Preaching from the Psalms

Preaching from the Psalms1

Elizabeth Achtemeier

There are some people who maintain that it is impossible to preach from the Psalms. I know of one homiletics professor who has even said that the Psalms "do not want" to be preached from. And I suppose the reason for that is the common presupposition that the Psalms are to be used for devotional purposes as prayers to be prayed and not as proclamations to be preached.

It should be pointed out, however, that not by any measure are the Psalms all prayers. The Psalter does contain many prayers to God in the form of hymns:

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth! (Ps. 8:1)

There are thanksgiving prayers:

Thou art a hiding place for me, thou preservest me from trouble. (Ps. 32:7)

There are prayers in the form of individual laments: Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord!

Lord, hear my voice! (Ps. 120:lf.) There is the great penitential prayer of Psalm 51:

Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love;

according to thy abundant mercy blot out my transgression.

We should be conscious of all these different genres which are used for prayers in the Psalter. There is a prayer in the form of an entrance torah:

O Lord, who shall sojourn in thy tent? Who shall dwell on thy holy hill? (Ps. 15:1)

There are royal psalms in the forms of prayers, as in Psalm 72. There are prayers which are songs of trust, and there are prayers which are a combination of genres.

AU of these types of psalms, and others such as the wisdom psalms, however, are also represented in particular songs which are not prayers. Hymns can simply be calls to praise, descriptive of God's actions:

O sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things! (Ps. 98:1)

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Thanksgivings often simply recount God's specific acts of salvation. There are entrance liturgies—"Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! (Ps. 24:7)—and there are prophetic royal oracles (cf. Ps. 2:7ff.), neither of which takes the form of prayer.

We are dealing with a multitude of types or genres in the Psalter. Sometimes they are prayers; sometimes they are not. But prayers or not, all of the psalms can be used as texts for preaching, and it is the primary purpose of this article to show how that is so.

In considering the Psalter for use in preaching, I believe that certainly we must approach it from the standpoint of modern form criticism. Every one of the psalms has its peculiar form and setting within Israels life, and only as those are known and studied by the preacher can the psalm be rightly interpreted.

For example, in Psalm 17, we find the prayer, in the form of an individual lament, of one who has been accused of some crime. " Hear a just cause, O Lord/' the psalm begins, "attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit." Then in verses 3-5 there is a protestation of innocence:

If thou triest my heart, if thou visitest me by night, if thou testest me, thou wilt find no wickedness in me; my mouth does not transgress.

With regard to the works of men, by the word of thy lips I have avoided the ways of the violent.

My steps have held fast to thy paths, my feet have not slipped.

That declaration of innocence on the psalmist's lips grates rather harshly on Christian sensibilities because we believe that every person has sinned and is guilty before God. Our temptation therefore is either to ignore this psalm as unworthy for Christian preaching or to contrast its self-righteousness with a Christian stance of humble repentance before God. But if we know the setting in which this psalm was actually used in Israel, then our understanding of it takes on an entirely new twist.

The person praying this psalm was one who had been falsely accused of a specific crime, perhaps of bearing false witness against a neighbor, in violation of the ninth commandment of the Decalogue. The case has been brought before the priest in the temple for judgment, and the psalmist is required in such a situation to undergo a night of self-examination. At the same time, he is required to repeat a protestation of innocence—to swear himself "not guilty" of the crime of which he has been accused. It is that ritual practice which is taking place in verses 3-5 of the psalm, quoted above. In other words, there is no self-righteousness here; rather, the psalmist is submitting himself and his case to God and is humbly going through the ritual practices required of him to do that.

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Preaching from the Psalms Review and Expositor

Knowing those things makes all the difference in the way we interpret this psalm.

Consider another example—Psalm 121. We are all familiar with the way its opening lines have been misinterpreted through the years: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help," as if God were to be found in the eternal hills—a view totally at variance with Israel's theology and straight out of Baalistic religion. Rather, this is a pilgrim's psalm, recited responsively by priest and pilgrim before the latter left Jerusalem for the journey home. The psalmist lifted up his eyes to the hills in the distance, and he saw there the hiding places of robbers who might attack him on his homeward journey. He therefore asked, "From whence does my help come?" and he made the affirmation of faith:

My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

The priest then took up the assurance:

He will not let your foot be moved, He who keeps you will not slumber.

