“Jesus answered them, ‘Is it not written in your Law, “I said, you are gods”?’ ”
Bible commentators often say the New Testament (NT) interprets the Old (OT), not the other way around. This principle is generally solid, though it can be taken to extremes; for example, by erroneously concluding that we cannot interpret any OT scripture properly without reference to the NT. Manifestly, we both can and should.
Book III of Psalms begins with Psalm 73. The superscriptions over the next 11 psalms tell us a man named Asaph wrote them. Asaph was a Levite singer and musician commissioned during David’s reign. Among other things, he was a harpist and a cymbal player. He and his fellow Levites sang and played David’s psalms as well as their own.
Most psalmists were prophets. Orthodoxy accepts that without question. Asaph too was a prophet, as his psalms establish beyond any reasonable argument to any reader using consistent interpretive principles.
Well over two-thirds of the Bible’s 150 psalms have titles or introductory notes that scholars refer to as superscriptions. These provide information about authorship, usage, musical directions and sometimes even the circumstances in which the psalm was written. From the late 1800s until relatively recently, a majority of Bible scholars questioned the value of these superscriptions, believing Hebrew scribes likely added them centuries later than the original text. It may be for this reason that not all modern translations include them.
At least one expert on Old Testament studies has reconsidered that view.
The introduction to Psalm 45 calls it a love song and tells us the Sons of Korah wrote it. The psalm portrays a glorious, conquering king. By verse 5, his enemies, in so many words, have become his footstool. Hmm, now where have I heard that before?
I jest. There’s no difficulty identifying the king as our Lord Jesus Christ. The writer to the Hebrews quotes verses 6 and 7 of this very psalm and plainly tells us they speak of “the Son”, distinguishing him above all created beings, no matter how powerful and glorious.
Christians love to quote from the book of Psalms, but some psalms are easier to apply to ourselves than others are.
I was enjoying Psalm 83 this morning while simultaneously noting just how difficult all the Hebrew specifics make it to apply the psalmist’s words meaningfully to present-day believers. The enemies of Israel do not work well as analogies for grumpy HR ladies, obnoxious environmentalist neighbors, or even — to make it more relevant — social misfits with sniper rifles and a burning grudge.
Too soon? Yeah, probably.
I’ve heard that Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time may be the most famous book people have never read.
That’s right: Never.
People sure do talk about it. It’s sold ten million or so copies. Lots of people cite the title of the book, laud it, and claim to have found their opinions confirmed by it — but few of these have actually ever read it.
In a way, maybe that’s understandable. It is, after all, a fairly challenging book. For a mathematician, it’s a good read, perhaps; for the average person it’s a quick road to Slumberland. Even though it’s pretty short it only takes a few pages to render most folks unconscious.
“The faithful have vanished”, David wrote.
Not that the faithful have been exterminated and evil has finally won the day.
Not that the faithful have apostatized or lost their salt.
They’ve vanished. Elvis has left the building, folks.
This is not simply David’s personal experience here. No way, not without at least some exaggeration or hyperbole.
The great mathematician Blaise Pascal claimed all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Modern people don’t sit in rooms alone very well. They find it boring. And, in fact, being bored is one thing almost all of us instinctively hate. Particularly in our present day of social media, cell phones, portable games and constant mental stimulation, it seems to us that solitude and silence are indicators of something being terribly wrong. On those occasions when we find ourselves momentarily bored we immediately fumble for our phones or look around for some new distraction.
I suspect we are probably less adept than any previous generation at just sitting still and thinking.
“There is nothing new under the sun,” wrote the Preacher in Ecclesiastes a little over 3,000 years ago. People have been quoting him ever since, and the manifest accuracy of his statement is both reassuring and humbling for the Christian in search of truth.
Humbling, because it implies that none of the ideas that come to us as we read the word of God and discover great ‘new’ things about it are actually original to us. Someone always got there before us; we just don’t necessarily know whom. Reassuring, because the fact that others have walked the same path before us and come to exactly the same conclusions about scripture provides confirmation that we are correct in our understanding of it.
Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible by any metric you might choose.
In English, it’s 176 verses and approximately 2,445 words long (depending on your translation). The English verse divisions reflect a highly regular underlying structure based on the Hebrew alphabet, with each of its 22 sections made up of eight pairs of ideas. All eight verses in each section begin with the same Hebrew letter, and the letters are in order.
