HOW TO READ THE PSALMS (SERIES): PART III OF IV

 

(by: Doug Van Dorn)

In this third installment of “How to Read the Psalms,” we want to understand something very important about this book. What would that be? Psalms is a book. This virtual tautology is something I think many do not understand to the level that it can be helpful. Why is this the case?

I believe that the default way of reading the Psalms is to pick a song and just read it. This is how we often listen to music in this day of “shuffling the iPod.” We ask ourselves, “What psalm do I want to hear this time,” and we become our own D. J. I actually don’t want to poo-poo this too much, as it is true that each song is its own self-contained unit. That is, after all, the way all songs work. So, this is certainly a fine and good way to read the Psalms.

But you can think of the Psalter like you might think of an old-fashioned record. Back in the day, we had to listen to vinyl. That meant, you had to put the needle on the record and let it play until Side A was finished. (Yeah, I know, you can play D. J. even on a record. But it’s a LOT more work, and really only fun when you are scratching!) When you turned it over, you started Side B.

Thing is, a good artist always put the songs on the album in some kind of meaningful way. It might start with a fast song and the side might end with a slow song. Sometimes, as in “concept albums,” the tracks all had a larger meaning and purpose collectively than they did individually. Only by listening to them together and in the order the artist wanted, did you get that message. My personal favorite example of this is Boston’s Third Stage. Concept albums are like symphonies with their various movements that often trade on a basic set of notes, or jazz compositions that improvise a riff for fifteen minutes. Listen to the first and last songs on the Third Stage, and you realize that Amanda and Hollyann are not only the only two girl-named songs on the record, but they have the same basic tune! The songs form a kind of chiasm!

The Psalter is basically the greatest concept album ever written. Here I want to tell you how it works. There are four levels.

1. Level 1: An Individual Song. As mentioned above, each song is its own self-contained unit. As such, each song can and should be read by itself. Scholars have labeled the various songs in subjects, including but not limited to songs of lament, praise, thanksgiving, trust, and royal Look for a basic theme like this and it will help you read the psalm better.
2. Level 2: Units of songs. As I’ve been preaching through the psalter, I’ve discovered that certain sets of songs are related such that reading them together is very helpful. Some of these are obvious (such as the Hallel song units of Psalm 113-118 or 146-150). Others take more work. For example, quite often, you can pick out and “evening” idea that is followed in the next song as a “morning” idea, and as such were intended to be sung liturgically by Israel, often during feast weeks. When read together this way, the songs complement and deepen the meaning of one another. In the way our church has uploaded our Psalm series, you can see many of these units simply in the way I decided to preach the psalms here. If you are looking for help, just read that list for an introduction (and for more in depth study, click on any of those sermons).
3. Level 3: The Five Books. The editor-scribe (perhaps Ezra and his associates) who put the Psalter into its final form wrote the collection on five scrolls, even though it was short enough to fit on just one.[1] Each scroll ended in doxology, thus creating the five “little books” of the Psalter. The Rabbis said that these five books parallel the Torah (the five books of Moses), and their purpose was, like Genesis-Deuteronomy, for different forms of instruction. Thus, each of these five books can be read as their own kind of self-contained unit. Some focus more on suffering. Others on covenant. Still others on life after exile.
4. Level 4: The One Psalter. The final level of reading is the psalter as a whole. Much good work has been done on this in the last few decades among scholars, and the idea is that the individual units, the mini-sets, and the five-books all work together to form an almost incomprehensible single story-line that is the Psalter. To me, this is as important a reading activity as any of the other three. Perhaps more so. For, you do not say that you have read a book unless you have finished that book. So also, you can’t really understand the Psalter until you have read it from beginning to end. It is to this last point that we will focus our final installment of this series.

[1] See Nahum Sarna, Songs of the Heart (New York: Schocken Books, 1993), 17.

How to Read the Psalms (Series): Part II of IV

 

(by: Doug Van Dorn)

In this series, we are asking the specific question, “How do I read the Psalms?” After figuring out the level of reading you want to achieve, you need to move into specifics. Here are some of my thoughts as I’ve been studying the Psalms. I believe they are simple enough for a second level of reading (“chewing”), but profound enough to take you all the way to the highest level you want to go.