And the closing line: The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in

from this time forth and for evermore.

The pilgrim then departed in the assurance of God's everlasting protection. I have often thought the psalm could be used in our liturgies in a similar fashion to dismiss the people.

The question is, of course, could we use Psalm 121 for preaching, or is it so embedded in Israel's worship life and so indigenous to her particular practices that it could not be transferred to apply to ours? Certainly Psalm 121 could easily be used in relation to our life. But the transfer would have to be made. And that is another thing that often bothers us about the Psalter, it reflects worship practices often so alien to ours that we have a very difficult time using the Psalms in the context of our culture. If you want a most extreme example, read Psalm 60:8:

Moab is my washbasin, over Edom I cast my shoe.

What on earth does that inean, and how could it be related to the twentieth century? Casting the shoe over a piece of property was a sign of ownership, as we see in the book of Ruth, and that could be explained if we used Psalm 60 in a sermon. Nevertheless, the transfer of the language of the psalm to the language and usage of our culture would have to be made, and so we still ask, how can the Psalms legitimately be used in Christian preaching?

Certainly we do not have in the Psalter the story of the Heilsgeschichte (sacred history), which becomes our story, as we have when we preach from the

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narratives of the Old Ttestament. Nor do we have the concrete historical settings that we find for the prophets' words—those settings which prevent us from turning the prophets' messages into timeless truths and demand that we hear them with circumcised hearts in a living relation with God analogous to the prophets' relations with him. Only the historical psalms like 105*106 or 135-136 tell the sacred history at any length. And only a Song of Zion like Psalm 137 mirrors its concrete historical situation clearly:

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.. .

On the willows there we hung up our lyres.

For there our captors required of us songs,

and our tormentors, mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"

The situation of the exile is very vivid there.

Most of the Psalms, however, speak in the most generalized terms of God's victories and Israel's trials and of the sufferings and faith of individuals. It is only in the last twenty-five years or so that we have even begun to be able to place any of the Psalms in their proper historical periods. We used to think they were all very late, and we dumped them all in the post-exilic period because we did not know very much about that period. Now we know that most of the Psalms are much earlier than that. Nevertheless, it is difficult to date any of them with precision, and few of them speak of specific situations. Indeed, if we read through the laments, which make up two-thirds of the Psalter, it becomes quite clear that all of them are rather stylized and that no one individual could have gone through all of the sufferings mentioned in some of them. Rather, we know from the findings of form criticism that the laments were standardized forms, preserved in the cult for use by all sorts and conditions of individuals, in all sorts of situations of suffering.

Because the Psalms lack concrete historical references, they have been used most often in preaching as expressions of timeless spiritual truths, or their language has been viewed as revealing of the general human condition. And certainly this would seem a proper use of some of the Psalms. Surely Psalm 90 is a picture of all human beings:

Thou dost sweep men away: they are like a dream, like grass which is renewed in the morning...

The years of our life are threescore and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore;

yet their span is but toil and trouble; They are soon gone and we fly away.

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Or surely Psalm 23 is a Song of Trust appropriate to every individual, religious or not, and therefore the psalm is properly recited at every funeral service.

That is the way we often use the Psalms in preaching—as reflections of the general condition of humankind. But I object to such an approach to the Psalter because the Psalms are not at all the product of a generalized religion. Rather, the Psalter represents Israel's responses to the long history of God's dealings with her in particular events and words. It is specifically God's chosen, elect, covenant people who speak in the Psalms, and unless somehow we are related to that particular people the Psalter is not our book. If we are not now the new Israel in Christ, then we cannot stand in the relation with God in which the psalmist stood, and we cannot make the Israelites' prayers and praises, their laments and liturgies, the reflection and responses to God's action our own.

There is not one of the Psalms that can be interpreted properly outside of the context of Israel For example, some have thought to interpret Psalm 8 as a product of natural religion:

When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established;

what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?

But the singer of that song does not know God from looking at the heavens; he knows God from a received creation tradition that has been handed down in the cult, and the psalmist spells out that tradition, known to us also from Genesis 1, in the verses which follow:

Yet thou hast made him little less than the 'elohim, and dost crown him with glory and honor.

Thou has given him dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.

That is exactly what we find in Genesis 1, and Psalm 8 can be properly interpreted only in the context of the creation theology of Israel.

