A Meditative Journey through the Psalms

By Timothy Tennent and Julie Tennent

This book is a collection of some thoughts on each of the psalms. No single meditation could even begin to exhaust the meaning and insight of any given psalm. This is a joyful testimony to the rich beauty and textured layers that are present in the Psalms. These particular meditations are the result of many prayerful conversations about each of these psalms that have arisen from our daily practice of psalm singing over the years. These meditations are not intended to be a formal commentary on the Psalms. This volume can serve by itself as a meditation guide for anyone who wants to engage the Psalms in a deeper way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seedbed
• Release date: Oct 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781628244878

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Authors

Introduction

THE PSALMS HAVE BEEN SUNG, PRAYED, READ, CHERISHED, and memorized by the people of God for thousands of years. It is no mistake that God put, right at the heart of the Bible, an inspired prayer and worship book. The Psalms were given to us as a means of grace. In other words, each of the psalms represents a bridge or conduit through which the grace of God can be conveyed into our lives.

This book is a collection of some of our thoughts on each of the psalms. No single meditation could even begin to exhaust the meaning and insight of any given psalm. We are quite confident that we could start from the beginning and write 150 more meditations on the psalms and the book would be an entirely new book. This is a joyful testimony to the rich beauty and textured layers that are present in the Psalms.

These particular meditations are the result of many prayerful conversations about each of these psalms that have arisen from our daily practice of psalm singing over the years. These meditations are not intended to be a formal commentary on the Psalms. For that, we would recommend one of several excellent commentaries, particularly one written by Derek Kidner, John Oswalt, or David Thompson.

This volume can serve by itself as a meditation guide for anyone who wants to engage the Psalms in a deeper way. However, if you would like to engage in the particular practice of psalm singing, alongside this volume we are also publishing a companion volume of all 150 psalms set into meter for personal or congregational singing. The book is entitled, A Metrical Psalter: The Book of Psalms Set to Meter for Singing. Our metrical psalms are also accessible in digital form as an open-source resource at seedbed.com/psalms.

The renewed emphasis on the book of Psalms has come with many questions by Christians about the best way to engage the psalms. The psalms were all written between the time of Moses and the end of Jewish exile. Therefore, they are all written before the coming of Christ. How, then, do we read or sing these psalms as our worship? How do we relate these acts of worship to all that we know about Jesus Christ, the cross, the resurrection, the coming of the Spirit, the life of the church, and so forth? How do the Psalms relate to so many later acts of worship, such as hymns and choruses? Many of these questions will be answered through this meditation guide. Nevertheless, a short introduction and orientation to some of the more pressing questions may be helpful.

Most Protestant worship services devote a section of the worship service to congregational singing. Typically, a congregation will sing hymns, choruses, or some combination of these. Yet, for the vast majority of Christians throughout history, the primary act of singing would have been the psalms, even if other songs were also sung.

One of the most important verses in the New Testament about worship is found in Colossians 3:16, where Paul says, Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. This passage contains an important insight into the nature of worship. The New Testament anticipates the people of God writing new acts of worship. Paul repeats this admonition to the church at Ephesus, providing evidence that this was part of Paul’s core teaching to new churches: In Ephesians 5:19–20 Paul says, Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Apparently, the early church took Paul at his word, as we see several Christian hymns emerging right in the pages of the New Testament. There are the obvious examples that have been carried over into Christian liturgy, such as Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55), Zechariah’s Benedictus (Luke 1:68–79), and Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis (Luke 2:29–32). But, there are many others, such as the Christ hymn of Philippians 2:6–11, the resurrection hymn of Ephesians 5:14, and the mystery of godliness hymn of 1 Timothy 3:16. Then, of course, there are many hymns found in the book of Revelation, which are sometimes referred to as the songs of heaven, since they are found on the lips of the four living creatures (4:8; 5:9; 19:5), the angels (5:9–12; 7:15–17; 11:15; 12:10–12; 16:4–7; 18:1–8, 16–24), the twenty-four elders (11:17–18), the twenty-four elders with the four living creatures (19:4–5), and the redeemed (5:13; 7:10; 15:3–4; 19:6–8). It is clear that heaven is filled with worship and singing. Therefore, since the church represents the scattered outposts of heaven on earth, then the vibrancy of worship that we see in heaven should be anticipated in and through the hymns and Spirit-filled utterances of the church of Jesus Christ.

