Today I was reading the Book of Psalms on the train. This book is about prayer. I learn to pray with this book. Psalmists prayed to God, and their prayers became part of the canon. Their prayers became the Word of God. Their cries, soul-longings, and prayers became the inspiration of others, like us, through the illumination of the Spirit. The way they articulated their inner voices and struggles helps us articulate ours. We don’t always have to find a new way to articulate our faith. Rather, we can go back to the ancient ways through which all these sinners and saints prayed to God in their time and space. “The Psalms mirror the human soul. We look into them, and we see ourselves.”[1] The language of the Psalms is the language of human souls.
The Book of Psalms is not primarily concerned about theology. It’s about doxology in specific time and space. Or I should say that the Book of Psalms is not so much concerned about sound orthodoxy and proper theology. It’s concerned about lived theology. All these sinners and saints tried to seek God in their contexts. They didn’t try to say everything right. They didn’t try to protect their faith from being adulterated. They just sought a better approach to live out their faith and encounter their God in their time and space. They didn’t want to be minimized by their surroundings. Rather, they wanted to magnify their God. They attempted to maximize their trust and faith in God through their cries and prayers.
In other words, the psalmists sought God’s presence in their lives. They put doxology into living. Their lived theology is not about being right. It’s about praise and thanksgiving, struggle and prayer, and waiting and living. Their lived theology allowed them to embrace failure and confusion. Otherwise, it’s not lived theology, but theology in a vacuum.
“Abstract theology is not found in the Bible. The whole Bible dresses truth about God in the context of our relationship with him...The Psalms give us theology written in intimate relationship with God and in close touch with life.”[2]
Whenever theology is apart from a particular space and time, it’s clean and secure. But it’s not Christian theology, for Christian theology is grounded in the incarnation of the Son whose birth, ministry, death, and resurrection happened in particular time and space. His birth place was messy in the manger. His ministry was filled with sorrow and rejection (Isa. 53:3). He embraced the hatred of others and the violent death with open hands. The resurrection of the body emptied the tomb that was blocked by a big stone. Christ contextualized the gospel as the first-century Good News. And the Holy Spirit has helped God’s people to contextualize and re-contextualize this first-century gospel into our own.
When we read the Psalms, we learn to hear our voices and embrace our own failure and confusion. In Psalm 119, it’s the longest psalm in the Psalms. In this psalm, the psalmist craved for God’s laws.
“I will study you’re your commandments and reflect on your ways” (119:15).
“I will delight in your principles and not forget your word” (119:16).
“Open my eyes to see the wonderful truths in your law” (119:18).
In some verses, we see that the psalmist didn’t love God’s laws and pray the prayer in a vacuum. It all happened in a hostile environment. He prayed in a certain way because of his surroundings—local people and local events.
“Though the wicked hide along the way to kill me, I will quietly keep my mind on your decrees” (119:95).
“My life constantly hangs in the balance, but I will not stop obeying your law” (119:109).
“Rescue me from the oppression of evil people; then I can obey your commandments” (119:134).
At the end of the psalm, this is how he ended:
“I have wandered away like a lost sheep; come and find me, for I have not forgotten your commands” (119:176).
The psalmist was lost—totally lost. He couldn’t even find a way in life. That’s why he prayed, “Come and find me.” The reason why he prayed “Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light for my path” (119:105) is because he was lost, and he knew that the Torah was his road map in the midst of lostness. He prayed this prayer not in a vacuum, but in a particular time and space—his lost time and lost space. He confessed that he was lost. He prayed for God’s seeking. This was his condition; it may be our condition as well.
“The Psalms were born from life struggles, and they speak to people who struggle today. They also arose from people who had experienced liberation from struggle, and so we find expression to our joy when God liberates us from oppression.”[3]
“And I, the Son of Man, have come to seek and save those like him who are lost,” said Jesus. (Lk. 19:10)
When we read the Psalms, we enter into the Psalmists’ inner voice that will become an inviting voice—we are invited to articulate our feelings and thoughts to God and relate to Him in reality. The Book of Psalms is a record about how to experience God in a way that we can be freed from proper theology and freed for lived theology in which we seek a way to live out our faith with our feet on the ground. This book gives us the language that we need and invites us to use its language to talk to God.
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