The Psalms: Our Language of Prayer
A little background on the Psalms, and why they are so integral to our prayer lives
Orientation, Disorientation, and Reorientation
Last week, hundreds of thousands of people were without power and electricity for several days across Northern California. It’s currently peak wildfire season, and in an effort to prevent power lines sparking during a windy few days, a major utility company made the difficult decision to cut power in our area. Honestly, it was difficult not to be frustrated during those couple of days — with all the throwing food out of the fridge (and thinking about local businesses who would lose so much money, or families who can’t afford to lose what food they have), stumbling around a dark house with headlamps and candles, showering at a friend’s house who was fortunate enough to have hot water, having to charge my phone in my car, and being without internet access.
You'd have thought that a lack of electricity would have been an encouragement to enjoy being unplugged and unhindered by the distraction of screens for a few days (especially after our recent post on Practices of Resistance!), but I mostly felt oddly disoriented and on edge. Being stuck in darkness for a few days had a disorienting effect on my mind, body, and spirit.
Walter Brueggeman writes about this idea of disorientation in his book Praying the Psalms. He suggests that our faith moves through three phases: “(a) being securely oriented; (b) being painfully disoriented; (c) being surprisingly reoriented” (p. 2). We long for the security of a sense of “equilibrium,” when things feel settled and normal—such as having full access to power, electricity, running water, and internet. While there are some Psalms that reflect this season of secure orientation, but a majority of the Psalms are laments, cries out to God when we experience disorientation. Something throws us off — loss, illness, anxiety, relational distress, natural disaster, political turmoil, brokenness in the world around us — and we need a language that articulates those seasons to God. Brueggeman writes, “People are driven to such poignant prayer and song as are found in the Psalter by experiences of dislocation and relocation. It is experiences of being overwhelmed, nearly destroyed, and surprisingly given life that empower us to pray and sing” (p. 3).
Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a look at the Psalms from a theological lens, exploring the historical context and original intent behind them (what nerdy theologians call “exegesis”), and what the words of the Psalms mean for us today in our own spiritual lives and communities (the process of interpretation called “hermeneutics”). We love getting the chance to study and share what we’re learning with you! But we also want to present practical ways we can engage the Psalms in prayer to God, so we’ll include prayer experiences and practices we’ve come across. Along the way, Bryan and I will share how the Psalms have been formative in our own faith journeys, and how they’ve revealed the heart of Jesus to us.
So let’s start with a little background and context!
What are the Psalms?
John Calvin called the Psalms “an anatomy of all parts of the soul,” and that contained within them are "all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated" in his commentary on the Psalter. Luther called the Psalms a “little bible” and a handbook for our prayer lives. Eugene Peterson even wrote that in order to mature in our faith and “to glorify God with our entire heart, mind, soul, and strength, the Psalms are necessary.” He reminds us that any language — including the language of prayer — is learned, and the Psalms are how we learn to speak the language of prayer.
The Psalms are a collection of 150 poems, songs, and prayers written over hundreds of years by a multitude of authors (including King David, the Sons of Korah, Asaph, Moses, and various anonymous psalmists), and finally compiled into what we have today in our Bibles. They are the prayers and worship songs of ancient Israel, given to God, then given back to us from God in the scriptures. This mysterious part of the Psalms really amazes me — that prayers and worship offered up to Yahweh would be heard and received, then given back to us as His precious Word. To me, this communicates that my prayers matter so deeply to God, and it stirs within me the beautiful words of Psalm 63:1-4:
“O GOD, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands” (ESV).
Each Psalm varies in its origin and context, but it took several hundred years for the entire Psalter to be written, compiled and arranged. During the first few centuries A.D., the Psalms were arranged and divided into five different books to mirror the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), known as the Torah, or law:
Book I: 1-41
Book II: 42-72
Book III: 73-89
Book IV: 90-106
Book V: 107-150
Each of the five books in the Psalms also ends in a doxology, offering praise to Yahweh (Psalm 41:13; 72:18-19; 89:52; 106:48; and 150:6). A few decades ago, two guys with awesome names, Hermann Gunkel and Simon Mowinkel (not to be confused with Simon and Garfunkel, though they were psalmists of a different kind!), studied the Psalms and began to categorize them into different patterns. They noticed four main types of Psalms: Individual Praise, Communal Praise, Individual Laments, and Communal Laments. In addition to these major types of Psalms are minor types, such as wisdom Psalms (teaching us how to live the good, virtuous, flourishing life) and creation psalms (proclaiming the wonders of the Creator God). There are penitential psalms, supplying words to cry out to God for mercy. There are the Psalms of Ascent, sung communally as the people of Israel ascended the hill to Jerusalem several times a year for feasts and festivals.