Hymns and choruses have been written throughout church history. Beginning with the eighteenth century, hymns gradually began to overtake the psalms as the primary way the church worshipped. However, the psalms were never meant to be supplanted by newer acts of worship. Psalms remains the only inspired worship book, and it serves as the ongoing foundation of worship that unites the people of God, even as we experience the wonderful diversity of hymns and choruses that are also written and sung across the ages.

The book of Psalms is like the church’s public square, our shared space that emphasizes our unity with all Christians everywhere. Psalms is the most-quoted book in the New Testament in general, as well as the most-quoted book by Jesus himself. The radical shift of worship in the contemporary period is not the emergence of new hymns or choruses as acts of worship. The radical shift has been the separation of worship from the Psalms. By the twentieth century, much of the church had witnessed the erosion of the Psalms as the foundation for worship.

Why are the Psalms so crucial as a foundation for worship? The next section will explore several reasons why the Psalms should be retained as the foundation for all other acts of worship.

First, the Psalms connect us to the entire Bible. We may think of the Psalms as merely a collection of 150 separate songs. However, a closer examination will reveal that what we call the book of Psalms is actually intentionally organized into five books—Book One: Psalms 1–41; Book Two: Psalms 42–72; Book Three: Psalms 73–89; Book Four: Psalms 90–106; and Book Five: Psalms 107–150. One of the reasons for this is because the book of Psalms is meant to mirror the five books of the Law, known as the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy). In that sense, they function as sung Torah—the instruction of Torah framed as an act of worship.

The Psalms are more than mere songs of praise. They are also filled with the theology of the whole of Scripture, which becomes embedded in the worship of God’s people. The Psalms draw from the Law, the Historical Books, the Wisdom Literature, and the Prophets. Thus, by reading or singing the Psalms, you are encountering the entirety of Scripture, but within the context of worship.

Second, the scope of the Psalms is far wider than later songs of worship. Even if you primarily encounter the Psalms through reading the text, you should be aware that you are reading poetry, not ordinary prose. You are reading an ancient hymnbook. Therefore, it is important to think about how these songs are different from the kinds of worship songs we normally encounter in church.

If you reflect on what is typically sung in churches, whether hymns or choruses, they, broadly speaking, fall into the category of praise and worship, which take a similar amount of time to sing. However, there are several ways that the poetry in the Psalms is quite different from what we are accustomed to in our normal Sunday worship.

First, the thematic scope of the Psalms far exceeds what we normally encounter in hymns and choruses. The 150 psalms are like a collection of 150 separate spiritual journeys, some short, some long; some for individuals, some for the entire congregation. These journeys take us through a stunning array of human experiences, including praise, lament, thanksgiving, penitence, recitation of history, wisdom for life, the worldview of the wicked, questions (even accusations) directed toward God, imprecations and curses, messianic aspirations, instruction, and admonition.

It is precisely the breadth of this genre that makes the Psalms seem, for some, so odd and even unsuitable for a Sunday morning worship service. Indeed, the more transparent, sometimes disturbing subject matter has led the modern church to either diminish or eliminate the Psalms completely from modern worship. Others tend to cherry-pick a few praise and worship verses that may occur in a psalm, but ripped out of its larger, sometimes painful context. Yet, when we only sing or recite a few psalms, or select the more comfortable portions of a particular psalm, we lose the impact of the whole journey, and, therefore, miss the formation that would happen within us along the way. Each psalm, in its entirety, is part of the inspired Word of God. The Psalms are unfolding for us a vast cartography of authentic life in tension with the real world, and yet all within the larger context of unwavering trust in God who is guiding all of those journeys.

Second, the myriad voices in the Psalms are quite different from what is normally experienced in contemporary hymns and choruses. In the Psalms we find the voice of God to his people, the voice of the psalmist to God, the voice of the psalmist to the people, the voice of the psalmist to his own soul, the voice of the psalmist to the wicked, and even the voice and thoughts of the wicked themselves. Frequently, these voices can shift even within a single psalm.

The Psalms seem to be very interested in building within the believer an entire worldview that understands not only the character and will of God (which we might expect), but also the character and intentions of the wicked (which may surprise us).