As another example, consider the great communal lament of Psalm 44. It is precisely because the psalmist knows the story of Israel's salvation in the past that her present situation of defeat and deportation is a problem for faith:

We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us,

what deeds thou didst perform in their days, in the days of old.... (v. 1)

for not by their own sword did they win the land, nor did their own arm give them victory;

but thy right hand, and thy arm, and the light of thy countenance... (v. 3)

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Yet thou has cast us off and abased us, and hast not gone out with our armies, (v. 9)

The context for understanding the psalm is clearly Israel's holy history. Or read one of the greatest psalms of all—Wisdom Psalm 73. It is precisely

because the psalmist has inherited Israel's wisdom tradition that says that God is good to the upright, that his own pain and suffering over against the prosperity of the wicked are inexplicable. The whole psalm is then a reformation of Israel's wisdom: the psalmist starts out, in verse 1, with the wisdom doctrine that God is good to the upright; he ends with the realization, in verse 28, that the only good is to be near God.

The point is, none of these psalms can be interpreted properly apart from the context of Israel And that means we can only read and preach from the Psalter properly if we approach it as members of the new covenant people, as members of the new Israel in Christ. The Psalter is given us only as we are now Israel; and we are now Israel only through Jesus Christ.

That does not mean—and I emphasize this—that does not mean that we are to read Christ back into the Psalter. Psalm 110 is quoted more frequently in the New Testament than any other psalm, but it certainly was not originally about Jesus Christ. Originally, it was written for the coronation of an historical member of the Davidic dynasty. In similar fashion, verses from Psalms 22,69, and 34 are all used in the New Testament as cries of Jesus from the cross or as portrayals of his passion. But originally all of those psalms were written of pious sufferers in Israel, and when we use the Psalms in preaching, we must place them first in their original context in Israel. The Psalter must be left its own integrity, in its own historical place in the concrete life of Israel.

That means, however, that although the Psalms themselves do not reveal their historical situations, they are nevertheless embedded in the historical story of God's dealings with Israel. The Psalter has a narrative and a concrete history surrounding it; and its nature is that it is Israel's response to that concrete history. But then we share that history. Israel's story is analogous to ours. Her history before God is a prefigurement and parallel of our story before him. Or put the other way, our story is a parallel of hers. So it is that we can also share her response to that story, as that response is set forth in the praises and laments and wisdom teachings and liturgies and other forms in the Psalter.

Indeed, this is the pattern for preaching from the Psalms: We are to use them in such a way that Israel's responses to God become ours. Her words in the Psalms are to become our people's words. Her stance before God is to become our people's stance. Her depth of devotion, reflected in these songs, is to become our people's piety, through the means of the sermon. Sermons from the Psalms have the principal aim of calling forth from the covenant people of God a response appropriate to their nature as God's chosen people and a response

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worthy to be made to the God of the covenant. Thus, sermons from the Psalms are absolutely indispensable for growth into Christian maturity.

For this reason, I think it absolutely important that we preach often from the Psalter—because that growth into Christian maturity is a goal we have lost in modern American life—growth in sanctification, the theologians call it« growth in personal and congregational goodness, or in New Testament terms, growth up into the measure of the fullness of the stature of Christ. We have largely lost that as a goal for even Christian lives. Who wants to be good anymore in our particular cultures? We want to be successful, assertive, integrated, liberated... but good? That is not a goal that comes often to our minds.

We are in danger of losing the Psalter in our churches; indeed, many have already lost it, and so it is no accident that many people in our congregations do not know how to pray. We pray these days, in unbridled fancy, to almost any kind of god or even goddess—to a great soul of nature, an impersonal power, the projection of our own desires. But the psalmists pray to a God with a very particular, personal character, who has made his person and will and goal known in the specificities of the holy history. We pray in all sorts of languages— that of street gangs and feminists, of stuffed shirts and pietists, of nature worshipers and self-idolators. The psalmists pray in the utter frankness of the redeemed, the eloquent passion of the loved, the pained agony of the judged—in short, in the language of a peculiar people whose life has been set apart, molded, sometimes pounded, always wept over and sustained and transformed by a God who has chosen to dwell in their midst. And so to repeat, what a sermon from the Psalms must do is to enable us to see we are that people—indeed, to enable us by the action of God through the sermon to become that people. We not only can preach from the Psalms; we must preach from them, for their praises and prayers and piety must become ours as the people of Jesus Christ.

