to wait, to listen, to meditate, and to not rush on. Psalm 62:1 says, “My soul waits in silence for God only; From Him is my salvation” (NASB). Psalm 65:1 adds, “There will be silence before You” (NASB). In such a silence there is a fullness.
On certain days a psalm will invite us to pray what we feel in the moment—need, joy, gratitude, hope, fear, anger, doubt. On other days a psalm will invite us to pray despite our feelings of the moment. They will invite us to pray, that is, in faith. They will invite us to choose to talk to God even when we’d rather be doing anything but that. To pray in these two ways is to cultivate the virtues of sympathy and empathy.
sometimes the obvious needs stating.
In most English translations the term appears six times to describe the Lord, as if the poet were purposefully striking a single key on the piano over and over. The work of the Lord, by “your fingers” and “your hands,” which results in the creation of “your heavens,” is a reflection of “your glory” and of “your name,” the latter of which is repeated at the beginning and end of the poem to frame the psalm. Everything that happens inside this frame, from the poet’s perspective, is intended to communicate something specific about the personal name of God.
W. H. Auden once remarked, “I like hanging around words, listening to what they say.”12
The psalms of lament are full of imperatives: forgive (Ps. 79:9), heal (Ps. 6:2), vindicate (Ps. 43:1), deliver (Ps. 31:15), sustain (Ps. 119:116–117). The most frequent imperative is remember (Ps. 74). These psalms invite the faithful to speak out loud what needs to be confessed in the assembly of God’s people: Remember me! Remember us! Remember your promises!
while the movement from “sad” to “mad” in our experiences of profound pain is a natural one, the movement from “mad” to “bad,” where we commit sin against our neighbor, is always a choice.
The term profane, from the Latin profanes (pro, meaning “before”; fanum, meaning “temple”), suggests the idea of being “outside the temple.” Profane space is the opposite of sacred space. In this light, profane language can be regarded as language that lies outside the boundaries of the sacred. In technical terms, it is dirty language because it transgresses the holy order.13
For the Christian it is not just that “the joy of the Lord” describes our experience of God, it is also that “the joy of the Lord” describes God’s own joy (Ps. 35:27).
What exactly does it look like to do justice? The Psalter shows us. Justice shows no partiality. It maintains the rights of the weak and it rescues the needy (Ps. 82). It rejects the use of arrogant words and the desire to take advantage of the vulnerable (Ps. 94). The just do not kill the innocent (Ps. 10); they refuse to speak out of two sides of their mouth (Ps. 28); they’re not bloodthirsty (Ps. 139); they’re not greedy (Pss. 10; 73); they’re not conniving (Ps. 94); they don’t love violence (Ps. 11).16 Those who love justice actively reject all systems that oppress people (Ps. 58).
In the psalmist’s experience, death is like an enemy that entraps its prey (Ps. 18:4–6); none can escape from its clasp. Death is also like a ravenous creature whose appetite is insatiable; it greedily devours human lives (Ps. 69:15). Death seizes people suddenly and unexpectedly (Ps. 116:3). It appears like a phantom shepherd, escorting the dead to the grave (Ps. 49:14). Death rises up like an ocean that swallows human beings whole (Ps. 69:15). And it is a place of utter darkness, where a person is forever forgotten (Pss. 31:12; 88:12).
In the view of Psalm 49:10, death is the great equalizer: “When we look at the wise, they die; fool and dolt perish together and leave their wealth to others.”
we are mortals. Our days are like grass. We flourish like a flower, but when the wind passes over it, the flower disappears, “and its place knows it no more” (Ps. 103:15–16). We do not have life in ourselves. Life comes to us as a gift, and death shows us our creatureliness: from dust to dust.4
is the Lord who lifts the psalmist “up from the gates of death” (Ps. 9:13). It is the Lord who delivers the psalmist from death “so that I may walk before God in the light of life” (Ps. 56:13). It is the Lord who restores the psalmist “to life from among those gone down to the Pit” (Ps. 30:3). It is the Lord who stands sovereign over “storm chaos” (Ps. 89:9–10), and who defeats “monstrous chaos” (Ps. 74:12–15). It is the Lord who ransoms the psalmist “from the power of Sheol” (Ps. 49:15).
While the language of the psalms may involve a measure of ambiguity about the nature of death and the lot of humanity after death, in Christ we discover the definitive defeat of death and the unambiguous gift of life in the one who calls himself the Resurrection and the Life (John 11:25).
Instead of being an enemy against which we are helpless, in the context of the New Testament, death is a conquered enemy (1 Cor. 15:26; Rev. 21:3–4). And whereas the psalmist sees the constant threat of the life-sucking powers of death, Saint Paul sees Jesus as the one who destroys death and brings “life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10).
whereas the psalmist fears drowning in the deathly waters of chaos, in Revelation 20:14 we see how death is “thrown into the lake of fire.”
Death is real—but it is not final.
the psalms also remind us that God stands sovereign over death and that, while we may be like “grass” that withers, God invites us to be like a tree “whose leaf does not wither” (Ps. 1:3 NIV)—a “tree of life.” Such a gift of life, a “fountain of life” (Ps. 36:9), comes from God, not from ourselves,
What the psalms assume throughout is that God is the author, preserver, and protector of life. According to the Psalter, the Lord is “the fountain of life” (Ps. 36:9) who “preserves” our life (Ps. 86:2). In the face of danger, the psalmist prays, “O guard my life, and deliver me” (Ps. 25:20). He claims God as the “upholder of my life” (Ps. 54:4). He experiences the Lord’s precepts as life-giving (Ps. 119:93). The Lord sustains the psalmist by day, while at night “his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life” (Ps. 42:8). In Psalm 119 he links the experience of life directly to God’s work
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Peterson translates Psalm 104:24–26: What a wildly wonderful world, GOD! You made it all, with Wisdom at your side, made earth overflow with your wonderful creations. Oh, look—the deep, wide sea, brimming with fish past counting, sardines and sharks and salmon. Ships plow those waters, and Leviathan, your pet dragon, romps in them. (THE MESSAGE)
As Bernhard Anderson remarks, “In the Hebrew text, the verbs refer to continuing actions.” God creates life—and then keeps creating life. If he stopped being a life-giving God, creation would cease to exist. Anderson proposes a translation of Psalm 104:28 that captures this sense well: “When you give to them (not once but again and again), they gather it up (not one time but frequently).”8
In Psalm 40, God appears in past, present, and future tenses: “Many, LORD my God, are the wonders you have done” (v. 5 NIV); “You are my help and my deliverer” (v. 17b); “Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me; O LORD, make haste to help me” (v. 13).
We cannot say “God bless Africa” and stop there. We must add, “and may Africa fear and honour you.” —SAMUEL NGEWA1
“Divine Game of Pinzatski.”
In Psalm 104:24 the psalmist writes, “O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.”
Psalm 36:5 draws our attention to the fact that love likewise marks God’s creative work: God’s love “extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds.”
Psalm 65:8, and then adds, “you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy.”
rivers clap their hands and the mountains sing for joy (Ps. 98:8). The valleys shout with gladness, the trees sing, and the fields make merry (Ps. 96:10–13).
