Somebody Else’s Mail (28)

The sheer variety of ideas any given psalm generates in the minds of its readers constantly amazes me, both with respect to the circumstances in which the psalmists wrote them and with respect to their intentions in writing. I don’t look frequently at what other commentators have written about the scriptures before putting together one of these posts, but I happened to this morning. Almost everybody had something to say about the inspiration for Psalm 13.

Concerning the circumstances that led David to write it, we have a complete information vacuum. Vacuums apparently exist to be filled.

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“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.

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Much has been written concerning the circumstances that inspired Psalm 11. Some readers assign it to the period of roughly eight years when David was on the run from Saul, others to the time when David’s son Absalom seized the kingdom and briefly threatened his father’s life. Either way, the theme they derive from the psalm is that when faced with the threat of evil, godly people ought to stand firm. It is critical, they say, that God-honoring authority not be lost.

Once again, to nobody’s surprise, I have to disagree. I will be asking the same question that has informed our interpretation of several psalms to date, which is “About whom does the prophet say this?” In Psalm 11 at least, I don’t believe the answer is “About himself.”

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God is spirit. I think we can confidently affirm that spirits do not have physical features like we do.

So what’s this David is saying about God’s eyelids in Psalm 11 then? Seems a strange expression:

“The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven; his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man. The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.”

Hmm. Let’s give this idea some thought before we get into the psalm verse by verse.

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Today, evangelical Christendom divides broadly into people who relate to the formulation “Christ is King” and people who prefer “Jesus is Lord”, a subject discussed at length in this post. The first statement is the hope of the Israelite remnant. Ironically, we hear it most frequently today from Christians who conflate our present era with the millennial reign of Christ, many of whom don’t think much of Jews. The second statement was characteristic of the apostles and writers of the New Testament and best describes the Church’s relationship to Israel’s rejected Messiah.

God has made him both Lord and Christ. We completely concur.

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Several pieces of internal evidence prompt Bible scholars to link Psalms 9 and 10. The most obvious is an irregular acrostic pattern that begins in Psalm 9 (alef through kaf) and which Psalm 10 completes (lamed through tav), though EW Bullinger asserts seven letters are missing. A second clue is the lack of superscription on Psalm 10, and a third is the fact that in the Septuagint they form a single psalm.

Despite these indications, reading the two psalms back to back also raises more than a few questions.

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To date our studies have treated Psalm 9 as another of many that only a future believing Israelite remnant may sing in the text’s absolute and final sense.

Two Saturdays ago, we compared the language of this psalm to the language of the historical books concerning David’s personal dealings with the nations, and found they were an uncomfortable fit. Whereas David subdued individual nations temporarily only to have them rise up again against future Israelite kings, Psalm 9 speaks of God’s final, annihilative judgment of national Israel’s enemies as a collective, something David never saw during his lifetime.

So then, either Psalm 9 is a study in pure hyperbole, or else it is literal and prophetic, in which case David is speaking in a voice other than his own.

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“Sing praises to the Lord, who sits enthroned in Zion! Tell among the peoples his deeds! For he who avenges blood is mindful of them; he does not forget the cry of the afflicted.”

If you read this verse in the NASB, you may be forgiven for thinking David was name-checking a cheesy vampire flick. There, it reads, “He who requires blood”, a statement which sounds odd to modern ears but is nonetheless the most ruthlessly literal of all translations.

The author of Psalm 9 made no such silly Hollywood associations and neither did his original readers. The subject was deadly serious. The ESV rendering above is less literal but a little easier to process. So let’s talk about this title of YHWH, or maybe of Christ, if the distinction is worth considering.

Somebody Else’s Mail (20)

The prophetic spirit moved David as he wrote Psalm 9. Of course, the Holy Spirit was upon him as he wrote all his psalms of scripture but, like many good authors, on plenty of occasions he simply wrote what he knew. Not all David’s psalms required that he peer into the future and write down what the Spirit showed him as he carried him along.

This one does, as we will see shortly. The “will of man” did not move David’s pen, and I wonder exactly how much he understood about the times and circumstances the Spirit of Christ in him was indicating.

Somebody Else’s Mail (19)

Psalm 9 is the first acrostic psalm, a structural poetry convention in which each line begins with a consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. (Psalm 119 is the most famous example of this technique.) As others have noted, this one is an imperfect acrostic: some letters are missing. The pattern of starting each line with the next letter continues into Psalm 10, leading analysts to conclude they were originally two movements of the same psalm.

Jewish tradition suggests David wrote this psalm after his victory over Goliath.

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The sovereign God delights in delegating his own infinite power. We find the earliest scriptural instance of such delegation in Genesis 1:16-18 when the Lord makes the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night, then casually throws in the stars as a bonus. The Hebrew word translated “rule” in that passage is elsewhere translated “dominion”, “power” and “government”. The OT writers use it to describe God’s own sovereign power and authority.

Delegated authority is the principle on which God’s creation operates.

