Christopher Ash makes a good point of how we can limit our exposure to the full range of Psalms, losing out in feeding our souls what they desperately need:
There is a way of using the Psalms that is like pic’n’mix in a sweet shop; it skims the Psalms for nuggets that appeal, little gems to be printed on the devotional calendar. This has the same nutritional value for souls that sugary sweets have for our bodies. It is deeply unsatisfactory…What is more, even when the Psalms are taught, it is generally only a small subset of the Psalms.”
In the light of this past Sunday’s message on enhancing our prayer life at a time like this and, in particular, on using the Psalms to enrich our prayers, I want to share three things with you today. The first article is a thought-provoking article by N.T. Wright, Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It's Not Supposed To. The second article is some teaching on the subject from Christopher Ash, Teaching Psalms; Volume2: From text to message, which invites us to see Christ in every Psalm. Here are some quotes from the article to stir you to go and read it for yourself, especially given that about one-third of the Psalms are ‘lament psalms’:
N.T. Wright - Christianity offers no Answers about the Coronavirus - It’s not Supposed to
Rationalists (including Christian rationalists) want explanations; Romantics (including Christian romantics) want to be given a sigh of relief. But perhaps what we need more than either is to recover the biblical tradition of lament…Lament is what happens when people ask, “Why?” and don’t get an answer. It’s where we get to when we move beyond our self-centered worry about our sins and failings and look more broadly at the suffering of the world…At this point the Psalms, the Bible’s own hymnbook, come back into their own, just when some churches seem to have given them up…Yes, these poems often come out into the light by the end, with a fresh sense of God’s presence and hope, not to explain the trouble but to provide reassurance within it…The point of lament, woven thus into the fabric of the biblical tradition, is not just that it’s an outlet for our frustration, sorrow, loneliness and sheer inability to understand what is happening or why. The mystery of the biblical story is that God also laments. Some Christians like to think of God as above all that, knowing everything, in charge of everything, calm and unaffected by the troubles in his world. That’s not the picture we get in the Bible.
You can find the article online here:
N. T. Wright is the Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St Andrews, a Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University and the author of over 80 books, including The New Testament in Its World.
Christopher Ash - Pointers regarding Christ in the Psalms
Although I love the Psalms, my love is tinged with frustration at the prevalence of Christless handling of them; or readings to which Christ is a somewhat arbitrary ‘add on’, tacked on the end to make it feel ‘Christian.’ I want first to persuade you that the Psalms are filled with Christ, that Christ does not have to be ‘glued on’ to the Psalms to make them ‘Christian,’ but that Christ emerges from the warp and woof of the Psalms themselves.
I believe that reading the Psalms in the light of their fulfilment in Jesus Christ is not only heart-warming, but ultimately the right and true way to pray them…the Psalms are for us to join in saying or singing together as the people of Christ…if it is a prayer, we pray it to God in Christ; if it is praises, we declare it to the world and simultaneously address it in worship to God in Christ…if it contains instruction (such as Pss. 1,2,37)…we ‘signup’ to live a life in accord with what the psalm proclaims.
In Volume One (p.49) I noted that Matthew 13:35 takes the voice of the Teacher in Psalm 78:2 to be-ultimately-the voice of Christ. I have taken this to be, at the very least, a hint that wherever we hear the voice of a divinely authoritative Teacher in the Psalms we are to hear the voice of Christ (or of a psalmist speaking by the Spirit of the Christ to come). But is it safe to generalize in this way from one New Testament quotation? I think it is, and my reason for so thinking is theological. Jesus Christ is the Word of God, God the Son by whom God has spoken His final word (Heb. 1:1-4). As the Lord Jesus Himself taught, ultimately ‘you have one Instructor, the Messiah’ (Matt. 23:10). Behind the voice of every prophet is the voice of Christ the Word of God. So, for example, when Psalm 37 says, “Do not fret because of those who are evil” these are the words that Jesus of Nazareth heard, and needed to hear, in His earthly life; but they then become words that He speaks to His church.
A strong quotation from Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns us that
‘Praying certainly does not mean simply pouring out one’s heart (quoted in Volume One, p.52).
This can be misunderstood and I want to clarify what I mean by it (and what I think Bonhoeffer meant by it). This is most certainly not to deny that believers ought to pour out their hearts to God in prayer, lament, or praise; certainly we ought to do this in the presence of God. Bonhoeffer’s point is that true prayer needs more than this. The disordered outpourings of the natural human heart may be authentic, but they are not acceptable prayers before God. Only in the name of Jesus Christ is prayer heard by God the Father. What the Psalms do is to shape the outpourings of our disordered hearts so that they are reordered by the desires, yearnings, tears, and joys of the Lord Jesus, by whose Spirit they were spoken. I do not simply pour out my overflowing heart; the Psalms teach and train me how to pour out my heart according to the will of God and the heart of Jesus.
Tim Keller - Disciplines of Distress
And thirdly, a great teaching by Tim Keller on Psalm 11 called ‘Disciplines of Distress.’ It will help you to see how a Psalm is rich with meaning and speaks into our present situation. You can watch Keller’s exposition here:https://www.youtube.com/embed/j580__r-uKY?utm_source=email+marketing+Mailigen&utm_campaign=weekend-digest&utm_medium=email (Psalm 11 Disciplines of Distress by Tim Keller).