The Psalms (Volume 1, Introduction: Christ and the Psalms) (eBook)

Preface

Two convictions underlie this commentary: that the Psalms are essential to the life of the Christian church and that Christ is central to the Psalms.

In the preface to his book Interpreting the Psalms, Patrick Miller (1935–2020) expresses the first sentiment like this: “It is in the conviction that the psalms belong both at the center of the life and worship of Christian congregations and in the midst of the personal pilgrimage that each of us makes under the shadow of the Almighty, that I have written this book.”1 I share this conviction. It ought not to be controversial, although the Psalms have sometimes been marginalized in church life today. I want to add my voice to others calling the church to bring them back into the mainstream of both corporate worship and personal devotion.

The second conviction is that Christ is central to the Psalms. This is a Christ-centered commentary in which Christ is front and center in each psalm and in all the Psalms. Every word of the Psalms is ours in Christ but always and only in Christ, to whom the Psalms preeminently belong. The Puritan Thomas Adams (1583–1652) writes that Jesus Christ is “the sum of the whole Bible, prophesied, typified, prefigured, exhibited, demonstrated, to be found in every leaf, almost in every line, the Scriptures being but as it were the swaddling bands of the child Jesus.”2 I believe this is emphatically true of the Psalms. I am persuaded that the Psalms belong to Jesus Christ and cannot rightly be understood apart from him. The main purpose of this introductory volume is to explain my approach and outline a defense for reading the Psalms this way.

For the larger part of church history, this has broadly been the way Christians have read the Psalms (see part 3, “Christian History and the Psalms”). The Christian tradition of concluding the singing of a psalm with the “Gloria Patri” (“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen, amen”) expresses the ancient Christian conviction that the Psalms are—in their original and enduring meaning—deeply Christian poems.3

But since the so-called “Enlightenment,” Christ has been eclipsed in much Psalms scholarship and preaching.4 With a few notable exceptions, recent commentaries tend either to omit Christ from many or all of the Psalms or to mention him as little more than an afterthought. But like an adventurer planting a flag in occupied territory, I want to reclaim the Psalms for Christ. Much more needs to be done. Scholars need to argue their way, yard by yard, across this occupied realm, claimed both by Judaism (as part of the Hebrew Scriptures, with Christ denied) and by the Old Testament academy (in various ways, with Christ at best on the margins). But in this commentary I want to do something else, something that may seem eccentric, even doomed to failure. I want to set before us what the Psalms might look and feel like, how they might be read and appropriated, if in truth they do belong to Christ—and to argue that they do.

For I have become persuaded that Jesus Christ is the subject and object of the Psalms, that his majestic divine-human person is woven into the warp and woof of the Psalter, and that he is the preeminent singer of psalms, the focus of the Psalter, and the one without whom the Psalms cannot be understood aright.5 I hope therefore to place Christ in the foreground of our reading of every psalm and to do so in ways that are shaped by the New Testament.

In arguing for a Christ-centered reading, I have occasionally been misheard as if I were suggesting that individual Christians cannot pray the Psalms. Far from it! This misunderstanding can arise because I draw attention to problems that arise when an individual believer seeks to refer a psalm directly to himself or herself and because I seek to emphasize how Jesus Christ prays the Psalms. The endpoint for which I argue, however, is that we may and must appropriate the Psalms for ourselves, both individually and corporately, but that we may only legitimately do so as men and women in Christ. If we are outside Christ, the Psalms are not mine or yours to appropriate; if we are in Christ, every word is our birthright as children of God the Father, brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, men and women indwelt with the Spirit of Christ.

I write as an amateur in the professional world of biblical studies and am deeply conscious of the shortcomings of my work. For the Psalms are difficult. Both Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564) express this awareness well.

“I confess frankly,” Luther said when he gave his First Lectures on the Psalms, “that even to the present day I do not understand many psalms.”6 In the preface to his comments on Psalms 1–22 (1519–1521), he writes,

I do not want anyone to suppose that I shall accomplish what none of the most holy and learned theologians have ever accomplished before, namely, to understand and teach the correct meaning of the Psalter in all particulars. It is enough to have understood some of the psalms, and those only in part. The Spirit reserves much for Himself, so that we may always remain His pupils. There is much that He reveals only to lure us on, much that He gives only to stir us up. . . . I know that a person would be guilty of the most shameless boldness if he dared claim that he had understood even one book of the Scriptures in all its parts. In fact, who would even dare assert that anyone had completely understood one single psalm?7

In the author’s preface to his Psalms commentary, Calvin writes, “The varied and resplendid [sic] riches which are contained in this treasury it is no easy matter to express in words; so much so, that I well know that whatever I shall be able to say will be far from approaching the excellence of the subject.”8

What was true for Luther and Calvin is far more applicable to me. There is much you will not find in this commentary. I am a preacher and pastor rather than a trained biblical scholar. I have sought to interact with a representative sample of writers across the centuries but have not, for the most part, attempted to interact with the voluminous and ever-growing secondary literature.9 Even in the sixteenth century, Luther could observe that “in many places the interpretations [i.e., of the Psalms] seem to require more interpretation than the text itself.”10 How much more today! I hope I am sufficiently aware of the more significant debates, but for a full study of these things, readers should consult one or more of the recent technical commentaries.

I have worked from the Hebrew text but have no particular expertise in the language, especially as regards Hebrew poetry, translation of tense forms, and poetic parallelism.11 Much scholarly debate surrounds theories of the dating, possible contexts of origins, and putative redaction histories of psalms. Too often, it seems to me that scholars construct theories on the basis of inadequate evidence; furthermore, I am not persuaded that these debates are always useful to Christian disciples seeking to weave the Psalms into their lives of prayer and praise. This commentary is not, therefore, a substitute for technical, scholarly commentaries. What you will find here, I hope, is the Psalter read with the breadth of a whole-Bible perspective and with a clear focus on Christ, the center of history and the fulcrum of the Bible story.12 Whether or not you are persuaded by every detail of my approach, I hope that this introductory volume whets your appetite to grapple with the commentary psalm by psalm and—far more importantly—to immerse yourself afresh in the Psalms themselves, in the presence of the God who so generously gave them to us.