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How the Book of Psalms Is Shaped and Meant to Be Read | James Hastings et al. · Reformed Thinking

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  Welcome to Reformed Thinking. I'm your host, and I'm glad to
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  be back at the table with our resident expert.
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  We're here to talk about the things that shape our faith, our
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  worldview, and our understanding of the Bible.
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  It is good to be back. And you know, as two Protestant
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  Christians who hold to the Westminster Confession of Faith,
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  we often say that the Word of God is our only rule of faith
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  and practice. We say it a lot.
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  But saying it is one thing. Actually sitting down, opening
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  the text and doing the hard work of understanding it is something
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  else entirely. It takes effort.
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  It really does. And today we're taking on a book
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  that I think everyone thinks they know.
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  It's when we open, when we're sad or when we're happy, or
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  maybe when we just need to find something quickly because it's
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  right in the middle of the Bible.
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  We're looking at the book of Psalms, the Psalter.
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  The hymnal of the ancient church.
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  The prayer book of God's people. Right, but here's the problem,
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  and it's really the reason I wanted to do this specific
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  analysis. We tend to snack on the songs.
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  That's a good way to put it. We take a verse here for a
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  coffee mug or a chapter there for a funeral.
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  We treat them as these isolated little pills of inspiration.
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  We rarely step back and look at the collection as a whole, as a
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  book with a specific history, a specific structure and a
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  coherent theology. We miss the forest for the
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  trees. Or, I don't know, maybe we miss
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  the cathedral for the individual stained glass windows.
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  That's a great image, Yeah. And to help us see that
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  cathedral, we are going to be walking through a very dense,
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  very detailed entry from A Dictionary of the Bible by James
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  Hastings. And look, this isn't a light
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  devotional. This is a piece of serious
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  scholarship that looks at the history, the editing, and the
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  structure of the Psalter. Our mission today is to move
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  beyond just reading the Psalms and start understanding the
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  Psalter. And Hastings is a fantastic
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  guide for this. He manages to handle all the
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  critical questions, the dating, the authorship, the editing,
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  without ever losing sight of the fact that this is the word of
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  God. He treats the text with a lot of
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  respect while still asking the hard questions.
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  So let's start with the very first thing we see the title in
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  our English Bibles. It just says the Book of Psalms,
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  but that's not what the ancient Israelites would have called it.
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  No, it's not. If you look at the Hebrew text,
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  the title is Cepher to Hillam and that translates quite
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  literally to Book of Praises. In the later Aramaic period,
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  they would have shortened it to just Tillam.
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  Praises. OK, I have to pause right there
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  because having read the book, a lot of it doesn't really feel
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  like praise in the modern sense of the word.
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  I mean, you have people crying out in agony.
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  You have complaints, you have people asking God where he is.
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  Psalm 88 of all Psalms ends with the line.
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  Darkness is my closest friend, so why on earth title a book
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  full of lament praises? Well, that's a theological
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  statement in itself, isn't it? The Hebrew title suggests that
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  the destination of all prayer is praise.
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  Even the lament, even the complaint, is moving toward God.
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  It acknowledges his sovereignty. I mean, if you're complaining to
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  God, you're still talking to God, and that's a form of
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  honoring Him. That's a great point.
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  But you know, strictly speaking, the singular word tahila praise
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  is actually only found in the title of 1 Psalm, Psalm 145, but
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  the editors clearly felt it characterized the spirit of the
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  whole collection. OK, so that's the Hebrew, that's
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  the original. So where do we get our word
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  psalms? We have the Greeks to thank for
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  that. When the Old Testament was
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  translated into Greek, what we all call the Septuagint, they
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  use the word Somoy. And does that mean the same
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  thing? Praises not.
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  Quite. It has a different flavor to it.
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  Dehalam focuses on the content, the praise.
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  Somoy focuses on the method. The root word actually implies
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  the twitching or twanging of strings.
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  Oh, interesting. So essentially means songs sung
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  to stringed accompaniment. So the Hebrew title tells us
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  it's about the heart, what's happening inside.
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  And the Greek title tells us it's about the orchestra.
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  You could absolutely say that. In fact, the Codex Alexandranis,
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  which is one of our major ancient manuscripts, actually
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  titles it sultarian, which is the name of the instrument
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  itself. That's where we get our English
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  word psalter. It's like calling a hymn book
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  the organ or the guitar. It just reminds us again and
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  again that this was a liturgical book.
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  It was meant to be performed, heard and sung, not just read
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  silently in a corner. OK, so let's talk about the
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  scope of the book. In our Protestant Bibles, the
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  ESV, the King James, the NASB, we have 150 Psalms.
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  That feels like a settled fact, but Hastings points out that if
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  you pick up, say, a Catholic Bible or look at the Latin
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  Vulgate, the numbers get a little slippery.
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  It's a really common source of confusion for theology students.
