WORSHIP IN THE PSALMS
The purpose of the psalms may be regarded as teaching all men how to worship God in Spirit and truth, how to pray effectual prayers, in what spirit to bring sacrifices in the Temple, how to interpret the natural world around us, and the meaning of Israel’s laws and stirring history. All this is not self-evident: it requires an inspired interpretation.
Many psalms are made by David, the “sweet psalmist of Israel” (2 Sam. 23:1), who had not only a poetic heart and the gift of playing the lyre (1 Sam. 16:18), but also the spirit of prophecy (2 Sam 23:2, 3; cf. Acts 2:30), “being a prophet,” in relation to Ps. 16). He had probably composed a number of psalms as a youth while he was still a shepherd in the lonely hills of Judea. Accompanying himself on his lyre. David must have poured out his sensitive soul in the lyrics of adoration and praise while contemplating God’s works in nature and in Israel’s sacred history. Later, when he was falsely accused and persecuted, his lonely heart cried out to his Shepherd for help, assurance of divine vindication, and revival of soul. The universal purpose of David's psalms in the prayers of all the future saints is well expressed by E. G. White:
“The communion with nature and with God, the care of his flocks, the perils and deliverances, the griefs and joys, of his lowly lot were not only to mold the character of David, and to influence his future life, but through the psalms of Israel's sweet singer they were, in all coming ages, to kindle love and faith in the hearts of God's people, bringing them nearer to the ever-loving heart of Him in whom all His creatures live.
The psalms of David represented not only his personal outreach for God. Arousing similar emotions in the hearts of all Israel, the sacred songs of David were in God's providence accepted in the official liturgy of Israel’s worship in the Temple of Jerusalem. Then all Israel began to sing the songs and to pray the prayers composed by David. Who can tell the far-reaching influence of those inspirational liturgies of sacred songs that praised the faithful love and mercy of Israel’s God? They aroused new courage and loyalty to the LORD in the hearts of God’s people, freeing them from idolatry and superstition. Those who heard and sang the psalms of Israel drank from a fountain of living waters welling up from the presence of God, reviving the soul.
The incalculable religious value of the Psalter is basically of a twofold nature: the psalms furnish both an authentic record of the religious feelings and insights of Israel's saints and a true standard or norm of the emotions and thoughts about God and man for the worship of God by all men.
Israel’s Calling: To Praise the Lord
The psalms reflect Israel’s understanding of God’s work in creation and redemption, of His providence and purpose with the world and its history. Through the Psalmbook God aroused Israel to seek a deeper knowledge of Himself and in that way also of themselves.
The psalms of David pass through the whole range of experience, from the depths of conscious guilt and self-condemnation to the loftiest faith and the most exalted communing with God. His life record declares that sin can bring only shame and woe, but that God’s love and mercy can reach to the deepest depths, that faith will lift up the repenting soul to share the adoption of the sons of God. Of all the assurances which his word contains, it is one of the strongest testimonies to the faithfulness, the justice, and the covenant mercy of God.
Have you ever wondered how it would be possible to spend more than a few moments pondering the sacrifice of Christ? How can individuals come face to face with the reality of what took place at the trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Reading the accounts of Christ’s sufferings in the gospels reveals much, but mostly the physical side of his sufferings.
A few years ago someone shared with me how much more of Christ’s suffering is written in the Psalms. The thoughts of Christ, the description of what He went through mentally while “as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so He did not open His mouth” (Isa. 53:7). Yet Psalm 69:3 says: “I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for God.” “As the deer thirsts for water brooks, so my soul thirsts for thee” (Ps. 42:1).
Even while suffering long during his trials before the Sanhedrin, Herod, and Pilate, and being allowed no food or water, Christ’s thirst was more than physical: “My soul thirsts for the Living God, when shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my meat day and night, while they say unto Me all day long, Where is your God?” (Ps. 42:2, 3). “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” (v. 5). But “You have cast off and abhorred, You have been wroth with Thine anointed. You have made void,” have made it no good to Me, “the covenant of Your servant.” The idea being that God's promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was no good to Him in suffering the wrath of God. “You have profaned his crown by casting it to the ground” (Ps. 89:38, 39).