1. Psalms is not a book about life-verses. Growing up in the 80s, singing the Psalms was becoming popular again. But this wasn’t a singing of the whole psalm. It was often a wrenching out of context of one or two “happy verses” to create a sentimental ditty. As the Deer is an interesting example. Taking its cue from Psalm 42:1, the song is a series of cheerful lines that fit a simple, welcoming tune. Many of those lines are taken from other parts of Scripture, which is well and good. But, this isn’t singing the psalm. Rather, the context of Psalm 42 is very, very different from anything you actually hear in that contemporary chorus. In fact, there actually is a chorus in Psalm 42 (it has one idea repeated three times). It isn’t “As the deer pants for the water, so my soul longs after you.” Rather, it is, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God” (Ps 42:5, 11, 43:5). That’s quite a different idea from “As the Deer…” So, as you read the Psalms, don’t go looking for a verse here or there. Read the whole thing and come to understand its main point.
2. The Main Point. How do you find the main point of a psalm? There are several ways of doing this. Understanding the kind of literature that you are in is the place to start. Psalms are songs. These songs are written in Hebrew poetry. As such, you will find at least one of the following elements in each song:

 

• Chiasm. A chiasm is the most basic and common technique employed by the psalmists (they are actually found throughout the Bible, not just the Psalms). In its most basic form, it is a repetition of ideas that form a giant arrow pointing you to the main point. They used chiasms to help in memorization and to highlight various parts of the text. Most psalms are chiastic,[1] so look for repeating ideas near the ends of the song and inbetween. When you find a chiasm, the center is the main point. Once you become practiced at it, finding chiasms isn’t really all the difficult, even when you are simply sitting down and reading the psalm. In the paragraph I have provided an example from the most recent Psalm I preached.
• Repetition. When you notice a line repeated in a psalm (like we saw in Psalm 42-43), this acts like an English chorus (a line repeated throughout the song). This is rarer than chiasm, but many psalms have them. This is a main idea of the song.
• Superscription. The superscription is the first line of a psalm that was added later and is not, properly speaking, part of the text of the song. I believe the superscriptions are inspired. I also believe they are important for identifying the background of a song. Some are quite detailed (like Psalm 57’s, “To the choirmaster: according to Do Not Destroy. A Miktam of David, when he fled from Saul, in the cave”). Others are very basic (like Psalm 143’s “A Psalm of David”). Both help put the song in a context, and sometimes that context means you need to go to other places in the Bible to better understand what’s going on. In the case of Psalm 57, you need to read 1 Samuel 24. In the case of a simple Davidic song, just remember that this means the song is coming from the hand of the king.
• First and last verses. Since every Psalm has a first and last verse, look at these for clues as to the what the rest of the psalm will answer. A good and simple example of this is the Hallelujah psalms at the end of the book (Ps 146-150). Each of these psalms begins and ends with the word “Hallelujah” (in Hebrew). In between, you learn the reasons why you are to “praise the LORD.” Another example is a song we just looked at. “As the Deer…” (cited in the previous post) begins Psalm 42. This is its first verse. It is actually a very meaningful verse, integral to the song as a whole. The last verse also happens to be the chorus. So here we have two of our ideas in understanding the point of a song. When put together, suddenly, it is clear that this isn’t a mere sentiment the psalmist is giving you, but a deep act of faith that becomes the longing of his heart during great trials and suffering.

After looking for the main point(s) of a song, it is time to move onto the next phase of reading the Psalms, which is learning to read them beyond a rag-tag collection of randomly jumbled together songs. We will look at this in the next installment.

[1] I’ve used three main online resources in my preaching through the Psalms here. First, Robert Alden’s three-part series on chiasms in the psalms published several decades ago in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (Psalms 1-50, Psalms 51-100, Psalms 101-150). Second, a blogger named Christine who has done some tremendous work on chiastic psalms. Third, the Biblical Chiasm Exchange.

How to Read the Psalms (Series): Part I of IV

 

(by: Doug Van Dorn)

The other day, someone asked me, “How should I read the Psalms?” I thought, that’s a good question, and given that I’m wrapping up a two-year series in them, it’s one that I think I’m able to answer better than I was before. This will be a four part series, and I’ll keep each post fairly short. This shouldn’t be rocket science.

So how should you read the Psalms? The first thought that came to my mind is that this is a different question than, “How should I study the Psalms?” Reading something vs. studying it are very different activities. In their famous 1940 book, How to Read a Book, Adler and Van Doren (no relation), following a quote from Francis Bacon, explain that there are four levels of reading any book. Using the illustration of eating, they suggest you can taste, swallow, chew, and digest it.[1] Each stage commits you to a more thorough reading such that by the end you really are studying more than reading.

Thus, if you want to read the Psalms, you have to first decide what level of reading you are committing yourself to.