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Long before the Lord Jesus ever used the title “Son of Man” to describe himself, the concept had a history with which devout Jews looking for their Messiah were well acquainted. Ezekiel not only had the title before the Lord Jesus, he had it used to describe him many more times than the Lord Jesus, 93 in total. In fact, God himself chose to address his servant that way, as he did Daniel.

What can we learn from that? Not much, probably, except that the hermeneutical “Law of First Mention” is nowhere near as reliable as the law of gravity.

Somebody Else’s Mail (16)

In his book The God-Shaped Heart, Timothy Jennings makes what I believe is a helpful distinction between two manifestations of divine rule in the world: design law and imposed law.

Design law includes things as disparate as gravity, love, motion, health, mathematics, friction, thermodynamics, authority structures, liberty, exertion, and so on — principles intrinsic to the proper functioning of our world and human society as designed by God. Do X, and Y will be the natural result, either for good or ill. Design law is just the way the world works.

Imposed law refers to both God’s commands and all other codes, rules, regulations and ordinances enforced with penalties, whether imposed by God or by men under his authority.

Somebody Else’s Mail (15)

Sometimes God gets angry. When his servants sin egregiously, even they may become the objects of his righteous and thoroughly justifiable anger:

“The Lord was angry with me because of you.”

“The Lord was so angry with Aaron that he was ready to destroy him.”

“The Lord was angry with Solomon, because his heart had turned away from the Lord.”

“He has cut down in fierce anger all the might of Israel; he has burned like a flaming fire in Jacob, consuming all around.”

But the consequences of God’s anger (not to mention its duration) are not always precisely the same.

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The apostle Paul once wrote about his desire to know Christ and share in his sufferings, becoming like him. In doing so, he was responding to God’s own desire that those closest to him understand his heart. In both Old and New Testaments, we find the Lord putting his most faithful servants through hard experiences to teach them how God thought and felt.

Accordingly, we find the Lord testing Abraham in order than he might understand what it is like to give up a beloved son, testing Ezekiel in order that he might know what it’s like to lose one’s beloved, or testing Jeremiah so he would know the cost of telling the truth. I believe such trials were never arbitrary, and never inflicted on anyone who couldn’t handle them. They were expressions of trust and intimacy from friend to friend. Perhaps you have been through similar trials and come out with a better understanding of our heavenly Father and his beloved Son.

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Not all long-term friendships get off on the right foot.

The relationship between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin is a fascinating historical study. Israel’s second king, our beloved psalmist, was from the more dominant, numerous and historically significant tribe of Judah, while its first king, Saul, hailed from the comparatively tiny tribe of Benjamin.

What Benjamin lacked in size it made up in pugnacity. “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf”, prophesied the original Benjamin’s dad, and so it came to be.

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Because so many psalms are prophetic, we are wise when we come to them to ask the question posed to Philip by the Ethiopian eunuch concerning the prophecy of Isaiah that he was reading at the time. He inquired, “About whom does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”

It was an excellent question. We must ask it of ourselves (and of the scriptures) today.

Somebody Else’s Mail (11)

Last week we looked into the apostle Paul’s use of Psalm 5:9 in the book of Romans. For Christians, this is usually the bottom line: we’re interested in how the things that were written in the Old Testament apply in our own experience. That’s normal, natural, and even biblical, but it’s useful to keep in mind that whatever the NT writers may have legitimately made of them, these passages also had an original context and an original audience.

Today we’re looking at what these words meant when David wrote them something in the order of 3,040 years ago.

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I mentioned last week that we would take a little time out from expositing Psalm 5 in context to look at Paul’s use of verse 9 in a famous passage in Romans 3 that begins by posing this question: “What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin.”

The selection from Psalm 5 is part of a list of Old Testament quotes from various sources that Paul assembles to prove his point, and this is where his critics begin to object to his usage of Psalm 5:9 and other verses. So let’s take a look at their objections today and see if we can’t come to a better understanding of what Paul was trying to accomplish in Romans 3.

Somebody Else’s Mail (9)

The superscription to Psalm 5 reads “To the choirmaster: for the flutes. A Psalm of David.” I had to take a quick peek at the Hebrew for “flutes” in my Strong’s, as I don’t imagine what the Levite musicians played 3,000 years ago bore much resemblance to a modern wind instrument, especially one usually made out of nickel-silver alloys.

As it turns out, the word only appears in certain English Bibles. Some consistently omit the superscriptions for reasons discussed in this article. Even in the cases where it does appear, we have nothing else in the Old Testament with which to compare it. The usage is unique. Strong’s says it may refer to a musical instrument or simply be the name of a particular melody, which is a discreet way of saying the translators are guessing. Most modern translations go with “flutes”, though a few say “wind instruments” and the NIV goes with “pipes”.

It would be nice if we perfectly understood the etymology and popular usage of every ancient Hebrew word. This one we don’t. We can only imagine how this psalm sounded in full vocal chorus with accompaniment.