The Psalms as Christian Praise

A Historical Commentary

Bruce K. Waltke, James M. Houston

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780802877024
• eBook ISBN:
  9781467457422
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Two respected scholars explore the heart of the Psalms

Following in the style of their companion volumes, The Psalms as Christian Worship and The Psalms as Christian Lament, Bruce Waltke and James Houston now explore the depths of Christian praise. Each volume uniquely blends verse-by-verse commentary with a history of Psalms interpretation in the church from the time of the apostles to the present.

Since praise is the essence of the book of Psalms, Waltke and Houston have narrowed the focus toBook IV of the Psalter (Psalms 90-106), which magnify God and proclaim him king. To give voice to the psalmist, the authors (carefully) translate and explain each psalm and summarize its theological message. This is followed by listening to the voice of godly churchmen whose comments have stood the test of time. The Psalms as Christian Praise is ideal for anyone seeking to better understand the praise of Israel as found in the Psalms and how Christians also use these Psalms in worship.

CHAPTER 1

The Psalms as Christian Praise

In the Preface we explain why we selected the psalms in Book IV of the Psalter to hear the voices of the inspired psalmist and of the church in response. To help us introduce this corpus, we rather flippantly employ Rudyard Kipling’s six honest serving-men: “I keep six honest serving-men/ (They taught me all I knew);/ Their names are What and Why and When/ And How and Where and Who.”

I. What: The Object of Praise, I AM

The Psalter petitions and praises Israel’s living God, YHWH—traditionally “the LORD” and in this volume rendered “I AM.” Psalm 99 has I AM as its first and last word, the alpha and the omega. God’s name occurs seven times in that psalm, and independent pronouns (not required in Hebrew) for I AM also occur seven times. In Scripture, the number seven symbolizes divine attributes and works (cf. Josh. 6:4).

A. Reflections on the Progressive Revelation of God

God progressively reveals himself to Israel, his adopted family, today identified as the church. When God called Moses to lead his people out of Egypt to the land that he promised the patriarchs, he patiently revealed his name. Names in the Bible commonly involve wordplay (association of a proper name with a similar-sounding word). Wordplay in the Pentateuch, according to Austin Surls, has four possible functions: commemoration (e.g. Cain, Gen. 4:1), anticipation (e.g., Noah, Gen. 5:29), description (e.g., Eve, Gen. 3:20) and renaming (e.g., Abraham, Gen. 17:5).¹ The parallelism of Exodus 3:14 and 3:15 implies that God explains his personal name YHWH (Exod. 3:15) by his sentence name: “I AM WHO I AM” or “I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE” (Exod. 3:13–14). Presumably, then, his name is descriptive (“He is”) or anticipatory (“He will be”). Janet Soskice has pointed out the Septuagint translated the sentence name by “I am the Being,” understanding “the metaphysical ultimacy of the Tetragrammaton of God as ‘Being Itself.’ ”² Her interpretation partially supports the traditional meaning “I AM WHO I AM.” Thus his name speaks of his eternal, unchanging Being. Israel’s God is an aseity; he is not a derivative of someone or something.

Austin Surls recently argued on the basis of Hebrew syntax that the sentence name means “I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE,” signifying anticipation—the progressive revelation of himself, not a description of his being.³ Thus Israel learned for the first time through I AM’s plagues on Pharaoh that the name signified his awesome power (see Exod. 6:1–4); and Israel learned through the Golden Calf incident of his amazing grace (Exod. 34:6; see Ps. 103:6–7). The more traditional interpretation, however, in addition to communicating his unchanging Being, also provokes the notion that he will progressively reveal who he is. Climactically, I AM revealed himself in his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, who convinces the world of Truth (John 4:24).