Christ felt the total rejection that God must give in judgment against sin. He asks in His soul: “How long O Lord? Will You hide Yourself forever? Shall Your wrath burn like fire?” His cry, “Father, Father, why have You forsaken Me?” was the total expression of His thoughts and feelings that were whirling in His mind. He was tempted in the face of utter abandonment to reject, to no longer have faith in His Father’s Love. Even when His “soul was cast down,” He knew in His soul, “Hope thou in God; for I shall yet praise Him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God” (Ps. 42:11). And with that He cried out, “‘It is finished!’ and bowed His head and died” (Jn. 19:30).
Take a closer look at these chapters that describe the sufferings of Christ for us.
Have you ever been opposed, misrepresented, misunderstood, and as a result, pained? Welcome to “David’s Club”! The Holy Spirit has provided for you David’s “Prayer Book” wherein you can find encouragement ready—made for every problem life brings to you. You know that you are unworthy to pray David’s prayers as though they were your own, for he was “the anointed of the Lord,” and you have this deep feeling that you are not. But God invites you to do exactly that—to identify with David in his prayers. And here’s the reason why it’s so: King David had a Son, a distant Descendant, who so immersed Himself deeply in David’s Psalms that He earned the title, “The Son of David.” And it is He who invites you to identify with David and pray his Psalms as though they were your own prayers, because that is what He did and they became His prayers. God has “predestinated [you] unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, . . . wherein He hath made [you] accepted in the beloved” (Eph. 1:5, 6). Jesus invites you to pray in His name, so that all the encouragement He Himself derived from the Book of Psalms He wants you to absorb also. You will find this difficult to grasp, that one so unworthy as you know yourself to be should be thus exalted, but you ever afterwards “walk softly” before the Lord and before your fellow humans. David suffered opposition, misrepresentation, even hatred from the people who prided themselves as being God’s people, David’s fellow-Israelites. You may suffer problems in your family (so did David, and so did Jesus), or at work, or even (could it be so?) in your church—the place where you expected peace and harmony. We were reading for family worship a few days ago a reading by a wise writer who reminded us that there is a “supreme court of the universe, from whose decision there [can] be no appeal” (Christ Triumphant, p. 176). David often appealed to that Supreme Court, and so can you. Then you can find rest unto your soul, confident in the decision of that “court.”
Some fifteen times the New Testament speaks of Jesus Christ as “the son of David.” This is spoken of in two senses: (a) Christ’s legal, linear, unbroken genetic descent from David, and (b) His personal spiritual experience that was identical to David’s as revealed in the Book of Psalms. The marks of identification are numerous: No one knows when David wrote Ps. 22, but it is obvious that in a proleptic sense David anticipated Christ’s experience on the cross: the piercing of His hands and His feet (16), the parting of His garments among the soldiers, the casting lots for His “vesture” (18), the ridicule of the bystanders (7), the taunts of the priests and rulers (8), Christ’s cry of dereliction (1, 2). All these details were literally reduplicated in Christ’s experience. David wrote intimate prophecy. Ps. 69 likewise comes from the heart of Christ: the hatred He endured (4), His rejection by His own family (8, 9), His loneliness (20), the bystanders offering Him vinegar when He cried “I thirst” (21), even the ruin of Judas Iscariot (24-18).
Now for the question: can we as believers in Christ “adopt” David’s experiences as ours, too? If Jesus did, why can’t we? When Christ became “Emmanuel, . . . God with us,” His humanity required Him to pray. He could not have lived without prayer. Neither can we! If Christ was “the son of David,” identifying with his experiences in the Psalms, then we too can identify with David “in Christ.” We are “crucified with Christ,” we “abide in Him” which means we live in Him. We identify with Christ; His experiences in battling with temptation become our experiences. As you read David’s Psalms, put yourself in his place, and then put yourself in Christ’s place. Let David’s prayers become your prayers, and then let Christ’s prayers become yours, too. Even if you have never known a moment of pain or sorrow, you can “grow up” “unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” by identifying with Him through the Psalms. Then when you at last meet Him face to face, you will not feel like a stranger in His presence.
The Book of Psalms is everybody’s favorite devotional reading. Those songs say things to God and about Him that we wish we could say but we don’t dare. They are openly honest, laying bare the very deepest emotions in our hearts. No matter how much veneer of “all-is-well” we cleverly put on our surface, inside we wrestle with the same problems that David had. “Why hast Thou forsaken me” we ask when we are going through our valley of shadows. We read of other people's miraculous answers to prayer, but “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but Thou hearest not; and in the night season . . .” (22:1, 2). “Our fathers . . . trusted in Thee, . . . and Thou didst deliver them, . . . and were not confounded. But I . . . “ and then David says what you and I don't dare say even though we sometimes feel that way, “But I am a worm, and no man, a reproach of men, and despised of the people” (4-6). (Teenagers need to read the Psalms; kids are the most prone to depression in society).