It is probably the most carefully crafted chapter in the entire Bible.
“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ”
Sometimes the Bible just hits the nail on the head.
You run into a lot of people who pride themselves in being atheists. They rattle on about how they are the only intellectual option … that every scientist is an atheist … that no one who has any sense would be anything else … and so on. Their smugness, their self-satisfaction, their certainty seem so great that the unprepared believer is often blown back on his heels.
God is holy.
Not a new thought, I know, but one that, in the opinion of the Holy Spirit, merits mention three times in the nine verses of Psalm 99: “Holy is he! Holy is he! The Lord our God is holy!”
Amen. In fact, he’s so holy that in the Old Testament, those closest to God tended to pay a price for their proximity.
Around 1052 B.C., King David conquered a Jebusite stronghold in the hills and made it the capital of his kingdom. He repaired and built up the city that has come to be known as Jerusalem, Zion, the City of David and Ariel. His son Solomon enhanced it and made it truly world class, and the later kings of Judah supplemented and strengthened it. It has been attacked by history’s greatest empires, razed repeatedly but always rebuilt, and unlike many ancient cities of the East, it’s still there today.
The Sons of Korah called Zion “the city of our God”.
Little is known about the writer of Psalm 89, but it’s still a great deal more than we know about the writers of some other psalms.
Ethan the Ezrahite was a Levite
musician, poet and prophet who came to prominence as a young man during David’s
reign, continuing his ministry into the reign of Solomon and perhaps even that
of his
Evidence for that last statement to come …
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“Who authored the Psalms?”
Scripture clearly identifies many of the psalmists with superscriptions. Sometimes we even get a little bit of detail about the circumstances in which they wrote. For example, the superscription for Psalm 3 is “A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son”, and Psalm 7 is called “A Shiggaion of David, which he sang to the Lord concerning the words of Cush, a Benjaminite”.
Please don’t ask what a “shiggaion” is. It’s one of those words Strong’s Concordance labels as “doubtful”.
Henry Giroux wrote that a utopia is “an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its members”. He was generalizing based on the way the concept has been used (and misused) for over five centuries, trying to distill a jumble of ideas down to a basic concept everyone can agree about. The word itself comes from a 1516 book of the same name written by Sir Thomas More, but Plato’s Republic took a crack at the same ideas almost 2,000 years earlier, and it may be argued that even the Tower of Babel was an early, misguided stab in that direction. It would be hard to find a time when men have not dreamed of and yearned for social perfection, though always on their own terms and by their own standards.
Literally, utopia means “no place”. You would think more people might take More’s not-too-subtle hint.
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“When iniquities prevail against me, you atone for our transgressions.”
This first phrase nicely encapsulates the condition of the believer. Iniquities do not characterize him. Iniquities do not magnetically draw him the way they once did. Iniquities are not his goal or the meaning of his life. Iniquities are an enemy with which he is perpetually in contention.
Occasionally iniquities even prevail. For a moment only.
“Against you, you only, have I sinned.”
Do you have trouble with this verse? I certainly do. Just like I struggle with a lot of hyperbole in scripture.
What? There’s hyperbole in scripture? You mean people said things under the direction of the Holy Spirit of God that weren’t intended to be understood literally?
Sometimes I think we moderns, especially in the West, are way too literal in our reading of scripture.
I’m not against literalism as a general principle, of course. “When the plain sense makes good sense, seek no other sense” is a solid hermeneutic. No, literalism of that type is just fine. The sort of nit-picking, fussy literalism I’m concerned about has more to do with the negative inferences the Western mindset often tends to draw from positive statements. It’s more about strange leaps of logic extrapolated from the text than about the text itself.
“Which of the psalms stands out the most to you?”
If you were stranded on a desert island and could take only one book of the Bible with you, which book would it be? Forest Antemesaris says he would take the Psalms, and many Christians would agree with him. The Psalms, he says, are “the songbook of Israel, a chronicle of praise from our spiritual ancestors, an emotional catharsis, the New Testament’s Old Testament foundation, and the scriptural bedrock of spiritual formation”. He goes on to say the Psalms are central to both testaments, and foundational to praise, the biblical language of prayer, and the love of God’s word.
All this is true.