Third, the length and timing of a psalm is another way that the scope of the Psalms is quite different from a hymn or a chorus. We are all creatures of time and we all carry an inner sense of the appropriate length of various things we encounter in our lives. Whether we are watching a movie, waiting for a red light to turn green, anticipating the coming of spring, or listening to a sermon, we have certain internal ideas about how long various experiences should normally be. This same expectation comes into worship as well. Many of the well-known hymns that we sing in churches were originally written with as many as ten or fifteen verses. Modern hymnbooks generally only present four or five verses at the most, because the idea of singing ten or fifteen verses of a hymn seems to exceed the unspoken but widely held idea about the appropriate length of an act of worship. Hymns and choruses rarely last beyond five minutes.

A psalm must be approached as a different kind of worship vehicle than a hymn or a chorus. If we think we are singing a hymn or chorus, we will have unnecessary dissonance. With a psalm, the journey of the words is the primary driver of the worship, and the music carries you on the journey. Some journeys, like Psalm 117, are quite short and would be considered very short by a hymn or chorus standard. Others, like Psalm 78, are much longer. The point is to experience the full journey, whether short or long, and not have any set expectation as to how long a psalm should be. Just as in life, some journeys are short (to the convenience store) and some are long (traveling to see the Grand Canyon), but both journeys have their own internal integrity.

Many of the barriers that keep Christians from truly engaging the Psalms are revealed in some of the most frequently asked questions from various groups we have shared with over the years. Most of these questions are dealt with in the specifics of the daily meditations along the way, but a few questions up front may be helpful in getting us started on the daily journey of walking through life with the Psalms.

Why do the Psalms talk about the wicked so much?

The Psalms often speak in categories—most obviously the two ways of the righteous and the wicked, right from the beginning of Psalm 1. The enemies who have set themselves against the righteous appear in 125 of the 150 psalms, so it is very important to be prepared to think about these categories properly. The two groups known as the righteous and the wicked (and in Proverbs as the wise and the foolish and in the Torah as the blessed and the cursed) should not be heard as the sinless and the sinful, for we know that we are all sinners. Rather, the righteous are those who are trusting in God and have entered into a covenant with him. The righteous are in relationship with a righteous God, who has reached out to us in covenant love and made provision for all those who trust in him. Thus, the two ways of the Psalms find their ultimate fulfillment in Jesus Christ, who is the Way and the only truly righteous One.

Do the Psalms call us to hate people?

Another category that can be troubling in the Psalms is the use of the words love and hate. The Psalms speak of God loving the righteous and hating the wicked. We have so invested these words with emotional weight that we are uncomfortable with saying that God hates anyone. Yet we know that God does, indeed, hate wickedness and is committed to putting an end to all evil.

More importantly, in the Bible, neither hate nor love is primarily an emotion, as we typically think about the terms. Biblical love has little to do with any kind of sentimental feeling that God has about us. Rather, the terms love and hate should be primarily understood as covenantal actions. God loves by taking action on behalf of those with whom he has entered into a covenant. When God hates, it means that he is standing in opposition to the wicked and, because he longs for them to come into covenantal relationship with him, he takes action to defeat their schemes. Again, the New Testament helps us understand this. First John 3:16 defines love in this way: This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. Love is defined as an action. Biblical love is acting on behalf of, and biblical hate is standing opposed to those who stand opposed to God and his truth/ways.

How should we as Christians understand the emphasis on God’s judgment in the Psalms?

The concept of biblical judgment has been caricatured, particularly in the contemporary period, as portraying a capricious, arbitrary God exerting raw, unrestrained power over those he does not like. However, biblical judgment is God setting things right in the perfection of his righteous justice and compassionate mercy. Judgment in the Psalms is always a good thing, and is something that we long for in a broken world of oppression and violence. Redemption (or mercy/grace) and judgment are not two things, but one thing. They are two sides of one reality, for there can be no action of mercy on behalf of the oppressed without judgment upon the oppressor. In fact, the Psalms frequently place these two actions of God in a shared poetical couplet, demonstrating the integrated relationship between the two:

The LORD watches over all who love him,

but all the wicked he will destroy. (Ps. 145:20)

The ongoing cry of the Psalms is for God to set things right, because we are created with a longing for justice as part of God’s image within us.

As Christians, we know from the New Testament that this longing will be fulfilled in a way that the psalmist could never have imagined—God’s wrath and judgment will be poured out upon his own Son. Jesus will become the very curse that the Psalms voice, and he will drink the cup of wrath that the Psalms call for. This is God’s first costly answer to the psalmist’s cry for vengeance and judgment, and it is in this answer that redemption and mercy and forgiveness are found. But for those who will not embrace this redemptive insertion, or divine interruption, the reality of final judgment still stands, and the cry for justice keeps us mindful that Jesus will, in the words of the Apostles’ Creed, come again to judge the living and the dead. He will finally make all things right, and that is our great hope.