But the Psalm of Psalms that defies our understanding most is the one (the only one!) that ends in despair—Number 88. It says the most painful things about God of any. It’s the near-death and near-hell category of prayer. Not the death of some old person who might welcome silent rest, but it’s the death of a very sentient young person whose bitterness is the most poignant because it is the most deeply felt: “Lover and friend hast Thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness” (vs. 18). David has put into words of prayer thoughts that seethe beneath the surface in hearts: “Lord, You are to blame for my divorce! You turned so-and-so against me when he or she had told me, ‘I love you!’ and I believed it. There is no bitterness in life so painful to endure as ‘lover . . . hast Thou put far from me’”! The psychiatrists and counselors can work overtime to heal, but the wound still festers even years or decades later. “God did it, not I! It feels like even He hates me!”
Read that Psalm again (88): David is not bitter, and neither do you need to be. Don’t miss the huge comfort that is here: David is a type of Christ who drank a cup of lover-hatred more bitter than any of us can taste. Through David we learn to know Him—as He is.
Going to school is something most people want to get out of as soon as possible. Kids love summer vacation; school discipline is onerous; “commencement” is great—class work is finished. But does God have a “class” where school discipline continues? In Psalm 25 David seven times prays that he may be a student in the Lord’s “class”; “teach me Your paths,” he asks over and over. We probably don't know if he was old or young when he wrote this Psalm, but the inspired picture we get in the Bible is Good News—there is never a graduation out of the Lord’s school. You are always a student, a learner, and He never expels you from His “university,” but of course you are always free to “quit school” if you wish. There is always a temptation to “quit” because as our Teacher the Lord exercises discipline, which our carnal hearts don’t like. “Do not despise the chastening of the Lord, nor be discouraged when you are rebuked by Him; for whom the Lord loves He chastens” (Heb. 12:5, 6). It’s not that He is a severe Schoolmaster, but His tuition appears that way to us, for “no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but grievous; nevertheless afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (v. 11). In fact, if the discipline or chastening has ceased and you think you have clear sailing, one of two things has happened: either you are indeed ready for translation (way ahead of almost everybody else), or you are in real trouble, for “if you are without chastening, . . . then you are illegitimate and not sons” (vs. 8). The writer of Psalm 73 felt at times that the Lord’s discipline was too severe. “I have been . . . chastened every morning” (vs. 14), waking up each new day to renewed “grief” and “vexation” (vs. 21). It seemed that the Holy Spirit would never get through “convicting” him of sin (which is His “first grade” tuition, Jn. 16:8). Would he as a student in the “school of Christ” never get out of that “first grade”? Other “students” seemed to be spared that “discipline.” Life for them was all fun and games. “It was too painful for me—until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I understood their end” (Ps. 73:16, 17). Something special is happening right now in the “sanctuary”—the Day of Atonement. Yes! Better stay in school!
The book of Psalms is the prayerbook of the Bible. Here we are taught, not what we want to pray, but what God wants us to pray in the name of Jesus Christ, His beloved Son.
In the New Testament the doxologies of Mary—the “Magnificat”—and of Zechariah—the “Benedictus”—in Luke 1:46-55, 67-69 show that Israel’s hymns were applied to thank God for His present fulfillment of the messianic promises. The psalms also formed an essential part of worship in the apostolic church:
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 (Colossians 3:16).
The singing of sacred songs is “one of the most effective means of impressing the heart with spiritual truth. How often to the soul hard-pressed and ready to despair, memory recalls some word of God’s,—the long-forgotten burden of a childhood song,—and temptations lose their power, life takes on new meaning and new purpose, and courage and gladness are imparted to other souls! . . . As a part of religious service, singing is as much an act of worship as is prayer. Indeed, many a song is prayer.”[1]
In the last Bible book a glimpse is given of the celestial glory around the throne of God. Heavenly angels are singing songs of adoration and thanksgiving (Rev. 4-5). The keynote of heaven is the praise of God for what He is and has done for all of His creation.
Paul Penno