Let us then illustrate the uses of some psalms in preaching. Suppose we take as our text the great hymn of praise in Psalm 148, coupled with Colossians 1:9-20. How can that psalm become the response of our people to God? I have discussed this psalm at length and printed the text of my full sermon on it in my recent book, Preaching as Theology and Art,2 but perhaps excerpts from that discussion and sermon bear repeating here.

Psalm 148 not only calls upon persons but all of nature to praise the Lord, especially in verses 7ff. What meaning can it have for our people in our scientific, technical age to have trees, beasts, and elements called to give praise to God, as in this psalm? The answer is that perhaps we have to enlist science itself in the enterprise of interpreting this psalm, as I did when I wrote an ecological sermon on it, entitled "God the Music Lover."

Lewis Thomas, the biologist, has a marvelous chapter in his book, The Lives of a Cell,3 in which he points out that there is a continual music in nature: Quasars sound forth in continual rhythm from millions of light years away;

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some fish make sounds by clicking their teeth; animals with loose skeletons rattle them; even leeches tap rhythmically on leaves and hump-back whales sing. And one wonders if that is not all praise to God the Creator for the good life he has given his creatures. God is pleased with the song of praise that rises up to him. God is a music lover. And we, the people of God, are also called to join in the universal song of tribute.

The next point in the sermon: The difficulty is that we have disrupted the praise. Think what we have done to the song of praise of an old man forgotten in a nursing home or of a starving child in Africa. But think too what we have done to the song of praise from all the endangered species—grizzly bear and coyote, whale and sea lion, eagle and whooping crane. We are slaughtering off the sound of their singing. Indeed, we human beings have ravished the world with our bug sprays and poisons and technology, with our bulldozers and concrete and earth-movers, and now the day seems not far distant when God the music lover will listen and hear from his good earth nothing but a deafening silence. That is the way Jeremiah pictures the end of the world—the earth left a still and wasted sphere, turning silently in space, with no sound but the whistling of that stormy wind, blowing once again over the voice of chaos.

The third point: Yet God will not have done with us, will he? He loves us even more than all nature which we have destroyed. You remember the words: "Look at the birds of the air... are you not of more value than they?" "Consider the lilies of the field... will he not much more clothe you?" God loves us even more than he loves his beloved creation. (The New Ibstament always comes in to complete the picture.) So God sends his Son that we may learn how to sing again. He sends his Son that we may have cause to praise. Is there one of us here so sunk into sinful and sullen silence that we cannot, that we will not, praise God for such love?

But then—in the final point of the sermon, which returns to the psalm—do we not need to be joined in our praise by a universal chorus? When our voices are feeble in their song to God, do we not need the mighty whale's jubilation? When we sleep tonight, do we not need the night creatures' roars and shrieks of joy— the endangered tiger, the wolf, the Rocky Mountain grizzly? When we are inconstant, should there not be the steady pulsation of the distant stars, beaming their energy through an unpolluted sky? And when we are dissonant and divided in our praise, should not our disharmony be drowned out by the liquid melodies of lark and wren, or the roar of pure waterfalls?

The final paragraph of the sermon ends with these words:4

Our scripture lesson from Colossians proclaims that all things hold together in Christ. And perhaps this is finally the way we affirm that is really true—by so loving owe God in his Son that we will not disrupt the song of one old man or child, that we will not still a single sparrow's song raised to him in praise, or pollute the waters of one

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fish that bubbles out its joy, or condone the setting out of a trap of poison for one coyote howling his hallelujah. Then indeed God's universe can be joined together as one, sounding forth its great, unbroken Te Deum in one united chorus of praise, for the love that God has lavished upon us in his Son. And God the music lover can hear and smile and rejoice in his work, and affirm once again, as he did at the beginning, "Behold, it is very good."

The sermon then ends with the psalm repeated and a call to all to praise the Lord. In some such fashion, we enable our congregation to make the words of Psalm 148 their own.

Tb take another example, let us look at Psalm 1, that great wisdom psalm which is so pertinent to an age that no longer knows right from wrong and that does not really care. That all human decisions and actions are to be blessed or cursed by God, not only in some future judgment, but also here and now; that all human Ufe depends on whether it is rooted and grounded in God or in the shifting sands of the latest popular fad—that is the wisdom of this psalm which must become the wisdom of our congregations, by means of the sermon.

