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Believing in the God of the Psalmists, Part 1: God Is

April 6, 2009 in A Springboard for Your Spiritual Life, Prayer, praying like the psalmists, psalms with 3 Comments

If we want to improve our prayer lives, a great place to go is Psalms. The prayers of these saints soar on heights we can hardly fathom. Over the last two weeks of our Spiritual Springboard we noticed 2 Reasons We Don’t Have to Pray Exactly Like the Psalmists and then 2 More Reasons.

You may also want to check out the index for this entire series of posts.

Now we want to turn our study to what we can learn from the psalmists about praying.

The foundation for praying as the psalmists did is believing in the God of the psalmists. This is so much more than just saying, “Yeah, I believe in Jehovah.” This means examining the psalms and what they said about God. Because of what the psalmists believed about God, they prayed. If we want to pray like they did, we’ll have to believe like they did. When we believe like they did, prayer will no longer be a checklist item of Christian homework to try to accomplish every day like that daily literature journal our college lit professors tried to get us to do. When we believe like they did, prayer will be our natural response. We won’t be able to help praying.

The first point we need to notice is the psalmists believed God Is.

God Is

You may think this should go without saying and we need to move on to more important topics. However, sometimes the very obvious needs to be stated. When we don’t state it, even the obvious is forgotten. Yet, even more than stating the obvious, we should get beneath the surface of this statement.

“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”–Psalm 14:1

“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”–Psalm 53:1

As if to make the point abundantly clear, the Psalms contain these two almost identical songs. Both begin with the same sentiment. Only fools declare there is no God. Of course, the atheists and agnostics believe the exact opposite. In this post, I don’t wish to argue that point, but simply show what the Psalmists believed.

The Springboard for Prayer

The reason this point is so phenomenal is not just about the psalmists’ faith but their faith despite all the other things they say in their prayers. Too many people today pray and when things don’t go their way, assume God must not exist. The psalmists prayed and prayed and prayed and things didn’t always go their way. What did they do? They prayed again. Why? Because they did not believe the evidence of God’s existence was wrapped up in whether or not God did what they asked.

They prayed because they believed God was there. They didn’t suddenly assume God was zapped out of existence simply because He didn’t respond on their timetable or in their way.

Consider Psalm 88. It is a benchmark psalm for me and will come up repeatedly in our study. In Psalm 88:1, Heman claimed he cried out to God day and night. The rest of the psalm chronicled Heman’s troubles. He had endured many of them. He laid them at God’s feet and claimed God was the author of them. He got mad at God. He accused God. He didn’t understand God. However, for all of those very troubling aspects of those psalms he never denied God. He didn’t question God’s existence. He assumed it. That was why Heman was so troubled. Why, since God does exist and does care, wouldn’t He do something about Heman’s troubles? It didn’t even enter his mind to say, “Since God is not doing something about all this, He must not be there.” Yet, that is exactly the response of so many today.

If we want to pray like the psalmists, our faith must be anchored in God’s existence. God will not respond to our prayers on our timetable. He is not bound by our whims and wishes. As the sovereign ruler of the universe who sees the beginning from the end and knows all sides of our lives and the entire world, we can trust Him to do what is right. He knows better than we do. He knows when to respond and how. We need to be like Heman. The very fact that he wrote Psalm 88 indicates his continued faith that God Is, even though God is not bound by Heman’s will.

From the psalmists perspective, wise and righteous people might get mad at God. They might accuse God of being the author of some of their troubles. They might feel like God is far away and is ignoring them. But only the fool looks at all that and says, “There is no God.”

As we grow in prayer, we will have all kinds of questions and struggles. However, we will always have a leg up as long as we maintain our faith. God is out there even if we feel like He is far away. God is still there. He is still the sovereign ruler of the universe. Only the fool, no matter how smart he thinks he is, says there is no God.

Come back next Monday to learn that the Psalmists did not merely believe God is, but they believed God is the creator of all that is.

2 More Reasons We Don’t Have to Pray Exactly Like the Psalmists

March 30, 2009 in A Springboard for Your Spiritual Life, Prayer, praying like the psalmists, psalms with 3 Comments

Next Monday, we’ll move on to learning how to pray like the psalmists. This week, however, we’ll conclude what we started last Monday by noting two more reasons we don’t have to pray exactly like the Psalmists. Also, you may want to check out the index for the entire series of posts.