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  If you're reading someone like Saint Augustine or Jerome and
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  they reference Psalm 22, they might actually be talking about
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  what we call Psalm 23. The total count is always 150,
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  but how they get there that differs.
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  So walk us through that math. How did the numbers shift?
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  It all comes down to how you divide the poems.
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  The Greek Septuagint takes Psalm 9 and Psalm 10 and fuses them
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  into a single poem. Is there a reason for that, or
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  was this scribe just, you know, trying to save paper?
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  No, no, there's a good literary reason.
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  In Hebrew poetry, we sometimes see these things called
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  acrostics, where each stanza starts with a consecutive letter
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  of the alphabet. Well, Psalms 9 and 10 together
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  form a rough kind of broken acrostic pattern.
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  This suggests there were originally one composition that
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  later got split in the Hebrew tradition, but was kept together
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  in the Greek. OK, so if the Greeks combine 9
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  and 10, now they're one short. They're at 1:49.
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  Correct. Then they also combine Psalm
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  1:14 and 1:15, so now they're too short.
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  So they had to make it up somewhere to hit that 115
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  number. Exactly.
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  So they took the scissors to two other psalms, they split Psalm
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  116 into two separate readings, and they did the same thing with
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  Psalm 147, splitting it into two parts.
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  So the content is the same. We all have the same verses, but
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  the chapter markers are just in different places.
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  Speaking of extra material, Hastings brings up something
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  that I have to admit I have never seen this in my Bible.
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  It's called Psalm 151. You won't find it in the Hebrew
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  Masoretic Text, which is the basis for our Old Testament, but
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  it is in the Septuagint, and it has a very specific, a very bold
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  title. It says this Psalm is a genuine
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  one of David, though supernumerary, composed when he
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  fought in single combat with Goliath.
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  That is quite a claim, genuine though supernumerary.
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  It sounds like a bonus track on an album.
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  I have the text here in the notes it reads.
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  I was small among my brethren, and youngest in my father's
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  house. I tended my father's sheep.
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  My hands made a harp, my fingers fashioned a sultry.
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  It's very autobiographical. It's clearly trying to fill in
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  the narrative gaps of First Samuel 16 and 17.
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  It's telling the story from David's perspective.
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  It goes on. I went forth to meet the
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  Philistines and he cursed me by his idols, but I drew his own
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  sword and beheaded him. It's very dramatic.
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  So why isn't this in our Canon? Well, the verdict of the source
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  material and of the church historically is that it lacks
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  the mark of inspiration, Hastings says.
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  It lacks pretensions to genuineness.
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  It's essentially what we would call it, pastiche.
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  The writer took phrases from Psalm 89, Psalm 78 and the
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  narrative of First Samuel and sort of cobbled them together.
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  Fan fiction. It is essentially yes.
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  It reads like someone trying to sound like David.
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  It's interesting for historical comparison for sure, but when
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  you read Psalm 151 alongside say Psalm 23 or Psalm 51, the
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  difference in spiritual weight and quality is it's just
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  obvious. 1 is a man mimicking a style, The other is the Spirit
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  of God speaking through a man. That's a very clear distinction.
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  OK, so let's move from the fringes to the structure of the
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  book that we do have. You mentioned earlier that we
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  shouldn't view the songs as just a random playlist.
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  There's an architecture here, and I think most people assume
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  they're arranged chronologically, like David
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  wrote the first ones when he was young and the later ones when he
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  was old. But that is not it at all.
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  No, the arrangement is not chronological.
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  It's thematic and liturgical. The Psalter is actually five
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  books in one. Five books.
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  Yes, this was recognized by the Jewish rabbis at least as far
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  back as the 2nd century. The Midrash says Moses gave the
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  five Books of the Law to Israel, and David gave the five books of
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  the Psalms to Israel. So it's a deliberate mirror of
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  the Pentateuch, the Torah. The law comes down from God and
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  the Psalms go up for the people. Precisely.
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  It's a responsive structure. God speaks, we respond.
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  So how do we know where the brakes are?
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  I mean, I don't see book 2 written in big letters in the
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  original Hebrew. Scroll No, but you look for the
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  doxologies. These are the editors marks at
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  the end of Psalm 41 and then again at the end of Psalm 72,
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  Psalm 89 and Psalm one O 6. The poem stops and you get this
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  little formula. It's usually something like
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  blessed be the Lord God of Israel, from everlasting to
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  everlasting. Amen.
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  And then men. And those aren't part of the
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  original individual Psalm. It's very unlikely they were the
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  seam, the stitch that bound one collection to the next and then
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  Psalm 150. The entire Psalm serves as the
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  grand doxology for the 5th book and the finale for the whole
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  collection. This implies a lot of editorial
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  work. This wasn't just David handing a
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  single manuscript to the choirmaster.
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  This suggests the book grew overtime.
