Praying The Psalms (New International Commentary)
“One of the reasons that the psalms are so beloved is that they express the full range of human emotions before God. The hymns of praise shout out the soaring joy of those who bear witness to God’s faithfulness. The prayers for help give voice to the groaning pain of those who long for—but cannot find—a faithful God in their suffering.
The poems of trust express the confident inner faith of those who trust, in spite of the quaking external realities all around. The songs of thanksgiving ring with the renewed song of those who have passed through a dark valley of crisis. The instructional psalms pass on the wisdom of those who have gone before to generations yet unborn.
The imprecatory psalms cry out for justice against those who oppress. And the royal psalms bear witness to the mystery that God has chosen human beings as the agents through which God is at work in a broken world. Because the Psalter draws on the full range of human experiencing and emotions, William Brown has said that “the Psalter is … Scripture’s most integrated corpus.”
This great diversity of emotion and perspective is the source of the Psalter’s richness for believers. Because the Psalter is a collection of poetry, it does not have a plot in the same way that the narrative books of the Bible do. Nor does it have a central argument in the same way that the epistles of the New Testament do. Nor does it have a unified vision or source, as many of the prophetic books of the Old Testament do.
Comprised of 150 compositions from many different authors, the Psalter more resembles a great choir of witnesses than it does a story, or letter, or collection of visions. The Psalter gives voice to the faith struggles, theological insights, and liturgical witnesses of many different people. For this reason and others, even though more than two thousand years separate us from the days when they were first written, the psalms continue to be central to the life of faith for both Christians and Jews.
Near the beginning of life, people of faith memorize them as children at their mothers’ feet. They sing or chant them when they come together for weekly worship. In times of trouble they recall the psalms’ words of promise and hope. And to mark the end of life, they utter them solemnly when they bury their fathers.
As John Goldingay has aptly put it, the “Psalms make it possible to say things that are otherwise unsayable.” At times the psalms give us words to express anguish that we cannot bring ourselves to express. At other times they allow us to express the joy we feel, but to do so in a theological register. And at still other times, we do not sing them because they say or feel what we already believe or feel, but because by speaking them we can come to believe what they say, feel what they feel, and trust where they trust.”(1)
Throughout the centuries, across denominations, continents, and cultures, the people of God have routinely found life in praying through the Psalms. Join us Wednesday mornings as we corporately sit with God in the wrestling, lamenting, adoring, interceding, hoping, thanksgiving… of The Psalms.
(1) deClaissé-Walford, Nancy, Rolf A. Jacobson, and Beth LaNeel Tanner. 2014. The Book of Psalms. Edited by E. J. Young, R. K. Harrison, and Robert L. Hubbard Jr. The New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company