• Do you want to merely taste it? This includes recognizing words, scanning the sentences, etc.? This is the most basic level of reading.
• Do you want to chew it? Here we do things like inspecting, skimming, pre-reading, learning the structure, taking notes, even memorizing. This is the level of starting to make the words your own.
• Do you want to swallow it? Now you begin to analyze, thoroughly read, figure out the plot, the unity, the author’s intent, the author’s message, and read the author fairly instead of importing your own “meaning.” This level begins to include other aids such as commentaries, journals, dictionaries, etc.
• Do you want to digest it? This kind of reading is where you get into the nitty gritty of the heavy demands of trying to understand the context, the culture, the language, how it fits in with other related texts in the Bible, and so on.

My suggestion is, at the very least, you want to commit to the second level of reading (“chewing”), where you are ruminating on the words rather than just letting your eyes glaze blurry over the text. (For more on this, I highly recommend Adler and Van Doren’s book, as the art of even basic reading is something that has been lost in our day to many people.)

In the next installment, we’ll begin to look at some specifics I’ve used when going through the psalms.

 

[1] I’ve rearranged the middle two.

Leavers, Cleavers, and Covenant Union

(By: Chris Marley)

Christ and His Bride foreshadowed in Genesis 2:24

After Introducing the Princess Bride to the Prototype of an Ideal Husband as Our Lady of the Rib, we are told, “…A man shall leave his father… and shall cleave unto his wife” in Genesis 2:24. Here, a general precedent is set for a man to leave his home, his place of origin, and cleave to his bride. The man is called upon to leave his father’s house, wherein he lacks no need and has the comfort of familiarity, out of a desire for a bride. In leaving one home, he must then undertake the responsibility of head of the new household, becoming the provider of his family, and lead in the new home. The now-husband assumes the debts and needs of his new bride.

In like fashion, Christ came from heaven, leaving the heavenly home and Father, and redeemed for himself a bride. He left heaven and Father where he held the glory and sovereignty which he shared with the Father  (John 17:5). He left an earthly mother, Mary, in order to endure the hardships of life in a fallen world. He lived a perfect life of obedience in order to clothe his bride and fulfill her debt. He would even be obedient unto the death of the cross, declaring vows that sealed the bride to himself. In doing these things, he assumed the debt of the bride and paid it in full. He took the Federal Headship, leaving home, father, and mother, in order to cleave to his bride.The second theme in this verse is that a man and his wife shall be one flesh. Now remember, this is God who is creating. He could have made

The second theme in this verse is that a man and his wife shall be one flesh. Now remember, this is God who is creating. He could have made us asexual creatures, but one of the major reasons he did not is in order to provide us with a metaphor of his relationship to us. On the pragmatic side of things, it is important to note that this is about “wife,” “girl in a committed relationship,” or “girl man has very strong feelings about,” but “wife.” This is about covenant relationship. Men and women are not meant to seek the physicality of marriage without the covenant of marriage.

On the other side of the metaphor, we should rejoice that Christ’s love is within the confines of a covenant. It is not seasonal, it will not fade, and it will not forget. It is the thing signified by marriage, and is greater than earthly marriage, because there is no “‘till death do us part” clause in the Covenant of Grace.

If we are meant to see Christ in every page of Scripture, why is this narrative being related to us? Because the bridegroom and bride will become one flesh, first by Christ taking on flesh, and then by our being born again in his likeness. How mysterious and beautiful is the union with Christ! The doctrine of Union with Christ is both delicate and volatile. Some would ignore it for fear of straying into error. Others may be too bold, even claiming that saints become God in some way as if they merge into some Christian version of Nirvana. There is a balance, and it is most easily found through this metaphor.

A husband and wife become one in marriage. There are imputed values (like a balance-transfer) that take place. A wife is given all of her husband’s assets and/or debts. Likewise, a husband receives all those belonging to his wife. They share a last name, a home, finances, and possessions. There is a physical union in the marriage bed. They should speak with a united voice on decisions made for the household and the purposes of the family. Everything becomes mutual in as much as is possible.

Yet distinctions do exist. There are still two physical bodies, two minds, two souls, two sets of interests and opinions that will never fully merge. It is foolish to pretend otherwise. The wife of a surgeon may receive esteem and the financial stability of a surgeon’s paycheck, but she should never take up the scalpel and attempt a heart transplant (unless she goes through medical school herself). My wife is trained as a florist, but that does not miraculously make me capable of building a bridal bouquet.