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  It grew over centuries, and Hastings provides some
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  fascinating detective work on this.
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  He points to duplicates as proof that these were originally
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  separate hymn books that got merged together overtime.
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  Duplicates like you mean Psalm 14 and Psalm 53?
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  Right. If you read them side by side,
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  they're almost identical. Now think about it.
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  If I were an editor compiling a book from scratch, I wouldn't
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  include the same poem twice. I'd pick the best version and
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  just delete the other one. So why are they both there?
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  What's the thinking? The thinking is that Psalm 14
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  was in. Let's call it Hymn Book A.
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  What we now know is book 1, and Psalm 53 was in Hymn Book B,
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  which is our book 2. When the final compiler came
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  along and merged the collections, he respected the
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  integrity of the existing scrolls too much to cut them
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  out. He kept them both in.
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  But there is a difference between them, a really
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  significant one, and Hastings highlights this as a major
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  critical finding. It has to do with the name of
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  God being used. This is the Elohistic
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  controversy, as scholars call it in Book 1.
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  So that's Psalms one through 41. The divine name used is almost
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  exclusively Jehovah, or more accurately Yahweh.
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  It appears 272 times. The word Elohim, which is the
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  more generic word for God, appears only 15 times.
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  OK, so book 1 is a Yahweh collection.
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  It's very personal, very covenantal.
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  But then you look at book 2, it flips completely.
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  Elohim is used 164 times and Yahweh only 30 times.
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  Wow. That cannot be an accident.
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  That's a pattern. It is not an accident.
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  Scholars believe there was an Elohistic editor, a redactor,
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  who for some liturgical or theological reason, went through
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  the collection that became Book 2 and systematically swapped out
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  the personal name Yahweh for the title Elohim.
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  Do we have specific proof for that?
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  I mean the a smoking gun. Psalm 43 verse 4 is about the
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  clearest example you could ask for.
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  In our English Bibles it reads God my God.
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  In Hebrew it's Elohim, Elohim. It's a bit repetitive and
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  awkward. It does sound a little clunky.
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  It is because the standard covenant phrase, what you see
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  everywhere else is Yahweh, Elohay, Lord my God.
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  It's almost certain the original text said Yahweh and the editor
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  changed it, creating that little stutter in the text.
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  That's just fascinating. It shows us that the text we
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  have has a history of use in the community.
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  It wasn't static. It was being adapted for
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  worship. OK, there's one more piece of
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  evidence for this gradual compilation that I found really
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  striking. It's at the very end of Psalm
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  72, verse 20 reads. The prayers of David, the son of
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  Jesse are ended. Right, it's a very final
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  sounding statement. It is, but then I turn the page
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  to Psalm 86 or Psalm One O 1 or Psalm 110 and they were all
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  titled a Psalm of David if his prayers ended at 72.
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  What are these? That subscription at the end of
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  Psalm 72 is like an archaeological layer.
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  It proves that one point in history, Psalm 72, was the back
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  cover. That was the end of the Davidic
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  collection. The later Psalms, those in Books
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  3-4 and five, were added in subsequent centuries.
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  The final editors kept that note in Psalm 72 as a historical
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  marker, even though they added more Davidic material later on.
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  It's messy, but it's a messiness that, in a way, confirms its
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  authenticity. It wasn't sanitized or
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  streamlined. This leads us directly into what
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  can be a hornet's nest of biblical criticism.
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  Authorship. We call them the Psalms of
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  David. The New Testament quotes David,
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  but the critics in Hastings gives them fair time.
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  Here often question if David wrote any of them it.
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  All hinges on a tiny Hebrew preposition LA.
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  The titles often say La David. Now LA is tricky.
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  It can mean by David, which implies authorship, but it can
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  also mean belonging to David, or dedicated to David, or even in
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  the style of David. The source material used the
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  analogy of a Hymns of Wesley book.
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  That's a perfect analogy. If you buy a book titled Hymns
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  of Wesley, you know the Wesley started the tradition.
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  You expect their songs to be in there, but you also might find
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  songs by their followers or songs written in their
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  theological tradition, even if Charles Wesley didn't hold the
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  pen for every. Single one.
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  So when we see La David, it might refer to a Davidic
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  collection rather than direct authorship for every single
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  Psalm. So what are the arguments
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  against David writing all of them?
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  Why doubt it? Well, there are three main lines
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  of argument. First, there's language.
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  Some songs use what we call Aramaisms, words or grammatical
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  structures that are heavily influenced by Aramaic.
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  Which is a later language. Yes, this suggests a later date,
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  maybe post exilic or at least a northern dialect that a Judean
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  king like David wouldn't have used.
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  OK, what's the second argument? Anachronism.
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  This is the one that troubles people the most.
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  David lived during the time of the Tabernacle, the tent.
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  The temple was built by his son Solomon after David had died.