I once had a student assigned to preach from this psalm who rejected all its marvelous wisdom as nothing but legalism. "Blessed is the man . . . [whose] delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night." The student took that as legalistic religion and argued that the Old Testament should be discarded for the "better" Christian teachings of justification by faith. In short, the student fell into the trap of developmentalism, in which the Old Testament is seen as an outdated, materialistic, primitive religion of law, worshiping a God of wrath, whereas Christianity is understood as having developed beyond that to a spiritual religion of justification by faith alone in the fatherly God of Love. That is a complete misunderstanding, of course, of the Old Testament, whose God is precisely the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.5

That is also a misreading of Psalm 1. The whole psalm emphasizes the work of God. We are "planted," literally, "transplanted," according to verse 3 of the psalm. Israel and therefore we, the new Israel, are God's pleasant planting. God puts us beside his stream of life-giving water; our roots are sustained by the never-failing, bubbling, clear, deep rivers of his word so that we can bear our fruit in the proper seasons of our life and not wither now or eternally. That word is incarnate for us in Jesus Christ; and if we drink of him, he becomes in us a spring of water welling up to eternal life, as John 4:14 has it.

Consider too the great Song of Zion in Psalm 46. Our people know it best from Martin Luther's hymnic version, "A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing"; and they are familiar, with the psalm's opening words, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble,"—just as they have heard the refrain, "The Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge."

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But the rest of the psalm is largely unknown to our people, and they need to identify with it.

It too has that riva*, symbolic of God's life-giving presence: "There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God" (v. 4), and that is coupled in verse 5 with God's defense of his people. There is also the picture of the kingdom of God come upon earth, in verses 8 through 10, and that of course is precisely the universal rule for which we also pray in the Lord's Prayer: "Hallowed be thy name... thy kingdom come on earth... thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory." The psalm phrases it:

Be still and know that I am God, I am exalted among the nations.

This psalm carries the picture of our hope. Perhaps most powerfully of all, Psalm 46 portrays the chaos of our world in

verses 1-3. Those are not ordinary waters portrayed there. Those are the waters of the primeval chaos—the power of darkness, death, and evil—which God pushed back in his creation of the world, and which he finally fully defeated in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Chaos—that dark, empty void of evil, which our world knows so well in the mushroom cloud of a hydrogen bomb or in the desolate barrenness that chokes a heart after the divorce becomes final Chaos—this psalm proclaims that God is sovereign over it. And how much we need to hear that word in our atomic age! Blow the world off its ax i s -

God is our refuge and strength a very present help in trouble.

Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;

though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.

Then again, there are so many psalms in the Psalter which are totally unknown to our congregations and yet whose portrayals of the life of faith are so profound that we should not neglect them in our preaching. For example, look at Psalm 131, one of the so-called Songs of Ascent (or Pilgrimage) in that collection of Psalms 120-134, a collection that contains some of the loveliest songs in the Psalter. Actually, Psalm 131 is a Song of Trust:

0 Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high;

1 do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a child quieted at its mother's breast;

like a child that is quieted is my soul. O Israel, hope in the Lord

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Here we have pictured for us the faith that has learned to trust aU things to God. Perhaps the psalmist has been through a situation of inexplicable suffering. Perhaps he recognizes that he once pridefully tried to direct his own life. But now he has cast that behind him, and his faith involves a deliberate effort of the will: "I have calmed and quieted myself—" He compares his relation with God to a child resting secure and quiet on its mother's lap, and we have one of the most daringly anthropomorphic pictures of God. This psalm could be compared to Paul's statement to the Philippians from prison: "I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content"; or again, the psalm might be paired with Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane, "Not my will, but thine be done." Then, in verse 3 of the psalm, as is so often true in them, the saved person becomes a missionary, speaking out of personal experience to all the people.

The reader has perhaps noticed that when I preach from the Old Testament, I always pair the Old Testament text with a New Testament passage, and that is an exercise that can be carried out with a great deal of creativity and holy imagination. Sometimes the Old Testament may be used simply to add additional power and meaning to the New Testament story.