Likewise, the union of the believer with Christ is extraordinary. By imputation, the believer is counted as holding the righteousness of Christ’s earthly ministry. How beautiful! How mysterious! The Bride receives only of Christ’s good while Christ assumes only her debt to be paid on the cross. The more believers grow in grace and knowledge of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the more their mind is conformed to Him and the more their heart desires that which is good and holy. The saint has the security before God that the Son does! However much the saint is one with Christ, though, he is still separate and distinct. The believer will not achieve the archetypal knowledge of God, nor the power to speak and create ex nihilo. Certainly the glory and honor owed to God will ever remain his own. Only Christ, being God, could claim before the Father, “…Yours are mine.” John 17:10. We can only declare to God, “What is mine is yours.” Yet, the believer is bound to Christ more securely than a wedding license can provide, more intimately than the wedding bed, more magnificently than earthly marriage can display. This is union with Christ.

When the two become one in the earthly marriage, life is produced. This is not perfectly consistent because nothing is in earthly marriage. But what we see is a kind of bizarre mathematical concept that the one plus one equals one… plus one. God used the intimacy of marriage as the means to produce new life. I will not belabor the earthly aspect, but the thing signified in Christ and church bears exploring.

It is important to note that this does not defy the monergistic nature of salvation (a technical term for stating that it is Christ alone who saves). Some would claim that man co-authors his salvation (synergistic), but it is God who saves. The Father chooses, the Son redeems, and the Holy Spirit quickens. The church does not co-author that salvation, but God uses means and secondary causes. God uses his bride to accomplish salvation through the general call to salvation.

Paul states that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the preaching of the word of God, Romans 10:17. This is the ordinary means of salvation. God works through the foolishness of preaching to quicken the spirit, regenerating the heart to respond in faith to the message preached. It is not usual, ordinary, or to be expected that God should speak in an audible voice as he did with Noah, Abraham, and Paul. Rather, God uses his already-awakened redeemed to share the gospel that awakened them. Not every sharing of testimony or even every faithful, clear, gospel-preaching sermon automatically results in sinners being saved. It requires the attending work of the Holy Spirit for redemption to be applied.

Here is where the metaphor applies. For earthly children to be born, the husband and wife are to meet together in intimacy. For earthly men to be born again as children of the kingdom of God, the bride of Christ must meet with her husband. When Christ chooses to so visit his bride through his Holy Spirit, new life is produced. Not every sermon attended by the Holy Spirit results in salvation, but a sermon cannot change the hearts of men without the Holy Spirit. Essentially, this means that every sermon through which the Holy Spirit chooses to save will save whomsoever the Holy Spirit intends. This is the nature of Irresistible Grace.

This article first appeared at Credomag.com and is used here with permission. Chris Marley is the pastor of Miller Valley Baptist Church in Prescott, AZ.

THE NEW COVENANT– KNOWING THE LORD: AN EXPOSITION OF JEREMIAH 31:31-34 (PART 6)

The Law and Teaching: To Know the Lord

We are continuing now with the second of three phrases in Jeremiah’s new covenant that we are exploring. The last two posts looked at the phrase, “I will put my law on their minds and hearts,” and its effect that, “They will be my people, and I will be their God.” We saw that the the language of both has rich OT background, and that both point to the idea that these covenant people are not only outwardly called, but inwardly called as well. This post looks at the second phrase, “They shall not teach saying know the Lord,” and its effect, “For they shall all know me.”

In the old covenant, you clearly had some people who were in covenant with God who were not elect, who died, and went to hell. Jesus refers to them as children of Satan, not Abraham (John 8:39, 44). A question in the baptism debate is whether or not this is also true in the new covenant. Are there some people in the new covenant who will nevertheless eventually be in hell? But this question should not be determined by presuppositions about who should receive covenant signs or by systematic frameworks that deal in continuity or discontinuity. The proper way to figure this out is through exegesis of the Scripture.

The statement is, “They shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord’” (Jer 31:34). We will focus on “teaching” first. Under the old covenant, God sent mediators who would teach the law. Moses and the firstborn of the tribes of Israel did this under the Sinai covenant, and this was followed by the priests whose job it was to teach the law, as Ezra did, under the Levitical covenant. Other teachers included the fathers who were to teach the children, “You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deut 11:19). The important thing to realize here is that even under the new covenant, we still have teachers (1Co 12:28; Eph 4:11; etc.). Therefore, if the new covenant is somehow “not like” the old, then the “teaching” it has in mind isn’t merely helping people grow in knowledge. Rather, it is knowledge of a more basic kind.

The content of the teaching is to “know the Lord.” This is not mediated knowledge “about” the Lord. It is immediate, personal, and direct knowledge “of” the Lord. Therefore, the declaration is that they will “no longer teach, telling people to know the Lord.” This will now be done immediately by the Holy Spirit. He will circumcise the heart and write the Commandments on us as living tablets of flesh. The effect of this promise is radically different than it was in prior covenants: “They will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” “All” is an important word, for this is how the new covenant differs from the old.

