Somebody Else’s Mail (1)

Reading somebody else’s mail can be a profitable exercise. We can learn much about the Lord and his ways from truths he has not directly shared with us, just as I can learn a great deal about my natural father’s character by reading his letters to my brother or sister. We can take very personal lessons from things that happened to people from wildly different cultural backgrounds in distant times and places. After all, God is the same God. He never changes his character.

That is not true of his tactics and strategies. Those may vary quite a bit.

Tactics and Strategies

The great Flood came once, then never again. It accomplished its purpose and did exactly what the Lord intended, but he has assured us he has no need to go back to that well another time. The rainbow is his reminder. Exile is another strategy God used over the centuries in dealing with sinful people. Israel went first, then Judah, then the whole nation once again. Yet the Lord has never seen fit to disperse failed Christians throughout the nations, possibly because we are already exiles of a sort. Believers of the Church Age who have gone out to the nations went voluntarily and, for the most part, under the Lord’s direction and for his glory.

The biggest strategic change across history is probably the distinction between Law and Grace. These are two very different ways of motivating sinners and transforming lives. I would argue the latter is considerably more effective than the former. That’s not because God discovered a better way once his rules failed to produce the results he was looking for. Rather, it’s because human beings love laws. We impose them on ourselves endlessly in hope of improving both men and society. God gave man exactly what we wanted and expected for centuries not because law was the best way to save souls, but because we needed to understand that’s not what law-keeping does. Ever. Not even when you have the best laws that could possibly be written.

Different Sets of Rules, One God

I had one of those moments this morning in reading my Bible that happen from time to time. My Old Testament reading and my NT reading dovetailed together beautifully. Psalm 147 reminded me of Israel’s unique privileges with respect to the counsel of God:

“He declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and rules to Israel. He has not dealt thus with any other nation; they do not know his rules.”

Meanwhile, over in the book of Acts, Peter was heralding the end of that order to the household and friends of the Gentile Cornelius:

“Peter opened his mouth and said: ‘Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him … everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.’ ”

For centuries, the Lord dealt with humanity under one set of rules. Suddenly, in the mid-first century, we observe a divine change of tactics that continues to benefit Gentile believers all over the world to this day. God has not changed his character one iota, but the time had finally come to deal with humanity differently, and he did so.

We see this sort of thing all through history. If we fail to observe it, we are going to find our Bibles very confusing.

Hebrew and Corporate

The Psalms are from a different era. They are fundamentally Hebrew in character. They reflect the mindset and worldview of a time in human history when God conferred privilege and responsibility on a single nation, giving them his testimony. The Psalms speak to a people under the law of God. Grace and faith are there, of course: God has always been gracious, and he has always prized faith, as Hebrews 11 confirms. But in the Psalms these features, characteristic of God’s dealings in the age we live in, are often between the lines rather than explicitly declared.

Moreover, the Psalms are fundamentally corporate in purpose, a feature almost entirely lost on individualistic Gentile readers in the twenty-first century. Superscriptions address fifty-six of the Bible’s 150 Psalms to the nāṣaḥ, translated as “choirmaster”, “director of music” or “chief musician”, depending on your version of the Bible. These psalms were not written primarily as aids to personal Christian piety, but first and foremost so that Israel could express itself to God corporately and nationally. They were written to be sung, and to be sung by large groups of devout Jews or Israelites. In 1 Chronicles 23, anticipating the temple service that would shortly be initiated under his son Solomon, David appointed 4,000 Levite musicians to offer praises to God. The psalms that he and his contemporaries wrote were the music they led and that Israel’s devout sang together. I suspect all psalms served this purpose, but we can confirm beyond a doubt that more than a third of those remaining to us did.

The Hymnbook of the Remnant

As individual and personal as some of the sentiments expressed in the Psalms may seem to us, the psalmists wrote them down to express the thoughts and feelings of other believing hearts. It is this universal quality that makes the Psalms appeal to us across many centuries and across a massive linguistic and cultural divide. Nevertheless, as we read them we must never forget they are somebody else’s mail. My father called the Psalms “the hymnbook of the Israel’s remnant”. I’m not sure where that expression originated, but in a large part it’s true. The fact that these psalms speak to Israel both before and after the Church Age means that they sometimes use a spiritual language foreign to the believer of our present era.

The Psalms speak of life in exile, and of dashing babies against rocks; of men surrounded by murderers determined to end their lives; of the desperation of faithful Israel during the future time of Jacob’s trouble; of the glories of Christ’s millennial kingdom; and of a hill far away and an old rugged cross. No amount of spiritualizing and allegorizing can make such things directly applicable to our situation today.

In short, the Psalms are not all about you and me.

Universal, and Yet … Not

Then we come to something like Psalm 23, and find sentiments more easily universalized. Gentiles and Jews alike have loved that psalm for over three millennia. We still teach our children that the Lord is their shepherd, just as he was David’s. Yet that very same “universal” psalm speaks of bitter enemies, the valley of the shadow of death, and a house of the Lord that was very much literal and physical. David wasn’t writing about the grumpy lady in Human Resources, the possibility of a cancer diagnosis, or about going to church. David’s life was very different from ours, and yet in some important ways, very much the same.

Our latest consecutive Bible study series is the Psalms of Israel. They speak to every era in human history from Moses to the millennial reign of Christ. Once in a while they even speak to our own era, if indirectly and not always literally.

I’d like to approach them from the angle that when we come to the Psalms as Christians at the end of the ages, we are indeed reading somebody else’s mail. Our generation has a tendency to leap straight from text to personal application, even when the distance between them approaches the breadth of the Grand Canyon. There are indeed innumerable things we can learn from eavesdropping on someone else’s relationship with our Lord and Savior, but we will learn them best once we have first identified what each psalmist was saying in his own day, then moving on to apply them to our own hearts. If you don’t first go through the exercise of asking what a passage of scripture meant to its original audience, you always run the risk of appropriating for yourself both promises and warnings unrelated and unrelatable to your own life and experience.

William Kelly Weighs In

I’ll leave you with the words of the venerable William Kelly on that subject:

“If we take the Bible as it is, without being too anxious to find ourselves here or there, instead of losing, we shall always be gainers, in extent, depth, and, above all, in clear firm hold of the blessing; and we shall not feel that we have been taking other people’s property, and claiming goods upon a tenure that can be disputed, but that what we have is what God has freely and assuredly given us. This will never be the case if I take up prophecies about Israel and found my title to blessing upon them; for they are neither the gospel for the sinner, nor the revelation of the truth about the Church.”

A big amen to that. Much more to discuss next week.