Last week we learned we don’t have to pray exactly like the Psalmists because…

1. The Psalms are part of the Old Covenant and Not Part of Our Covenant with God.

2. The Psalm were not written as the universal guide for all praying, but were written in a culturally appropriate genre.

There are two more reasons we do not have to pray exactly like the psalmists.

3. When Jesus was asked to teach His disciples how to pray, He didn’t refer to the Psalms.

In Luke 11:1-13, Jesus’ disciples asked Him to teach them to pray. While some of the principles He demonstrated can also be learned from the Psalms, He did not once go to the Psalms as the guide for how we are to pray. Rather, He provided a model for prayer and then stated some principles about persistence and about how God wants to bless us.

I have to believe if the Psalms were the guide we have to follow about praying, Jesus would have used them directly and set them up as our standard. But He didn’t.

Having said that, I do note that Jesus did use the Psalms in prayer. While on the cross He prayed the Psalms twice. In Matthew 27:46, Jesus prayed Psalm 22:1: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” In Luke 23:46, Jesus prayed Psalm 31:5: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!”

I conclude that we do not have to pray exactly like the psalmists. However, if we want to pray like Jesus, we can certainly learn from the psalmists.

4. Even the Old Covenant Hebrews Didn’t Pray Like the Psalmists.

WHAT?!

I know that shocks you; let me repeat it. Even the Old Covenant Hebrews didn’t pray like the Psalmists. Oh, no doubt, at times the Hebrews incorporated the Psalms in their prayers. I’m sure many of the psalms are liturgical in nature. That is, they were actually incorporated into their formal worship. For instance, it makes perfect sense to see Psalm 24:1-10 as part of their public worship as they opened the gates of the temple every morning. The Psalms of Ascent seemed to have been used as the Jews pilgrimaged their way to Jerusalem.

I recognize the Jews did pray the psalms. What I mean is when Jews hit their knees in prayer on a daily basis as they faced the hardships of life and needed God’s help, they didn’t pray in Hebrew poetry anymore than we would. Don’t be surprised at this. Have you read Job? For 35 chapters these 5 friends argue about what was happening to Job. Do any of us actually believe they argued in Hebrew poetry? Of course not. We understand this was a stylized account of what happened.

I suggest that is exactly what we see in the Psalms. They are not the natural prayers the normal Hebrews would offer. Rather, they were stylized accounts of what happened surrounding prayers. Certainly, they were adopted in later prayers. However, for example, David didn’t just naturally spout off the Hebrew poetry of Psalm 57:1-11 or Psalm 142:1-7 while he was hiding in a cave, fearing for his life.

When we just think about this for a moment, we can all naturally recognize this. However, I can actually show you a specific instance that demonstrates it. Isaiah 38 shows the prayer of an ancient Hebrew and then the psalm he wrote later about the circumstance.

King Hezekiah was going to die. God had told him through Isaiah to get his affairs in order, his time was up. In Isaiah 38:3 we see Hezekiah’s prayer: “Please, O LORD, remember how I have walked before you in faithfulness and with a whole heart, and have done what is good in your sight.” That doesn’t sound very psalmish. Rather, it sounds very prosaic, straightforward, normal. In fact, it sounds an awful lot like a simple prayer we might offer today. There is no poetic form, no parallelism, no chiasm, no imagery.

However, in Isaiah 38:10-20 we see the psalm Hezekiah wrote to memorialize this circumstance. I have no doubt at later times Jews probably used this psalm in their prayers, but this psalm wasn’t just the natural prayer offered up. I am sure if we could see behind the scenes of all the psalms, we would find similar stories.

Even we might write a poetic prayer that we used repeatedly, but that is not the natural way we pray. We might find some poetic prayers, even the psalms, and adopt their language in our prayers or even recite them in prayer. However, that is not how we pray naturally. The psalmists didn’t do that either. We don’t have to feel guilty if our natural and normal prayers don’t soar to the poetic heights of the psalms.