“Knowing the Lord” also has a rich OT background and Jeremiah is drawing up it. First, like the laws on your heart, to know the Lord is to obey him. “They bend their tongue like a bow; falsehood and not truth has grown strong in the land; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not know me, declares the LORD” (Jer 9:3). “For my people are foolish; they know me not; they are stupid children; they have no understanding. They are ‘wise’– in doing evil! But how to do good they know not” (Jer 4:22). “Heaping oppression upon oppression, and deceit upon deceit, they refuse to know me, declares the LORD” (Jer 9:6). “Do you think you are a king because you compete in cedar? Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well. Is not this to know me? declares the LORD” (Jer 22:15-16). It is evident then that this kind of knowledge of the Lord is, as the Proverbs say, “the fear of the Lord” (Prov 1:7).

But before this can happen, you have to have Christ revealed to you. In order to get to the point of the fear of the Lord, you have to have two different kinds of revelation happen to you. The first is objective, and comes from outside of yourself. “Samuel did not yet know the LORD, and the word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him” (1Sa 3:7). This knowledge comes to a person from the outside, not the inside. Samuel was called externally. He heard a voice. The context of the knowledge here is not mere head knowledge, but knowledge of a very specific person. Here, the One calling is called “the Word of the LORD.” The OT knows this person as the Angel of the LORD. The NT knows him as Jesus Christ. In the OT, very few people know Christ in this way. The Angel simply didn’t appear to very many people. They had to trust the prophets like Samuel who actually did know him and who spoke with him and talked to him. But in the NT, there is an objective sense in which everyone “knew the Lord,” because they could see him walking around all over Israel. He had followers, disciples, enemies, friends. He was physical, embodied, incarnated.

Now, today, he is no longer walking around. That is why it is so vital to tell people about him. The NT roots these events in the physical, the tangible, the sensory, and in history. People can only come to an inward knowledge of the Lord Jesus if they first recognize his outward coming, even as Samuel did with the Angel and then the disciples did with Jesus. He has to be revealed to people. In this sense, he was revealed to people–many people all at the same time. Because he has come in the flesh, the new covenant is clearly a better revealing of Jesus than the old was.

But new covenant knowledge of the Lord does not stop here! In the new covenant, necessarily, this external works its way into the internal. This is what the language means. We have already seen this with the “heart.” “The LORD will make himself known to the Egyptians, and the Egyptians will know the LORD in that day and worship with sacrifice and offering, and they will make vows to the LORD and perform them” (Isa 19:21). Why are Egyptians sacrificing to him? Because they want to! Because they know him now. This is a prophecy of Gentiles coming to faith in Christ.

We have seen how Jesus takes a bride. In the OT prophecies, to know the LORD is to be married to him. This is an intimate knowledge of husband and wife. “I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the LORD” (Hos 2:20). To be married to him means that you have been called and equipped by him. “For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I call you by your name, I name you, though you do not know me. I am the LORD, and there is no other, besides me there is no God; I equip you, though you do not know me” (Isa 45:4-5). Andrew once asked Jesus, “How do you know me?” “Jesus answered him, ‘Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you’” (John 1:48). When you are called like this, you follow. Period. It is irresistibly impossible not to. “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me” (John 10:14). Can you hear the language of the new covenant in Jesus’ words? Are you hearing his voice even now?

People who are called and equipped and married to the Lord recognize his authority over them. Pharaoh didn’t. He said, “Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and moreover, I will not let Israel go” (Exod 5:2). He didn’t recognize Christ’s authority, therefore he would not obey. So God did mighty works in Pharaoh’s presence. Thus, people who know the Lord recognize his mighty works. “And there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD or the work that he had done for Israel. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and served the Baals” (Jdg 2:10-11). Is not the greatest work of all the resurrection of Jesus? “After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him. Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth” (Hos 6:2-3).

In the “infant in the covenant” debate, sometimes people will say, “Yes, but there is the already/not yet of the covenant.” I completely agree. There is. But we are see the already/not yet in different places. Infant baptists see that in the new covenant, it is not “yet” true that everyone knows the Lord. They put this promise out in the future, basically in heaven. But this is not what Jeremiah or Hebrews say. Where I agree with the already/not yet is at this point: Not all of the elect are in the covenant yet. Why? Because not all of the elect have yet believed. Nor have many of them even been born. According to Jeremiah, you are simply not in the new covenant until you “know the Lord,” and knowing the Lord means fearing him, having faith in him. You are to look to Christ alone for salvation, not to election. That is for your sanctification.

(by: Doug Van Dorn)