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  Yet in psalms ascribed to David, like Psalm 5 and Psalm 27, we
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  see the word he call. Which translates to temple or
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  palace. Right.
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  So, critics argue, how could David talk about going to the
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  temple if the temple wasn't even built yet?
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  That's a fair question from a reformed perspective.
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  How do we answer that? How do we handle that?
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  Well, there are a couple of ways Hickel can refer to the Heavenly
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  Temple, the Divine Palace, or it could be a respectful term for
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  the Tabernacle structure at Shiloh, which was a bit more
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  permanent than just a tent. But Hastings also suggests we
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  shouldn't feel threatened by the idea that later editors might
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  have updated the language, or that the title The David was
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  applied to the tradition that David founded.
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  So we don't have to die on the hill that David personally held
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  the pen for every single Psalm that has his name on it.
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  We do not, however, and this is the balance we have to strike.
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  We shouldn't swing to the other extreme and say he wrote none of
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  them, which is what some very liberal critics would do.
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  Right, the historical books 1 and 2.
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  So Samuel are clear. He is the sweet psalmist of
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  Israel. He's a musician and a poet.
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  And we have Psalm 18. This is the anchor.
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  Psalm 18 appears in the Psalter, but it also appears almost word
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  for word in Second Samuel chapter 22.
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  The internal evidence, the warrior imagery, the roughness,
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  the freshness. It fits the 10th century BC, the
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  early monarchy perfectly. So if David wrote Psalm 18,
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  which is historically attested. Then we have a standard, we have
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  a baseline. We can look at other Psalms and
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  say, does this sound like the guy who wrote Psalm 18?
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  Hastings argues that a core group he suggests Psalms
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  81519232429 are almost certainly genuinely Davidic.
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  He is The Fountainhead. He's The Fountainhead, even if
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  other streams flowed into the river later on.
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  What about the other names we see?
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  Sons of Korra? Asaph, who are these guys?
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  These are almost certainly guilds.
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  The Sons of Korra were a choir, a Levitical group.
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  Asaf was likely the head of a musical family or tradition.
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  So these titles are probably identifying the repertoire of
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  specific temple choirs. It's like having a hymnal with
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  sections labeled Music by the Gaithers or songs from Hillsong.
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  That makes a lot of sense. So let's talk about the
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  timeline. Then we have David at the start,
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  around 1000 BC. When does the book finally
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  close? When is the final Amen put on
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  the collection? The exile in Babylon 586 BC is
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  the major turning point. The tone shifts dramatically.
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  We get psalms like Psalm 137 by the waters of Babylon.
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  We sat down and wept. Obviously David didn't write
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  that. Obviously, he was long gone.
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  But there's a debate about how late it goes.
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  This is what Stollars call the Maccabee in question.
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  The Maccabees were much, much later.
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  We're talking 2nd century BC fighting the Greeks.
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  Yeah, that's 400 years after the return from exile.
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  Correct. So could the Psalter have been
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  open that long? Could new material have been
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  added? Critics point to Psalms 4474 and
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  79. These Psalms describe a very
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  specific kind of persecution. They talk about synagogues or
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  meeting places being burned throughout the land.
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  They talk about people being killed specifically for keeping
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  the law. And that sounds different from
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  the Babylonian conquest. It's very different.
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  The Babylonians just wanted to crush the city politically.
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  The Greeks under Antiochus Epiphanes tried to crush the
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  religion. They were actively martyring
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  Jews for their faith. Hastings concludes that these
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  specific psalms fit the Meccabean crisis better than any
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  other period in Israel. Israel's history.
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  So the book was possibly still accepting entries as late as 100
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  BC. It's very possible, which makes
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  it a book that spans almost a Millennium of Israel's history.
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  An incredible scope. Incredible.
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  Yeah. Now I want to shift gears a
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  little bit to the fine print. I think this is the part of the
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  analysis that will be most immediately helpful to our
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  listeners when they open their Bibles tomorrow.
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  The subtitles. The rubric, yes.
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  Yes, we see these strange words, Ijalith, Hashahar, negnath.
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  You know, usually we just skip them to get to the English text,
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  but Hastings decodes them for us.
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  These are basically instructions for the music director.
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  They are the liner notes of the ancient world.
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  They tell the musicians what to do, what tune to use, which
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  instruments to play. OK, so give us some examples.
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  What about the tunes? All right, take Eyjalith
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  Heshahar, which you find in the title of Psalm 22.
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  That translates to the hind of the dawn or the Doe of the
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  morning. That sounds very poetic.
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  What does it mean? It was likely the name of a
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  popular folk song or a secular tune of the day.
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  The editors sang. Sing this heavy, agonizing Psalm
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  to the melody of the Doe of the morning.
• 18:13
  Wow, that contextualizes it so much.
• 18:16
  It's like a modern hymnal saying sung to the tune of
• 18:19
  Greensleeves. You're taking a familiar melody
• 18:22
  and putting new sacred words to it.