Wrapping Up the Springboard

We are going to learn a great deal about praying from the psalmists. However, I thought it was important to set our minds at ease. We don’t ever have to pray just like the psalmists. We don’t have to feel guilty if we don’t naturally pray like they did. We can simply be free to study the psalms as long as we like and grow as much as they’ll let us without feeling overwhelmed.

I’m looking forward to this study and hope you are as well. Come back next Monday for our next installment. We’re going to learn if we want to pray like the psalmists, we have to believe in the God they did and we’ll start learning what they believed about God.

2 Reasons We Don’t Have to Pray Exactly Like the Psalmists

March 23, 2009 in A Springboard for Your Spiritual Life, Prayer, praying like the psalmists, psalms with 13 Comments

(Check out the index for all the posts in this series.)

Praying Like the Psalmists

“The only way to understand the psalms is on your knees, the whole congregation praying the words of the psalms with all its strength”—Deitrich Bonhoeffer.

I’ve spent a good bit of the past several months studying the Psalms as a guide for prayer, praise, and worship. I completely agree with Bonhoeffer’s sentiment. I think most of us do. Our modern hymns demonstrate we believe the best way to use and understand the Psalms is in prayer and song. Consider some of our modern songs:

“As the Deer” from Psalm 42
“This is the Day” from Psalm 118
“The Lord’s My Shepherd” from Psalm 23
“How Majestic is Your Name” from Psalm 8
“Unto Thee O Lord” from Psalm 25
“I Will Call Upon the Lord” from Psalm 18

The list could go on, but you see the point.

Having said this, there is still part of us that is overwhelmed at the thought of using the Psalms as our guide for prayer. There are 150 of those psalms to go through. On top of that, sometimes the psalmists use phrases with which we are unfamiliar. Like greeting cards, the Psalms often sound good to us when we read them, but they don’t seem to fit us when we actually say them. Not to mention, there are just some ways in which the psalmists speak that seem almost blasphemous. I’ve read some psalms (e.g. Psalm 88) that make me want to change locations when I’m done for fear that lightning will strike where I was standing.

Thus, there is a huge part of us that wants to pray like the psalmists. At the same time, there is a part that doesn’t. With that in mind, I’m going to devote our Monday spiritual springboard to prayer and the Psalms for a while. But, I want to begin in an odd place. I want to first set our minds at ease where we don’t want to pray like the psalmists. Hopefully, as we consider these things we can relax as we look to the Psalms and not be so overwhelmed. Then we’ll be free to gradually learn as much as we can about prayer from the Psalms.

Today, I want to show you 2 of the 4 reasons we don’t have to pray exactly like the psalmists. Next week, we’ll wrap up the other 2 reasons.

2 Reasons We Don’t Have to Pray Exactly Like the Psalmists

1. The Psalms are part of the Old Covenant not the New

Despite the usual practice of Bible printers to include the Psalms when they publish a pocket New Testament, the Psalms are not part of our covenant or the law of Christ. They are part of the Old Covenant law. Note John 10:34. While debating with the Jews, Jesus said, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’?” Jesus quoted from Psalm 82:6. I certainly recognize the Psalms were not written as a legal code. I understand they are not part of the decalogue. I see that they are not written with “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not.” Nevertheless, Jesus demonstrates they are part of that Old Covenant.

In Hebrew 7:12, we learn when there is a change of priesthood, there is a change of law. We are no longer under the levitical priesthood. Rather, we are under the priesthood of Jesus Christ. Our priesthood has changed, so has the law.

Romans 10:4 says Christ is the end or goal of the Law. When Christ came, He fulfilled the Law. He superseded the Law. It is no longer our pattern and guide for glorifying God.

Having said that, don’t forget Romans 15:4, which explains we can learn from what was written even in the days of the Old Covenant. I’m not suggesting tossing out the Old Testament. That would be silly. In fact, we cannot possibly understand the New without learning from the Old. We just need to keep the Old in proper perspective. Now that the Messiah has appeared, we are no longer under the schoolmaster/tutor/guardian (cf. Galatians 3:19-29).

