The Lord of the Psalms

Patrick D. Miller

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780664239275
• eBook ISBN: 9781611643558
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In seven readable chapters, renowned scholar Patrick D. Miller delves into the biblical book of Psalms. Miller explores what the psalms can teach us about God, our relationship to God, and what God wants for us. He tackles over a dozen of the most beloved psalms that explore themes of God's existence; creation and redemption; praise and thanksgiving; and grace, mercy, and justice. He approaches the material in various ways, sometimes focusing on what a particular psalm can tell us, other times examining one theme that flows through several psalms. Miller offers a fresh reading of the psalms that will help the reader better understand God in worship and prayer.

Chapter One

The Reality of God

Years ago, just before I began my teaching ministry, Mary Ann and I spent several months in Israel. During that time I would regularly walk down the street to a news vendor, buy a copy of Time magazine, and try to catch up with the world news and what was going on back home. I can still remember the day in April—it was the Easter season—when I made my usual walk to get the weekly copy; as I picked it up, I was quite taken aback. There was—for the first time in the history of the magazine—no picture on the cover. Instead there was only a black cover with the words “Is God Dead?”¹

I was not the only person startled at this Easter cover. That cover and the accompanying story received more reader response than any story in the history of the magazine to that point—at least a sign that theological issues are not unimportant to many people. I expect it was also an indication that the issue posed in the question and the discussion of it touched a nerve in many people, Christian and non-Christian, persons who believe in God and persons who do not.

The article reflected an extensive theological debate going on in the 1960s as to whether God or the notion of God—and both ways of putting the matter were in view—is dead. That debate, widely publicized in a way not usually the case for theological matters, is past, at least as a public phenomenon and item of news. But the question raised and the claims asserted in the debate have been around for a long time in some form or another, and they still persist among many persons as nagging but serious questions. Is God a reality, one with which we have to deal, or not? Is God real?

The Psalms are so clear and articulate, so frequent and expansive in their praise and proclamation of the Lord and the Lord’s way, that it may seem to be an unasked or irrelevant question as to whether or not God is real and present in the world. At the same time, it might be argued that nowhere else in the Bible does one find questions about that reality so frequent and articulate and so tied to the human condition as in the Psalms. Of course, the customary place for pursuit of this issue is usually in either Job or Ecclesiastes, and not without good reason. What is particularly noticeable or characteristic of the Psalms is the juxtaposition of the extravagant claims and the deep doubts—often in verses right next to each other—doubts not raised in intellectual reflection but in the depths of despair and anguish. It seems appropriate, therefore, to begin our thinking about the Lord of the Psalms by seeing how and why the psalmist confronts the reality of God and what that engagement contributes to our understanding of the theology of the Psalms. I am going to do that via two theological issues: the existence of God and the knowledge of God.

The Existence of God

As a way into the matter, let us look at the perspectives of three different groups represented or illustrated in different psalms but clearly interacting with one another. Those different groups are (1) the foolish, the group least present in an explicit sense in the Psalms, but they are there; (2) the enemy or the wicked, and they are hard to distinguish and often present; and (3) the suffering praying one, whose voice is probably the loudest and most widespread of any other.

If we start with the fool, the nābāl, we encounter a member of the community well known in Proverbs and elsewhere but less present in the Psalms. In fact, the nābāl appears in only four psalms [14 = 53; 39; 74]. In two of them, Psalms 39 and 74, the fool is identified as one who utters scorn or scoff (ḥerpâ). In Psalm 39, the praying one says: “Deliver me from all my transgressions. Do not make me the scorn of the fool” (v. 8). In Psalm 74, one of the community laments that complains to God over the absence of divine intervention to help the people against a powerful enemy, the fool appears twice, once as “a foolish nation,” that is, the enemy (vv. 18 AT, 22). And the scoffing or taunting is mentioned a third time, again with reference to the enemy. In Psalm 39 the scoffing is directed toward the suffering psalmist. Psalm 74, however, has each instance referring to scorning or taunting God. Ultimately there is no difference, it would seem, particularly when we ask, What is the nature of this taunt or the scoffing voice of the fool, who is seen to be an echo of what the enemy says, and vice versa? The clearest answer to that comes from the one other psalm where the fool appears. It is Psalm 14 [= 53] with its familiar opening verse: “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’” That such an assumption is at the heart of the taunt of fool and enemy is confirmed when one hears the psalmist in Psalm 42 complain: “My adversaries taunt me, while they say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’” (v. 10). Likewise in Psalm 10 the praying one says:

In the pride of their countenance the wicked say,

“God will not seek it out”;

All their thoughts are, “There is no God.” (v. 4)

The fool is not finally different from the enemy or from the wicked. In both instances, the taunt against God is a conviction, a view of reality that is held within the heart and mind. Several times in Psalm 10, one of the powerful complaint psalms of the Psalter, we hear what the wicked/enemy/fool really believes in the heart (vv. 6, 11, 13). We shall come back to these, but first a look at the basic conviction of the fool = wicked. “There is no god” is not a philosophical or ontological statement. Thus ʾēn ʾĕlōhîm means simply God is not present, God is not here (10:4). When we read that “Sarah was barren” (ʾēn lāh wālād, Gen. 11:30), the text simply tells us she had no child. Children were abundant, but not with Sarah. Similarly, ʾēn kesep means “There is no money,” but the point is that the speaker doesn’t have any. So the fool’s claim is that God is not around and need not be accounted for.

