General Editor’s Preface

IT MAY BE THAT THE BOOK OF PSALMS IS THE most complete revelation in all of Christendom. What do I mean when I say a “complete revelation?” I mean that properly read, the 150 psalms touch every aspect of what it means to be fully human, created in the image of God. This commentary by Dennis Tucker and Jamie Grant shows that the Psalter tells the story of God working in the world and with humanity. Yet the psalms tell the story using one of our primary means of art: song. And, yes, there is a moral to each of the 150 mini-stories in David, Solomon, and others’ compositions, sometimes more than one. When you put the wisdom, art, and ethics of the psalms together it feels like one can almost reach out and touch God as our head, heart, and hands fade away in a wave of blissful relationship.

It may be that my sense of the completeness of the book of Psalms has a lot to do with my past experiences. The earliest thing I remember about Psalms is trying to memorize Psalm 23, “the LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing” (v. 1). I was not a great memorizer, but since I was the pastor’s son, after all, I was expected to show the way. I liked Psalm 23 very much, but I didn’t like the pressure of having to recite it from memory. I’m pretty sure my understanding of who God is, his sovereignty and glory, comes primarily from psalms like 41, “Praise be to the LORD, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting” (v. 13) and Psalm 72, “Praise be to the LORD God, the God of Israel, who alone does marvelous deeds” (v. 18). The musicality of the psalms surely was enhanced by my wife Frances’ beautiful piano renditions of psalm-based hymns from the Little Flock hymnbook, a reminder of her youth. And I will never forget the unique chanting-style of the psalms by the brothers at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, where we spent a year in sabbatical study.

The book of Psalms is complete in another way. It is both revelation—God’s words to us—and meditation—our words to God. Perhaps it was for this reason Martin Luther called the Psalter “The Little Bible,” a distillation of the Torah’s 613 commands down to the handful the psalmist emphasizes. There is a reason why the psalms are read every day in liturgies around the world. They are like public prayer conversations with God set to music. They can be read privately or corporately, but never without a two-way engagement with the author of our being.

When the psalms were written, their function was what Sigmund Mowinckel called “cultic,” referring to their use in worship as either praise or lament or thanksgiving. The wholeness and simplicity of that function in Old Testament times has been shattered and dispersed today. We talk about the psalms’ usefulness—what is of advantage to us. And we talk about the psychological, the sociological, and the philosophical (probably even the evolutionary) functions of the psalms. They are valuable, yes. They have “economic” worth to each of us, and to us as communities, they spread across the disciplines of life. Yet there must be more to it than that.

In the midst of this complexification of the psalms’ utility, something has been lost, something we might call the wholeness of the worship of God. And this is precisely what the Psalter can restore to us. When we read the psalms, God’s promises come alive. When we sing the psalms our hearts are filled with joy. God speaks through the psalms to our everyday burdens and cares. All of this is enhanced by learning more about the text we have before us. We read, then, this commentary with one eye on learning all we can, but with our other eye on being embraced by the wholeness of God’s amazing love.

—Terry C. Muck