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Jesus' Prayer Book the Psalms Are Our Invitation To

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Jesus' Prayer Book the Psalms Are Our Invitation To Book II - Psalms 42-72 The Psalms: Jesus’ Prayer Book The Psalms are our invitation to dialogue with God. Whatever our situation or whatever our emotions, we will find it in the Psalms. The Psalms are the Word of God and our words to God, arguably the most incarnational book of the Bible. Athanasius was right when he said that most scriptures speak to us; the Psalms speak for us. But the beauty of the Psalms is that we have both sides of the conversation: the Word of God in the fullness of God’s revelation and our response to God in the fullness of our human experience. We need the Psalms in our diet – good, healthy food for the growing Christian. Journalist Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food examines the industrially driven Western diet to show how it has ruined our health. All the processed stuff in the center aisles of the grocery store, with their flashy packaging screaming their outlandish health claims, represents the Western diet. Pollan refuses to dignify the merchandise in the center aisles as “food.” He labels it “eatable food-like substitutes.” The real food is in the produce section, without the fancy packaging. Pollan says, “The quieter the food, likely the healthier the food.” He offers a recommendation: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Eat real food.” My recommendation: Pray the Psalms, discover their wisdom and power. Embrace their intensity. Pray the Psalms. The Psalms are fully divine and fully human. They reveal the will of God and lay bare the human soul. They express our glory, laud and honor words, as well as our disturbing, violent, “go-to- hell” words. It is all there in the Psalms: love and hate, praise and pain, doxology and despair, revelation and repentance, heaven and hell. The Psalms challenge our false notions of holiness by showing us what it means to be human. “The Psalms act as good psychologists” causing us to deal with our anger, shame, guilt, and hate.1 “The 150 psalms present a mosaic of spiritual therapy in process.” Philip Yancey continues, “Such strewing of emotions, which I once saw as hopeless disarray, I now see as a sign of health.”2 “No other book of the Bible takes hold of the heart of the believer like the Book of Psalms.”3 Joni Eareckson Tada writes, “The Psalms wrap nouns and verbs around our pain better than any other book.”4 The meaning of the psalms pivot on a comparison between the “tenuous portrait of a king at risk” and the king enthroned and installed on Mount Zion (Ps 2:6).5 David is the type. Jesus is the archetype. David embodies the fallen human condition and Jesus is God’s redemptive provision. Through David we see ourselves and our need for salvation. In Jesus Christ we see the Savior. The Incarnate One embodies the meaning of faithfulness and fruitfulness: “Blessed are all who take refuge in him” (Ps 2:12). The interpretative key for the psalter is summed up in David’s revealing line: “The Lord says to my Lord: Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet” (Ps 110:1). The psalmists hears and responds to the Word of the Lord. Yahweh, the sovereign Lord, 1 Norris, “Why the Psalms Scare Us,” 21 2 Philip Yancey, The Bible Jesus Read (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1999), 122. 3 Allen Ross, Living with the Psalms: Introduction to the Psalms (Beeson Chapel Sermon, September 7, 2006). 4 Joni Eareckson Tada, Anger: Aim in the Right Direction. 5 Gerald Wilson, Psalms, vol 1: The NIV Application Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002, 651. 1 designates “my Lord” as the everlasting King who rules and reigns. The inspired narrative of the psalms explores the anguish and the ecstasy of the human story but always with a view to the meaning of “my Lord.” The soul-revealing transparency of “the man after God’s own heart” reveals our deep need for a Savior. Every lament cries out for deliverance and every praise calls out in hope. The psalmists knew that everyone has a story but only one story redeems our story. We are invited by the Lord himself to read the Psalms with him in mind (Luke 24:44). The Psalms belong to Jesus, whose external history establishes the ultimate revelational and emotional connection to the Psalms. In Christ, the Psalms find, what T. S. Eliot called the objective correlative, that is, the true correlation between event and emotion, object and person.6 David’s description of extreme abandonment and persecution in Psalm 22 goes well beyond his actual circumstances, but they are most accurate for Jesus, whose God forsaken experience on the cross, because of our sin, exceeds even the most powerful poetic expression. The words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” belong first and last to Jesus (Ps 22:1). These emotionally charged words are linked to the meaning of the atonement. The pivotal turning point in the Psalm comes when David abruptly moves from agony to ecstacy (Ps 22:22-31). Thus, the whole psalm finds its correlation in Christ, from cruciform-death to empty-tomb Resurrection. Jesus is the Rock of refuge and that great Shepherd of the sheep. Jesus is the One of whom it is said, “You are my Son; today I have become your Father” (Ps 2:7), and “The Lord says to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet’” (Ps 110:1). The church came to recognize Jesus as the psalmist. The Son of David is the author of the Psalms—the primary person of prayer. What David prayed figuratively, “They put gall in my food and gave me vinegar for my thirst,” found its literal fulfillment in the passion of Christ (Ps 69:21). In addition to Christ’s vicarious sacrifice, receiving in himself the penalty of our sins and giving us his righteousness, the Psalms offer us Christ’s vicarious spirituality. We are Christ-dependent, not only for our righteousness, but in our spirituality. In the Psalms, Christ leads us in prayer, with a passion and intensity well beyond our experience. The Spirit of Christ prays the Psalms on our behalf. We know the Psalms lie behind these wordless groans when the Spirit helps us in our weakness, interceding for God’s people in accordance with the will of God (Rom 8:26-27). What is true in our celebration of the Lord’s Supper is also true in praying the Psalms: it is not the passion we bring to worship, but the passion we receive in worship that is most important. There is no emotional prerequisite to praying the Psalms. We are relieved of the burden of working up our feelings. The passion to be focused upon is not ours, but Christ’s. If we let Christ lead us in prayer, we will learn how to pray. We embrace the Psalms because they are God’s answer to us and our answer to God. The Psalms hold up both sides of the conversation. We hear the voice of God in the Psalms and we discover our own voice—God’s will and our will in dialogue. The Psalms are instruments of grace, tools of being and becoming, that guide us in true spirituality. By praying the Psalms, we 6 James W. Sire, Praying the Psalms of Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2007), 31. 2 learn what it is to be both human and holy in the presence of God. Their rhythmic arrangement, juxtaposing praise and pain, hate and love, saves us from shallow optimism and ornamental spirituality. Through the Psalms we gain a true understanding of ourselves and we enter into solidarity with the Body of Christ. In order to make the Psalms our own, we learn to pray the Psalms on behalf of others—the global church and the household of faith. We pray the Psalms in the light of Christ and in sync with our personal experience. Unselfish skill is required to line up the Psalms with life, to discover the deep correspondence between God’s will and the human condition. And perhaps some courage is needed as well. 3 Psalm 42:1-43:5 The Counsel of Prayer Psalms 42 and 43 are linked so closely in thought, language and structure that they are better read as a single psalm.7 Three stanzas of equal length, each ending with a similar refrain, describe the psalmist’s yearning for God.8 “Dry, drowned, and disheartened,” capture three “frank confessions,” from a person who longs with his whole being for the fellowship of God.9 Kidner calls this “close-knit psalm, one of the most sadly beautiful in the Psalter.”10 My God As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God? My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me all day long, “Where is your God?” These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I used to go to the house of God under the protection of the Mighty One with shouts of joy and praise among the festive throng. Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. Psalm 42:1-5 Elohim is the preferred name for God in Book II.
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