• 18:24
  Precisely. Another one is Altashif that
• 18:27
  means Destroy not Hastings connects this to Isaiah 65.8,
• 18:33
  which references a vintage song sung during the grape harvest.
• 18:36
  Destroy it not for a blessing is in it.
• 18:39
  So you have these psalms of Deliverance set to the rhythm of
• 18:42
  treading grapes. It just grounds the theology and
• 18:44
  the dirt and sweat of daily life.
• 18:46
  This isn't just church music for a solemn hour.
• 18:49
  What about the instruments? The terms are pretty
• 18:51
  straightforward there. Najanov means stringed
• 18:54
  instruments. Nahailov means wind instruments,
• 18:57
  most likely flutes. And then there are even words
• 19:00
  for the pitch. Yes, Alamoth translates to
• 19:02
  maidens. In a musical context, this
• 19:05
  almost certainly refers to the soprano range high voices.
• 19:07
  Contrasted with Sheminith. Right, sheminith means the 8th
• 19:11
  in music. That's the octave.
• 19:12
  It likely refers to the lower octave or the bass range.
• 19:15
  So you have specific instructions for the treble
• 19:17
  section and the bass section of the choir.
• 19:19
  And then the most famous one of all, Sayla.
• 19:22
  The mystery word. It appears 71 times in the
• 19:25
  songs. I've heard pastors say it means
• 19:26
  pause and think about that. That's the devotional
• 19:29
  application, and it's a good one, but technically it's almost
• 19:32
  certainly a musical cue. Hastings connects it to another
• 19:35
  word, he gayon, which implies a low murmuring sound, like from a
• 19:39
  harp. The best theory is that Sela
• 19:41
  marks an instrumental interlude. So like a guitar solo?
• 19:45
  Or a moment where the cymbals crash and the strings swell
• 19:48
  while the voices stop. It's a pause in the singing to
• 19:51
  let the music carry the emotional weight of what was
• 19:53
  just said. It's a musical exclamation
• 19:55
  point. One last technical term before
• 19:57
  we move on. Songs of a Sense.
• 20:00
  That's the collection from Psalm 120 through 134.
• 20:03
  Shirhamalaf, there is some fancy theories about this referring to
• 20:07
  the 15 steps of the temple, but the most probable and I think
• 20:10
  most beautiful view is that these are Pilgrim songs.
• 20:12
  Explain that. OK, so 3 * a year faithful Jews
• 20:16
  had to travel to Jerusalem for the festivals.
• 20:19
  Jerusalem is up on a mountain range.
• 20:20
  No matter where you come from in Israel, you have to go up to
• 20:22
  Zion. These short, repetitive, easily
• 20:25
  memorized songs were likely sung by the caravans of families as
• 20:28
  they hiked up the Judean Hills. I love that image.
• 20:32
  Psalm 121. I will lift up mine eyes unto
• 20:35
  the hills takes on a very literal meaning.
• 20:37
  There they were, looking at the hills they still had to climb.
• 20:39
  And the dangers, the robbers that might be hidden in them.
• 20:42
  It makes the text 3 dimensional. It's not just a poem, it's a
• 20:45
  soundtrack for a pilgrimage. Let's pivot from the music to
• 20:49
  the poetry itself. When we read English poetry,
• 20:52
  we're trained to look for rhyme. Roses are red, Violets are blue.
• 20:57
  Hebrew poetry doesn't do that. No, if you're looking for rhyme
• 21:01
  in Hebrew, you're going to be disappointed.
• 21:03
  Hebrew poetry isn't built on a rhythm of sound, it's built on
• 21:07
  parallelism. Define that for.
• 21:08
  It's a rhythm of thought. It's like stereo sound for the
• 21:11
  mind. You state an idea in the first
• 21:13
  line, and then the second line does one of three things.
• 21:16
  It echoes it, it contrasts it, or it expands upon it.
• 21:20
  Can you give us a concrete example?
• 21:21
  Sure. Look at Psalm 19.
• 21:23
  The heavens declare the glory of God.
• 21:25
  That's the statement. Next line is and the firmament
• 21:29
  showeth his handiwork. So it's saying the same thing
• 21:31
  but with different vocabulary. Heavens is parallel to Firmament
• 21:35
  Tech Declare is parallel to Showeth.
• 21:38
  Exactly. That's synonymous parallelism.
• 21:40
  It reinforces the truth by hitting it twice from slightly
• 21:43
  different angles. Then you have antithetic
• 21:45
  parallelism where the second line gives you the opposite.
• 21:48
  Think of Psalm one. The Lord know the way of the
• 21:51
  righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish.
• 21:54
  Light and dark, life and death. Correct, and the structure is
• 21:58
  actually why the Psalms translate so well.
