Why Read the Psalms?
Since their composition, the Psalms have always been near to the heart of God’s people. Ancient Israel worshipped with the psalter as its hymnal. Our Lord Jesus himself would have known and sung the Psalms throughout his life on earth. The early church incorporated the singing of Psalms into their worship (Ephesians 5:29; Colossians 3:16; 1 Corinthians 14:26), and they used the Psalms to explain the truth of who Jesus is (for example, Hebrews 7:17).
In the Middle Ages, the Psalms were prominent in Christian worship, and most monks would have recited the whole psalter at least weekly in the worship of their monasteries. By the time Martin Luther began lecturing on the Psalms at the University of Wittenberg in 1513, he had been reciting them weekly for over seven years. During the Reformation, Luther continued to maintain the importance of the psalms for Christian worship, insisting that the Psalter was a “Little Bible” because “it promises Christ’s death and resurrection so clearly.” In the same period, John Calvin wrote settings of the Psalms for his congregation to sing because he believed, “There is no other book in which we are more perfectly taught the right manner of praising God, or in which we are more powerfully stirred up to the performance of this religious exercise.”
The Psalms resonate with God’s people because they are honest about both the joys and the difficulties of the life of faith. The Psalms connect with us through shared experiences. They prove powerful because they never leave us to wallow in our circumstances but always point us to God. Furthermore, as Christians, we believe that God worked through the Holy Spirit to inspire the Psalms as he inspired the rest of Scripture. Such inspiration means that the human psalmists often wrote better than they knew as the Spirit worked through their compositions to prophesy about the coming Christ. It is little wonder, then, that the Psalms are one of the most cited books in the New Testament as the first-century church reflected on the person and work of Jesus Christ.
Scripture is God’s revelation of himself to his people, so that we can know him. Apart from his Word to us, we cannot know him. We need the Bible to know God. Likewise, we need Scripture to make sense of the world. We, in our humanness, have limited vision. We are barely able to see beyond the horizon of each day’s end. To properly understand life, we need a fuller perspective. We need a God’s eye view of our lives. We will only make sense of life in this world when we can see it from God’s perspective. Scripture grants us this perspective, and the Psalms prove particularly applicable at this point.
We especially feel the need for God’s perspective when we are in the valleys of life. During life’s troubles, our eyes only seem to focus on the difficulties and dangers. The Psalms come alive to us in these valleys because in the Psalms we hear people of faith crying out to God in the midst of the most difficult circumstances.
The Psalms are divinely inspired reflections on the life of faith. This book delves into the inner thoughts and meditations of God’s people. We read about how they handle the joys and challenges of life, always pointing us back to the Lord whom we can trust and should honor. Even in the valley of the shadow of death, the Psalms remind us that the Lord is our shepherd (Psalm 23).
