Psalms

Psalm 34 is an acrostic. In Hebrew, the first word of each verse starts with successive letters of the alphabet. So, if this were English, verse 1 would start with A, verse 2 would start with B, and so on.

At Trinity Church, we’ve been preaching through Book 1 of the Psalms (that is, Psalms 1-41) from Easter until the end of August. We won’t have had time to preach on all of them; we’ve had 18 weeks, so there will have been time to preach on just under half of them. Nevertheless, we thought it would serve the church better to preach selected psalms from the first book, rather than a selection dotted across the whole psalter.

Here's a detail I've just noticed, and rather love.

Psalm 95:7 in the NIV reads as follows:

"For he is our God
and we are the people of his pasture
and the flock under his care."

Take that phrase "flock under his care" and look more closely.

וְצֹ֣אן יָד֑וֹ

Literally "the flock of his hand".

I wrote a longer post in 2010 that gave some thoughts on the book of Psalms and how we read them.

Today, I've been working on some notes to equip our small group leaders to lead a Bible study in Psalm 31. This comes as part of a series of Bible studies that look at passages that speak on the theme of prayer.

So often, when you read a commentary on part of the Bible you're studying, you have pages and pages of material but the commentator doesn't seem to be puzzling over the same details of the passage as you are.

How refreshing when the commentator asks exactly the questions you were asking, and has some very sensible things to say.

Psalm 33:3 says this:

Sing to him a new song; play skilfully, and shout for joy.

Note the three ingredients here of how we are instructed to sing to God.

I feel prompted to post part of Psalm 2 this morning

¹ Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
² The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,
³ “Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.”

That is one of the most fruitful questions I've asked of this familiar Psalm.

As I explained about a year ago, the book of Psalms is not 150 prayers and hymns in random order. It's sometimes hard to know exactly what conclusions we should draw from the order the Psalms are in, but that they have been carefully arranged is beyond doubt.

As I look at Psalm 6, in preparation for this coming Sunday evening, I went back to visit a blog post by Adrian Reynolds over at The Proclaimer.

He says this, which is very helpful indeed:

I love this quotation from Gerard Wilson (paid link). He's commenting on Psalm 5.

By relentless goodness I mean that from the beginning, God’s only intent was and still is to bless his creation. Judgement and mercy, therefore, are not two competing characteristics of Yahweh but are two inseparable consequences of his holiness. Relentless goodness is the flip side of incompatibility with evil. (Page 167)