• 22:01
  Rhyme is notoriously hard to translate, you almost always
• 22:04
  lose it in other languages. But parallelism, This thought
• 22:07
  rhyme works in English, Greek, Latin or Chinese.
• 22:11
  It's universally accessible. Then there are the acrostics.
• 22:14
  You mentioned this earlier with Psalm 9, but Psalm 119 is the
• 22:17
  big. 10 It's the giant 176 verses.
• 22:19
  It's divided into 22 stanzas, one for each letter of the
• 22:22
  Hebrew alphabet, and every single line in the LF stanza
• 22:25
  starts with the letter LF, every line in the Beth stanza starts
• 22:28
  with Beth, and so on. Is that just a gimmick?
• 22:30
  I mean, it feels a little artificial.
• 22:31
  Bit of a straitjacket for the poet.
• 22:33
  It is a constraint, yes, but Hastings argues it serves 2 main
• 22:37
  purposes. One, it's a mnemonic device.
• 22:40
  It aids memory. If you know the alphabet, you
• 22:42
  have a cue for the next line. 2, it suggests completeness.
• 22:46
  It's the poet's way of saying we are praising God from A-Z.
• 22:50
  We are covering the whole subject of God's law.
• 22:52
  Before we leave the poetry, I want to touch on the nature
• 22:54
  imagery. It's everywhere.
• 22:56
  Thunder, Cedars of Lebanon. Heinz Lions.
• 22:59
  It is, but the expert and our source notes something
• 23:02
  absolutely vital here. Nature is never the subject in
• 23:05
  itself. You don't find an ode to a
• 23:07
  Grecian urn or to a skylark in the Psalter.
• 23:11
  Nature is always the frame for the picture, and the picture is
• 23:14
  always God and the soul. The Thunder is the voice of
• 23:16
  Jehovah. The mighty cedar is the planting
• 23:18
  of the Lord. The sun is just a servant of the
• 23:20
  Most High. The Hebrew poet looks at the
• 23:22
  world and sees only the reflection of its Creator.
• 23:25
  That's a beautiful transition into the theology of the book,
• 23:28
  and Hastings makes a really bold claim here.
• 23:30
  He says the Psalm solve a major philosophical problem regarding
• 23:33
  the nature of God. Yes, the problem of preserving
• 23:35
  God's Infinity while simultaneously maintaining his
• 23:38
  personality. We call that the tension between
• 23:40
  transcendent and imminence. Right.
• 23:42
  If you emphasize that God is the creator of the ends of the
• 23:45
  earth, that he is Spirit, that he is wholly, he can become an
• 23:49
  abstraction, a cold distant force, the unmoved mover of the
• 23:53
  philosophers. But if you overemphasize that he
• 23:56
  talks to us and cares for us, he can become too small.
• 24:00
  Like the Greek gods on Mount Olympus who were just super
• 24:03
  powered petty humans. And that psalms hold that
• 24:05
  tension in the middle. Perfectly, He is the high and
• 24:08
  holy One who inhabits eternity, yet he has eyes and hands and
• 24:12
  ears. The psalmist isn't afraid of
• 24:14
  anthropomorphism, Speaking of God in human terms.
• 24:17
  He knows not his spirit, but he speaks of God's right hand to
• 24:20
  convey his power and his personal involvement in our
• 24:23
  lives. There's a verse in Psalm 18 that
• 24:25
  Hastings highlights as a massive theological insight.
• 24:28
  It's verse 35. Thy gentleness have made me
• 24:31
  great. That is one of the most stunning
• 24:32
  sentences in the entire Old Testament.
• 24:34
  The Hebrew word there is anawa, which can imply humility or
• 24:38
  lowliness. God's humility that sounds
• 24:40
  almost heretical. That's the paradox, isn't it?
• 24:42
  The idea that the infinite God would stoop down, would
• 24:45
  condescend, interact with a finite, sinful man.
• 24:48
  That is the humility of God. It's a profound thought that
• 24:51
  anticipates the incarnation. It tells us that true greatness
• 24:55
  comes not from our striving up, but from God's willingness to
• 24:58
  descend to us. That connects directly to the
• 25:00
  view of man that we find in the Psalms.
• 25:01
  You have Psalm 8. What is man?
• 25:04
  That thou art mindful of him. It's the double vision of
• 25:06
  humanity. On one hand we are dust.
• 25:09
  We are grass that Withers. Total depravity is all over the
• 25:12
  Psalms. And yet Thou has crowned him
• 25:15
  with glory and honor. We are the image bearers.
• 25:18
  The Psalms never let us get arrogant, but they also never
• 25:20
  let us hate ourselves. We are dust, but we are dust,
• 25:23
  loved and crowned by God. Now this brings us to a
• 25:26
  difficult subject. We're two reformed guys.
• 25:29
  We believe in total depravity. So how do we handle the songs
• 25:32
  with the writer claims to be righteous.
