Adapted from “The Holy Scriptures: God’s Word, Written in Human Words,” an updated version of Herman Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith, trans. Henry Zylstra (Eerdmans, 1956), chapter 7.
Why do the Psalms feel so personal? Open them almost anywhere and you find words that seem to come straight out of your own heart: praise, grief, fear, thanksgiving, longing. Yet these are also God’s Word. How can a book be both deeply human and fully divine? The story of how Israel’s songs became Scripture helps us see how.
A People Who Loved to Sing
Psalmody runs alongside prophecy in Israel’s history, and it too goes back a long way. Song and music were greatly loved in Israel.11 Sam. 18:7; 2 Sam. 19:35; Amos 6:5, and others.
The historical books preserve songs on all sorts of subjects. There’s the song of the sword (Gen. 4:23-24), the song of the well (Num. 21:17-18), the song of the conquest of Heshbon (Num. 21:27-30), the song of the crossing of the Red Sea (Ex. 15), the song of Moses (Deut. 32), the song of Deborah (Judges 5) and the song of Hannah (1 Sam. 2). There’s David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan (2 Sam. 1) and his lament for Abner (2 Sam. 3:33-34). And there’s the book of Jasher (Josh. 10:13 and 2 Sam. 1:18), which seems to have contained many songs.
The prophetic books include songs too: the song of the vineyard in Isaiah 5, the mocking song over the fallen king of Babylon in Isaiah 14, Hezekiah’s psalm in Isaiah 38, Jonah’s prayer in Jonah 2, Habakkuk’s song of praise and others. Many of these are so close in style to the Psalms that the move from one to the other is hardly noticeable.
Poets and Prophets
There’s a close relationship between psalmody and prophecy, too, and you can see it even in their form. Both come from a powerful inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Both take in the whole world of nature and history. Both see everything in the light of God’s Word. Both lead up to the proclamation of the Messiah’s kingdom. And both use the language and form of poetry.
When the psalmist is led into the mysteries of God’s will and counsel, he becomes a seer, a person who sees visions of the future. When the prophet’s soul is refreshed by God’s promises, his prophecy rises into poetry (1 Chron. 25:1-3). So Asaph is called a seer (2 Chron. 29:30), and in Acts 2:30 David, who wrote about half the psalms in the Book of Psalms, is called a prophet.
Every Psalm a Prayer
Still, despite similarities, psalms and prophecy aren’t identical, in either their development nor character. In the previous article, ‘Watchmen on the Walls’ we noted the rise of prophets both through schools of prophets and as individuals in particular circumstances.
The poetry of the Psalms was prepared for by the song of Miriam, the song of Moses (Deut. 32) and the psalm of Moses (Ps. 90). But it came into full flower after the worship of the Lord was revived under Samuel, in the psalms of David, the sweet singer of Israel (2 Sam. 23:1). David’s psalms set the basic patterns for all later psalm-writing, in the days of Solomon, Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah, and during and after the exile.
At the end of Psalm 72, all the psalms of David are called prayers. And that’s the defining feature of every psalm. They differ a lot from one another. Some are songs of praise and thanksgiving; others are laments and pleas. Some are hymns, some elegies, some prophetic and instructional. Some celebrate God’s works in nature, others his works in history. They speak of the past, the present and often the future. But underneath them all is the basic structure of prayer.
In prophecy the Holy Spirit seizes and moves a person; in psalmody the same Spirit leads the poet into the depths of his own spiritual life.
That’s the key difference. A personal spiritual state is always what prompts the psalmist’s song. But that state of soul has itself always been formed and moulded by the Spirit of the Lord.
The Strings of David’s Heart
David wouldn’t have been the sweet singer of Israel if he hadn’t been the man of striking character and rich experience that he was. His inner life, in all its variations of grief and anxiety, temptation and drive, persecution and rescue, became like the strings of an instrument. On those strings were played the melodies of God’s objective words and deeds: in nature and history, in institutions and preaching, in judgment and redemption.
What we hear in the Psalms, then, is a harmony between God’s objective revelation and his personal leading of the singer. It’s sung as in God’s presence and dedicated to his honour. It calls every creature to join in the song of praise, and it keeps singing until everything in heaven and on earth takes up its chords. That’s why, for every age and every generation, the Psalms are the richest expression of the deepest experiences the human soul has known.
Words for Our Own Lips
Here’s what that means for us. The Psalms teach us to put into words what goes on in our hearts in response to God’s revelation in Christ through the Spirit.
Because of this, the psalms were not only spoken by the psalmists themselves. They were also placed on the lips of the church in every age. When you pray a psalm today, in joy or in sorrow, you’re joining that long chorus, using words the Spirit shaped through one person’s life so that God’s people everywhere could make them their own.
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- 11 Sam. 18:7; 2 Sam. 19:35; Amos 6:5, and others. ↩︎