For example, the author of the Fourth Gospel considers Christ's crucifixion to be already his glorification and resurrection and ascension to the Father—"It is finished," Jesus cries from the cross. Or there is our Lord's statement, "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men to myself' (12:30). Or we find his prayer, "What shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify thy name" (12:27). The crucifixion is synonymous with Christ's glorification, according to the Fourth Gospel The cross is the exaltation of Christ the King, and we want to express that in a sermon.

Suppose, therefore, we were to couple John's story of the crucifixion with the Royal Psalm 47, which portrays the coronation of God as King over all the earth, in the kingdom of God:

Clap your hands, all peoples! Shout to God with loud songs of joy!

For the Lord, the Most High, is terrible, a great king over all the earth.

In verses 5-7, then, we have the portrayal of the actual ascent to the throne. Suppose we use those verses to portray the cross.

God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet.

Sing praises to God, sing praises! Sing praises to our King, sing praise!

For God is the king of all the earth; sing praises with a psalm!

Surely that captures something of the victory which the gospel writer sees at

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the heart of tibe crucifixion story, and it urges upon us the joyful celebration of that victory. But the psalm does not stop there. It further portray s God ruling from his throne and all the nations of the earth coming to pay him homage (w. 8-9):

God reigns over the nations; God sits on his holy throne.

The princes of the peoples gather as the people of the God of Abraham.

For the shields of the earth belong to God; he is highly exalted!

That is the same meaning we have in Jesus' words, "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto myself," and the psalm furnishes us with the response of joy, which we are to have to Christ's victory.

Consider another example: Sometimes in a class on preaching from the Psalms, I assign a student Psalm 114 as a sermon text. That psalm is a hymn concerning the exodus of Israel from Egypt, and it pictures the earth trembling at that event, the mountains skipping like rams and the hills like lambs. But the exodus event in the Old Testament is paralleled in the New Testament by the cross, and in Matthew's story of the cross we once again find the earth rocking at the presence of God: "And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom; and the earth shook, and the rocks were split" (27:51). Therefore,

what ails you, O mountains that you skip like rams? O Hills, like lambs?

The psalm can be used to illumine the event of the cross, and the presence of God at the crucifixion.

Further, the psalm does not end with the exodus. It also speaks of the mercy of this fearful God, who nevertheless bends down to give drink to his people in the wilderness (v. 8). And the crucifixion too is God's bending down, his stooping to our condition. The psalm can be used to illumine in a new way what happens on the cross.

Perhaps all of this is finally illustration of the fact that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the Psalms, just as he is the fulfillment of the entire Old Testament (so Lk. 24:27, 44).

Christ is the object of all the psalmists' praises, for in Christ, God has won his final victory. He has begun that kingdom over all the earth to which the Psalms looked forward in anticipation. And our Lord will come again to judge the earth, as so many of the psalms proclaim.

Christ is the goal of all the psalmists' longing for the presence of God, because he is now with us to the end of the age.

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As a hart longs for flowing streams,

so longs my soul for thee, O God. (Ps. 42:1)

The satisfaction of that thirst for the living God is now made real to us in Jesus Christ.

Christ is the summing up of all the psalmists' laments and suffering—he bears it aU on the cross. He is the bearer to us of aU the forgiveness the psalmists knew, all the gladness they voiced, all their joy in God's abundant life. And if we preach the Psalms to our people and couple their songs with the New Tfestament story, our congregation will learn the proper responses to God's love. They will find themselves forgiven and transformed into the new Israel of God. Indeed, they will know themselves sent to tell to all the nations what God has done and said. Let me therefore simply close with some words from Psalms 33 and 34:

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage. (33:12)

O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together! (34:3)

1 This lecture, along with two others on preaching from the narratives and from the prophets of the Old Testament, was delivered for the Lund Lectures at N o i^ Park Theological Sezninary, for the Midline Lectures at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, for the Scott Lectures at Phillips University Graduate School, and for the Sprinkle Lectures at Atlantic Christian College.

' (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984). • The Uves of a Cell Notes on a Biology Watcher (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 20ff. 4 This final paragraph is also quoted in Elizabeth Achtemeier, Creative Preaching: Finding the

Words, Abingdon Preacher's Library, ed. William D. Thompson (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1980), p. 96.

• For a complete discussion of developmentalism and of the taoie relation between Old Testament and New, see Elizabeth Achtemeier, The Old Testament and the Proclamation of the Gospel (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973).

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Preaching from the Psalms

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Transcript of Preaching from the Psalms