The Psalms hold a unique place within not only the Old Testament, but the New Testament as well. The Psalms are the most quoted Old Testament book in the entire New Testament (more than 50 times!), and they deeply shaped the prayer life of Jesus. When He was on the cross, it was the opening of Psalm 22 that He uttered in His anguish: “At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ Which means, ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Mark 15:34). And then, His last words on the cross came from Psalm 31:5 when he prayed, “'Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!'” (Luke 23:46)
Learning the Language of Prayer
Jesus’ last prayers on the cross show us something significant: if we want to learn the language of prayer, we need look no further than the words of the Psalms. Eugene Peterson wrote that prayers are the “primary technology” in the “enterprise of being human” that God uses to shape, form, and collaborate with us, and the Psalms are the toolbox (Answering God, 2).
The Psalms teach us how to pray.
What do we pray for? How do we pray? What kinds of circumstances are valid to bring before the throne of God? How do we pray when life isn't going well and feels out of control? Is it okay to express anger in front of God, or even to express our anger towards Him?
As we journey through the Psalms, we will see that all of life can be brought into God’s presence and lifted up to Him. The prayers of the psalmists are honest, raw, and vulnerable—and sometimes even uncomfortable (take a look at Psalm 137, and you’ll see what I mean!). But the Psalms teach us how to take these experiences and emotions, no matter what they are, and lay them before a God who is faithful to hear us and respond in love toward us.
For centuries, followers of Jesus have been amazed at how the Psalms truly are an “anatomy of the soul,” as Calvin put it. Church father Athanasius wrote in the 4th century, “It is my view that in the words of this book the whole human life, its basic spiritual conduct as well its occasional movements and thoughts, is comprehended and contained. Nothing to be found in human life is omitted” (Ad Marcillenum).
Luther wrote, “The Psalter is the book of the saints; and everyone, in whatever situation he may be, finds in that situation psalms and words that fit his case, that suit him as if they were put there just for his sake, so that he could not put it better than himself, or find or wish for anything better” (Word and Sacrament I, pp. 255-256).
Hundreds of years later, C.S. Lewis wrote in Reflections on the Psalms, “There I find an experience fully God-centered, asking of God no gift more urgently than His presence, the gift of Himself, joyous to the highest degree, and umistakably real. What I see (so to speak) in the faces of these old poets taels me more about the God whom they and we adore” (p. 52).
Then, Eugene Peterson quoted Trappist monk Thomas Merton: “[the Psalms] represent the experience of men and women who have prayed in every conceivable circumstance across thirty centuries. ’The psalms acquire, for those who know how to enter into them, a surprising depth, a marvelous and inexhaustible actuality. They are bread, miraculously provided by Christ, to feed those who have followed Him into the wilderness’ (Thomas Merton)” (Praying with the Psalms).
The Psalms teach us how to live.
Everything becomes a context for prayer. Every circumstance, every emotion in included here. Not just a good, not just the bad, not just the extraordinary, but everything—and what the Psalms are trying to teach us is that prayer is more than just a spiritual activity that we do, more than something we tack onto daily bible reading, more than just a spiritual discipline. Prayer is a way of life as it becomes integrated into our everyday reality.
There is an old Christian phrase that in the Latin says “lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi,” which means: “The way we worship and pray, shapes the way we believe, which shapes how we live.” What we pray for, becomes what we believe, which ultimately becomes how we live.
As the Psalms teach us the language of prayer, they show us the way of life. The final form of the Psalter’s arrangement into five books that represent the Torah is intentional. It is meant to communicate that the Psalms provide instruction for how to live the life God intends for us. (We’ll share more on this in our next post on Psalm 1, so stay tuned!)
The Psalms continue to surprise me, and as we journey together through them, I think they’ll surprise you, too! Follow along with us over the next few weeks, and check out our Instagram and Facebook accounts as we share ways to engage the Psalms in prayer. We’ll start with a look at Psalm 1 and how it acts as the entry gate into the entire Psalter. Then, we’ll look at several other Psalms — there are so many favorites, it’ll be hard to choose! If you need a few suggestions of Psalms to read over the next few weeks, check out Psalm 8, 16, 22, 23, 37, 40, 42, 46, 63, 91, 121, 126, and 139.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
Need a few book recommendations on the Psalms? Here are a few favorites:
Out of the Depths, Bernhard Anderson
Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Praying the Psalms: Engaging Scripture and the Life of the Spirit, Walter Brueggeman
Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer, Eugene Peterson
Praying with the Psalms: A Year of Daily Prayers and Reflections on the Words of David, Eugene Peterson