The point being that we can learn from the Psalms, but we can be relieved from the idea that they are somehow the universal pattern for all praying for all time. We can learn timeless principles about prayer, praise, and worship from them. But we are not seeing our pattern for how to glorify God under the New Covenant.

Let me show practically why this is important. Psalm 5:3 says, “O LORD, in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch.” If we want to pray, do we have to offer the morning sacrifice? If we have to pray exactly like the psalmists, we do. But this is not our pattern. Rather, we learn from this psalm within its Old Covenant context that sacrifice is what grants us access to pray to God. However, under the New Covenant, killing an animal is not how we glorify or draw near to God. We know Jesus is our sacrifice whose blood brings us into the presence of God (Hebrews 10:19-22). See from this how we learn from the Psalms timeless principles about prayer and praise but we do not follow them as our Law and guide for prayer.

2. The Psalms were written using a culturally appropriate genre, not a universal guide for all praying everywhere.

To claim we can only pray like the psalmists, would be akin to claiming we could only ever speak about judgment in apocalyptic. We would be taking a culturally appropriate genre and mandating it as the guide. In that case, we would be missing the real point in the Psalms. The real point is not that we have to use the psalmists’ genre to pray. Rather, we need to learn the lessons God revealed through that genre.

The genre of the Psalms is not an exclusively biblical genre. In fact, it is not even an exclusively Hebrew genre. Many scholars have pointed out that this exact genre was used among the Egyptians and Babylonians of the same time period. The genre of the Psalms is not the universal guide for the only way to pray or even the best way to pray. It was simply a form of prayer used at that time and God used that culturally appropriate genre to reveal His servants’ proper response to Him.

Some are thinking I’ve gone off the deep end and turned into a liberal theologian here. That is not the case at all. Isn’t this what God did with all of the Bible? He used people within their culture, in their background, their styles, their language, and revealed His will through that. That’s all I’m saying God did with the Psalms. He did not use this genre to say this is the only way to pray. He simply revealed His will through the background and culture of the people of that time.

We do not have to become masters at Hebrew parallelism, chiasm, or other characteristics of this genre in order to pray properly. We do not have to use the exact forms and phrases. That was all part of their culture. We have a different culture with different forms.

Consider one example. Psalm 102:1-2 says, “Hear my prayer, O LORD; / let my cry come to you! / Do not hide your face from me / in the day of my distress! / Incline your ear to me; / answer me speedily in the day when I call!” I have a very hard time with this or even remotely praying to God like this. In my culture, I should at least say, “Please.” I can imagine telling my kids, “Listen up!” like that, but I can’t imagine talking my parents like that, let alone my God.

What is happening here? It’s all about culture. Apparently, in that Old Testament culture and in the culturally appropriate genre, this could be said without concern. While I’m sure it is perfectly legitimate at the base level to recite this psalm in prayer, culturally, I’ll never feel comfortable demanding God listen to my prayer. Do I have a lack of faith? Am I weak because I don’t pray like the psalmists in this regard? No. I’m in a different culture. We have different means by which we show respect.

Consider an illustration. In John 19:26, Jesus addressed His mother saying, “Woman, behold, your son!” I wouldn’t remotely encourage modern sons to call their mother, “Woman,” just because Jesus did it. All by itself, it must not be wrong. But in our cultural context it is considered inappropriate and disrespectful. I think we need to consider the same point when we address God.

Wrapping Up

We are going to learn a lot of great information from the Psalms about praying. I can’t wait for us to discuss this and learn from each other as we converse about praying. But I hope we can set our minds at ease. We don’t have to pray exactly like the psalmists to go to heaven. We can relax and take as long as we need to learn from the psalmists.

Make sure you come back next Monday when we’ll wrap up this part of our Psalms study with two more reasons we don’t have to pray exactly like the psalmists.

Let me know what you hope to get out of discussing the Psalms. That will help guide where we go with this.

Praying Like the Psalmists: An Index

March 22, 2009 in A Springboard for Your Spiritual Life, Prayer, praying like the psalmists, psalms with 8 Comments

I hope you enjoy my series on praying like the psalmists. For easier navigation, I have added this index or table of contents so you can jump to whichever post you want to study, whenever you want to study it.

Please return to this index weekly. As each new post is added, a new link will be placed in this post.