After that initial assumption or conviction, Psalm 14 goes on as follows:

They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds;

there is no one who does good.

The LORD looks down from heaven on humankind

to see if there are any who are wise,

who seek after God.

They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse;

there is no one who does good,

no, not one.

Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers

who eat up my people as they eat bread,

and do not call upon the LORD? (vv. 1b–4)

It is clear why the foolish one says in her heart, “There is no God.” It is because there is total corruption, nothing but abominable deeds. There are only evil and injustice. There are none that “seek after God,” an expression that surely must be understood in the context of the prophetic message of Amos, where the people are called to “seek the LORD and live,” an instruction that is then spelled out: “Seek good and not evil, that you may live,” and “Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate,” that is, in the courts (5:14–15). So also Psalm 24 describes the “company of those who seek him” as “those who have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false, and do not swear deceitfully” (vv. 4, 6). As the basis for the fool’s claim that there is no God, Psalm 14 sets the evidence that there is no good or that there is no one who does good. In other words, no good means no god.

The point is underscored in spades in the interior thoughts of the wicked in Psalm 10:

“He [God] does not call to account.” …

“There is no God.” (v. 4 AT)

They [the wicked] say in their heart,

“I shall never be shaken, (v. 6a AT)

through all time never be in trouble.” (v. 6b NJPS)

They [the wicked] say in their heart, (v. 11a AT)

“God has forgotten, he has hidden his face, he will never see it.”

(v. 11b)

Why do the wicked renounce God,

and say in their hearts,

“You will not call us to account?” (v. 13)

What is clear from both psalms is that the claim “There is no God” or “God is not here” arises on two grounds:

1. All the indications that God is not present. That is, God is hidden, God’s face is hidden, God is nowhere around. God has forgotten. God does not see. God hides. God stands afar off: “Your judgments are on high, out of their sight.” (Ps. 10:5; various of these expressions occurring in the two psalms).
2. God is either not powerful in the situation or does not exercise any power to do anything in the face of wickedness, evil, oppression, and injustice. “You will not call to account.” “Through all time I shall never be in trouble,” says the fool or wicked. God does not do anything against the wicked to stop the evil or the wicked. The conclusion therefore is obvious: For all intents and purposes, there is no God.

What I think we hear in these psalms and elsewhere is that the question about God—or the assumption of no God, God is gone, dead, and so forth—was very real in Israel. That question is present in the questions of the psalmic complaint prayers as at the beginning of Psalm 13:

How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I bear pain in my soul?

and have sorrow in my heart all day long?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

In Psalms 14 and 53 and Psalm 10, however, the wicked or foolish have no questions about God. They already know the answer. They have worked it out pragmatically, scientifically, in a sense. Look at the evidence. They are able to carry out their evil and oppressive deeds without anything happening to them. No one is there to call them to account.

Their ways prosper at all times. (10:5)

They seize the poor and drag them off in their net.

They stoop, they crouch,

and the helpless fall by their might. (10:9–10)

Or in Psalm 94:6–7:

They kill the widow and the stranger,

they murder the orphan,

and they say, “The LORD does not see.”

It would be a mistake, however, to take these assumptions about God’s absence and noninvolvement as confined to the interior thoughts of wicked and foolish persons who get away with murder (literally and metaphorically). The psalms we are talking about are either all or in part laments. They are cries for help and expressions of Israelites’ despair and anguish before God in the face of oppression and injustice. That the question about God and God’s reality was not confined to the foolish and wicked is evident in several ways.

1. The depiction of the human situation in Psalm 14—“They are corrupt…. There is no one who does good, no, not a single one” (vv. 1, 4 AT)—is as much the perception of the psalmist as it is of the fool or wicked. It is the psalmist who sees a situation where evil runs rampant, where there is no sign of the presence of God and no resistance to the total evil that suggests the presence and power of God.

2. Second, we need to recognize that the many quotations of the thoughts and the words of the wicked and foolish in these prayer psalms are a way of indirectly expressing the conclusions of the psalmist herself in the face of the reality of the current situation. As Rolf Jacobson has noted in his study of the quotations in the Psalms, “The psalmist could quote the enemy [as] uttering genuine assertions of God’s powerlessness because the act of quoting dissociates the psalmist from the responsibility for this assertion.”² Implicitly they are what the psalmist sees as well but does not express so directly.

3. Still, and this is where the psalmist’s own voice comes into the picture, the sentiments articulated so directly and crassly in the thoughts of the wicked and foolish come to life in the words of the psalmists, but they do so in direct address to God, both in questions and in challenges. Thus in letting go of God, the psalmist does not let go of G...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Reality of God
• Chapter 2: God among the Gods
• Chapter 3: The Body of God
• Chapter 4: Maker of Heaven and Earth
• Chapter 5: “To Glorify Your Name”
• Chapter 6: Tender Mercies
• Chapter 7: The First Catechism Question and the Theology of the Psalter
• Notes
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index