What does going to the temple or Zion have to do with me as a Christian today?

Many of the Psalms, either explicitly or implicitly through the larger context of the psalm, contain references pointing to the temple, the city of Zion, a king on a throne, and so on. How should Christians read these passages? The New Testament gives us a lens through which we might understand the psalmist’s frequent longing for the temple and for the city of Zion. For the Hebrew people, the temple always represented the place of God’s presence among his people, and so the longing for Zion and for going to the temple was a longing for the presence of God.

In Jesus Christ, the presence of God has been fully made manifest among us. All of the verities of the temple that the psalmist longed for were finally made perfect in Christ’s incarnation—the priesthood, the sacrifice, and the presence of God in our midst. So, when the psalmist sings about his longing for Zion, remember that this is a longing for the presence of God that we, as New Testament Christians, know supremely in Jesus Christ, who is the new temple. Moreover, the apostle Paul reminds us that we (corporately as the church) are the new temple, where God resides by the Holy Spirit. Thus, though we read, chant, or sing the very words of the Psalms as they were written, we sing them with a New Testament lens (as we read all of the Old Testament). In the end, we are the New Jerusalem, the church is the body of Christ, and Jesus Christ is the One who sits upon the throne.

We’re not supposed to read or sing those Psalms, are we? (A reflection on curses in the Psalms.)

This brings us to one of the most difficult parts of reading or singing the Psalms: namely, those parts of the Psalms where the psalmist specifically calls down curses upon his enemies. How do we encounter these psalms in light of Jesus’ teaching about loving our enemies?

Broadly speaking, the church has read these psalms through four lenses. First, the enemies of the church today are not flesh and blood, but the spiritual powers of evil in the heavenly realms. Ephesians 6:12 says, For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. This first lens for the imprecatory psalms is perhaps the easiest to understand. We acknowledge, with Paul, that behind all of the flesh-and-blood agents of evil and wickedness in this world lie powers of darkness, spiritual forces, and Satan himself. When we consider the evil spiritual power that is at work in this world, seeking to steal, kill, and destroy everything that is good and right and holy (John 10:10), we can cry out with the psalmist for the Lord to put an end to these principalities of wickedness and to break their hold in the lives of people in this world.

The second lens through which Christians encounter imprecatory psalms is by seeing these texts as prayers that transfer our anger over to God. Deuteronomy 32:35, as quoted by Paul in Romans 12:19, says, ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord. As those created in the image of God, we long for justice. However, there are times when wrong goes unpunished, when wickedness flourishes unrestrained, or when human systems of justice fail. When that happens, we can be tempted to take matters into our own hands, striking back with the due retribution that we desire to inflict upon those who have wronged us. But our desire for vengeance and vindication must be transferred into God’s hands, for he alone can dispense justice with true righteousness. When the psalmist calls down curses, this transfer is precisely what he is doing. He is asking the Lord to take vengeance rather than taking it himself; he is pouring all of the anguish of reprisal into a prayer rather than into actions of his own. These psalms are, after all, prayers—not the actions themselves. They provide the necessary and healthy channel for venting anger without erupting into violence, and they provide for the transference of that anger into the hands of God, who has promised to bring about his holy judgment with perfect equity.

The third lens through which Christians encounter these particularly challenging parts of the Psalter is by realizing that Jesus Christ has taken on all of these curses on the cross of Calvary. Galatians 3:13 says, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.’ Just as the second lens enables us to transfer our anger and need for vengeance into the Lord’s hands, this lens reminds us of the terrifying reality that all of the curses that belong upon the wicked are transferred onto Christ. As we encounter the vivid descriptions of curses that are called forth in the Psalms, we are suddenly caught off guard by the stark reality that these, even these terrible curses, have been laid upon Christ in the crucifixion. All the punishments that the wicked deserve fall upon Christ.

The fourth and final lens is understanding these psalms as foreshadowing the final end of all things. This lens is expressed in Revelation 11:15: The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever. Many of the worst imprecations in the Psalms carry an element of finality to them; they evoke vivid images of total and permanent destruction. These curses seem very frightening unless we remember that our great hope is that God will set all things right in the New Creation.