• 25:34
  David says things like judge me, O Lord, according to my
• 25:37
  integrity, or I've kept the ways of the Lord.
• 25:40
  Is he being arrogant? Is he forgetting his own sin?
• 25:43
  It can really sound that way to our ears, can't it?
• 25:45
  But Hastings clarifies this really well.
• 25:47
  This is not a claim of absolute perfection.
• 25:50
  This is a claim of relative integrity.
• 25:54
  The keyword that's often used is Hasid, the godly one, or better,
• 25:58
  the covenant keeper. So it's about loyalty.
• 26:00
  It's a statement of allegiance. Yes.
• 26:02
  Think of a soldier on the battlefield.
• 26:04
  A soldier can say to his commander, I have been a loyal
• 26:07
  soldier. That doesn't mean he always
• 26:09
  polished his boots perfectly or never made a mistake in a drill.
• 26:12
  It means he never committed treason.
• 26:15
  He never went over to the enemy side.
• 26:17
  So when David says I am righteous, what he means is I
• 26:20
  haven't worshipped Baal. I haven't abandoned the
• 26:22
  covenant. Exactly.
• 26:24
  In the Great War between Yahweh and the idols, I have stuck with
• 26:27
  Yahweh. It's a claim of allegiance to
• 26:29
  the covenant, not a claim of sinless perfection.
• 26:32
  That helps immensely, but now we have to deal with the darker
• 26:35
  side of that allegiance, the imprecatory Psalms, the cursing
• 26:39
  psalms. Psalm 137.
• 26:40
  Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones
• 26:44
  against the stones. That is in the Bible.
• 26:47
  It's inspired scripture. How do we handle that?
• 26:49
  It's the great stumbling block for many modern readers, and we
• 26:52
  can't just pretend it's not air. Hastings analyzes this through
• 26:55
  the lens of what he calls particularism.
• 26:58
  Because the psalmist is so aligned with God's covenant, he
• 27:01
  sees his personal enemies as God's enemies.
• 27:04
  So it's not just I hate this guy because he stole my sheep.
• 27:07
  No, it's I hate this man because he is attacking God's people,
• 27:12
  mocking God's name, and destroying God's Kingdom.
• 27:16
  But Hastings also admits, and we have to be honest about this,
• 27:20
  that the Old Covenant operated on a different moral plane
• 27:23
  regarding enemies than the New Testament.
• 27:25
  Jesus said love your enemies and pray for those who persecute
• 27:28
  you. That's a direct command.
• 27:30
  Correct. We cannot gloss over that
• 27:32
  difference. The psalmist lived in a world
• 27:34
  where justice had to be seen. Now on earth, they didn't have a
• 27:37
  clear, fully developed view of the final judgement.
• 27:40
  So if the wicked prospered, it looked like God was failing.
• 27:43
  They prayed for immediate physical destruction to
• 27:46
  vindicate God's name and his justice.
• 27:48
  So the question for us then is as Christians, can we pray these
• 27:51
  songs? We.
• 27:52
  Cannot pray them against our personal enemies.
• 27:55
  We cannot pray for our neighbor who annoys us to have his
• 27:58
  children dashed against stones. That would be sinful, a
• 28:00
  violation of Christ's command. But there's a but there.
• 28:04
  But we can pray them against the spiritual forces of evil.
• 28:07
  We can pray with that same righteous ferocity against sex
• 28:10
  trafficking, against tyranny, against abortion, against the
• 28:13
  powers of darkness that destroy human lives.
• 28:16
  We transfer the target from flesh and blood to
• 28:19
  principalities and powers. That is a vital distinction.
• 28:23
  We keep the Zeal, but we retarget the weapon based on new
• 28:26
  revelation. Well said.
• 28:28
  That's the key. Let's look at the end of the
• 28:30
  story then. You mentioned they didn't have a
• 28:32
  clearview of final judgement. What did they believe about the
• 28:36
  afterlife? This is something that often
• 28:38
  surprises people. The Psalms generally lack a
• 28:41
  clear doctrine of heaven as we know it.
• 28:43
  There's no picture of pearly gates or streets of gold.
• 28:45
  We talk about Sheel. What was that?
• 28:47
  Sheel the pit, the grave. It wasn't hell in the sense of
• 28:52
  conscious, fiery torment, but it was a gloomy, shadowy,
• 28:56
  disembodied existence. In death there is no remembrance
• 29:00
  of thee, Psalm 6 says in Sheol, Who will give thee thanks?
• 29:03
  They feel that death meant the end of praise, the end of
• 29:07
  communion with God. But there are flashes of light.
• 29:09
  It's not all gloom. No.
• 29:11
  And when they come, they are brilliant flashes.
• 29:13
  In moments of high spiritual communion, the psalmist breaks
• 29:16
  through the gloom. Psalm 73 is the prime example.
