Media service providers love to bundle–TV, internet, land lines. Why do some Old Testament scholars deny God that privilege? God bundles. Psalms can be grouped according to themes. This is not news. But God does more than repeat themes and scatter them throughout Psalms. He loves to string psalms like pearls on a single strand.
The major thread running through Psalms is the story of God’s Son, especially what happened to him on the cross. When God foretells a story centuries before its occurrence, the foretelling is called prophecy.
Acts 2:23 this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. (ESV)
25 For David says concerning him, “‘I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken;
30 Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, 31 he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption.
Acts 13:36 For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep and was laid with his fathers and saw corruption,
Why did God prophesy the events of his Son’s life centuries before they occurred? I can think of a few reasons. Perhaps collectively we can think of more:
- to prove the presence of the supernatural
- to provide supernatural credentials for his incarnate (born as a human) Son
- to provide a road map of education and warning for the Son’s journey through human existence
- to prepare a people ready to receive his Son
- to bolster the faith of his Son during a very rocky ride
- to bolster the vision and understanding of the first disciples, the first followers of Christ
- to bolster the faith of the first disciples-turned-missionaries
- to convince all that God is for us, not against us, as we discover that the very human voice of the psalmist is my voice, and your voice, and the voice of people everywhere
God told the events ahead of time, so that we who were to follow could see, understand, and believe.
Why poetry? Why write prophecy as poems? Is there a better media than poetry to convince us “stubborn of heart” people that Christ, God’s chosen and anointed, was and is every bit as human as we are? Poems can be a subjectively accurate display of the heart, feelings, mind, and thoughts of the person speaking them.
God loves people so much that he sent himself in the person of his Son to bring life to us–to raise us from the dead. And with his Son, even before his Son’s arrival, he sent these magnificent poems to display the utter humanity of his Son in a way that an itinerant preacher/healer could not do in real time. Think of Jesus and his disciples so pressed upon by the anxious crowds that they had time neither to eat nor sleep. Think about the thousands of people Jesus healed, the thousands (?) of miles they walked, the hundreds of sermons he preached in three years, the hours and hours of private praying he did. Who would be there to write down his meditations and prayers? God provided. He sent a prophet-poet named David centuries ahead of time to record the thoughts, feelings, and prayers of his yet-to-be-incarnated Son. In this way God foretold the life of his Son.
Who in the culture of that day would have expected that God’s Son, his anointed, the mighty King to be (see Psalms 2 and 110), would live a life of poverty and suffering? Who in their wildest dreams would even dare to imagine that God would reject his Son unto death? Who would possibly dare to claim that the nakedly shamed and beaten Jesus of Nazareth was…Messiah? Impossible! No one but God would think these things. Therefore God predicted in advance through the prophecies of Psalms and other books, such as that written by Isaiah, so that at the right moment, we could recognize the divine Christ in his human form when he came.
In the voice of the suffering psalmist, I hear my own voice. As I do, I realize the fact that God ultimately wrote these words and included them in his book. This tells me that just as God sees the psalmist, God sees me, he sees you, he loves me, and he loves you. And just as the psalmist turned to God through all his trials, cried out to him for help, and praised him, God wants me to do the same. God is love.
God truly is love.
Amen Michele! Thanks for writing.