• 29:19
  The writer is despairing at the prosperity of the wicked, and
• 29:22
  then he goes into the sanctuary, gets God's perspective, and he
• 29:25
  concludes, Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward
• 29:29
  receive me to glory. Receive me to glory.
• 29:31
  That sounds like real hope. It's an inference of faith.
• 29:33
  They didn't have the theology of the resurrection spelled out for
• 29:36
  them yet, but they knew God, and they intuited that a
• 29:38
  relationship with the eternal God was too strong, too real to
• 29:41
  be snapped by physical death. They were betting on God's
• 29:44
  character to overcome the grave. That will not leave my soul in
• 29:48
  Sheol, Psalm 16. Which brings us, inevitably, to
• 29:51
  the Messiah, the ultimate hope. And we as Christians see Christ
• 29:55
  everywhere in the Psalms. Psalm 22 is a shocking
• 29:58
  description of the crucifixion. Psalm 110 describes he's eternal
• 30:02
  priesthood. But the critical scholars often
• 30:04
  say, wait a minute, David was just writing about himself or
• 30:08
  Solomon. And historically, on the first
• 30:11
  level, they're often right. Psalm 45 is clearly a wedding
• 30:14
  song for an earthly king. Psalm 72 is a prayer for the
• 30:17
  King's son, probably Solomon. So are we wrong to see Jesus
• 30:21
  there? Are we just reading him back
• 30:22
  into the text? Not at all.
• 30:24
  This is where the concept of typology, or what some called
• 30:27
  the double sense, is so crucial. Think of it as an organic unity.
• 30:30
  The seed and the plant. Exactly.
• 30:32
  The prophecy is a seed. When the psalmist described the
• 30:35
  ideal king, the one who would rule from sea to sea, who would
• 30:39
  save the poor, who would live forever, Solomon didn't fit that
• 30:42
  suit. Hezekiah didn't fit that suit.
• 30:44
  They all failed. They were all flawed.
• 30:45
  The language was too big for the man.
• 30:47
  The description outgrew the subject.
• 30:50
  The words pressed forward, as the source puts it, the Holy
• 30:53
  Spirit inspired language that outstripped the reality of the
• 30:56
  earthly king. It created a vacuum, a king
• 30:59
  shaped hole in the text that only one person in history could
• 31:03
  fill. So when Psalm 2 talks about the
• 31:05
  sun, it was a seed planted in the coronation of a Davidic king
• 31:09
  that only blossomed into his full meaning in the resurrection
• 31:12
  of Christ. And Acts 13 confirms that
• 31:14
  explicitly. The Psalter is the hymn book of
• 31:16
  the Messiah because he is the only one who can sing it
• 31:19
  perfectly. He's the only one who can say I
• 31:22
  have kept the ways of the Lord and be fully, absolutely telling
• 31:25
  the truth. And he is the only one who truly
• 31:28
  experienced the forsakenness of Psalm 22 on our behalf.
• 31:32
  He is the singer and the song. He fulfills it all.
• 31:35
  This has been a true analysis. We've covered the name, the
• 31:38
  numbers, the structure, the history, the music and the
• 31:40
  theology. It really does change the way
• 31:43
  you hold the book in your hands. It's not just a collection of
• 31:45
  random verses anymore. It is a cathedral.
• 31:48
  It was built over 1000 years by the Community of Faith under the
• 31:51
  Providence of God. I want to leave our listeners
• 31:54
  with a thought that really struck me as I was reading
• 31:56
  through the source material. For this.
• 31:58
  We often pity the Old Testament Saints.
• 32:00
  We think, oh, they didn't know about Jesus.
• 32:02
  Clearly they didn't have the New Testament.
• 32:04
  They were in the shadows. And yet.
• 32:06
  And yet, when you read these Psalms, you see a tenacity of
• 32:09
  faith, a raw honesty, and a joy in God that often puts us to
• 32:14
  shame. We have the full revelation, the
• 32:16
  completed story, yet we often have half the passion.
• 32:20
  It is a convicting thought. They held onto God's hand in the
• 32:23
  dark tighter than we often do in the full light of day.
• 32:26
  Why is that? Maybe it's because they knew
• 32:29
  that God himself was their portion and that had to be
• 32:31
  enough for them. That's a good question to
• 32:33
  meditate on. Do we rely on our knowledge
• 32:36
  about God, or do we rely on the God of the knowledge?
• 32:39
  We want to thank you for joining us on this exploration of the
• 32:41
  Psalter. We hope it helps you read with
• 32:43
  new eyes it. Was a pleasure.
• 32:45
  Our call to action for you is simple.
• 32:47
  Read a song today, but don't just read it for a warm fuzzy
• 32:50
  feeling. Look for the structure.
• 32:52
  Spot the parallelism. Notice the title.
• 32:55
  Try to see the history behind the prayer.
• 32:57
  It will change the way you pray. Until next time, keep thinking
• 33:00
  and keep reading. Goodbye.