In the New Testament, I AM fully reveals himself as a Trinity: an ontological Trinity of three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and an economic Trinity with each person having a unique function.⁴ Today, the Father wants to be known by the name of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And so his church prays in the Son’s name to bring glory to the Father (John 14:13) and the apostles preached in his name (Acts 16:31). Paul taught, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord [Jesus] will be saved” (Rom. 10:13, cf. v. 9), a quotation from Joel 2:32[3:5]: “Everyone who calls on the name of I AM will be saved.” The apostle admonished the church: “Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts” (Col. 3:16, emphasis mine).

Providentially, the rabbis in the period of the Second Temple considered the Tetragrammaton too sacred to be pronounced and used synonyms for it, such as Adonai (“Lord”) and HaShem (“The Name”). As a result, the original pronunciation of YHWH was lost. We say “providentially,” because the change from worshiping with the personal name of YHWH to worshiping with the personal name of Jesus Christ would otherwise have been too abrupt. The title, “the Lord,” however, could readily be applied to both the Father and the Son.

In his scholarly history of the Tetragrammaton, Robert J. Williamson has shown how the understanding of Jesus as “I AM” is first expressed by Justin Martyr and then the Alexandrines, and so to Augustine of Hippo.⁵ Augustine as a worldly rhetorician had profoundly misused the name of God. But after his radical conversion, as he narrates in his Confessions and later develops in his commentaries on the Psalms, the praise of God’s name continued to change him for the rest of his life. His opening lines of the Confessions voice all our need of praise to I AM: “Man, a little piece of your creations, desires to praise you, a human being ‘bearing his mortality with him’ (2 Cor. 4:10), carrying with him the witness of his sin and the witness that you ‘resist the proud’ (1 Pet. 5:5). Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. . . . Have mercy so that I may find words.”⁶

“Finding words” was no problem for a rhetorician, but finding “the right words” of divine praise was an epistemological quandary for Augustine. For how could he search for God if he did not yet know who or what he was searching for? How could he praise God if he did not know how to call upon him? How could he praise God if God is beyond all knowing, or name him without misnaming him? Like Moses, Augustine realized that it must first be God who called him, even though he was enjoined to call upon God—“speak to me so that I may hear.”⁷ But such a prayer is already a gift of God, a gift of faith, a gift of speech. We too, as we take up this gifted task of praise, join in Augustine’s prayer: “My faith, Lord, calls upon you. It is your gift to me. You breathed it into me by the humanity of your Son, by the ministry of your preachers.”⁸ As Janet Martin Soskice so beautifully concludes: “This speaking of God, made possible because God first speaks to us, opens for us not only the possibility of praise but of our true sociality, our true and truthful use of the shared possession that is speech.”⁹

B. Reflections on Kingship

It is fitting that a commentary focusing on the theme “I AM is King” elucidate the notion of kingship.

A king is a male ruler, usually among competitors, of a major territorial unit such as a city or a nation. In the biblical world, kings were invested with supreme authority by virtue of their ability to lead, especially in war and in the administration of justice.¹⁰ Also, the king is a builder: of temples (1 Kings 6–8),¹¹ palaces (7:1–8) and even cities (12:25).¹² Psalm 93 praises the divine King as a warrior, judge, and builder, but it intersects and magnifies these qualities. Indeed, as a warrior he is mightier even than the wild fury of raging seas (vv. 3–4); as a judge, he even decrees laws (v. 5); and as a builder, he established the earth-disc so firmly that it cannot be toppled (v. 1). Indeed, as will be argued in our chapter on Psalm 98, the psalms that proclaim “I AM is King” or praise him as such are “Divine Warrior victory songs” (see pp. 216–17).

A king’s ability to lead depends on his noble qualities: strength, justice, majesty, and longevity (cf. Isa. 11:2–5; Ps. 45:3[4]).¹³ I AM possesses these virtues in an incomparable way. He may be compared to a human king, but no human king compares to him (cf. Jer. 10:6). Psalm 93 lauds both his majesty, which is redefined as strength (vv. 1, 3–4) and justice (v. 5). As for longevity, he is from the “eternal” past (v. 2) to “endless days” (v. 5).

C. General Praise and Grateful Praise

Praise is the essential gift of worship. Daniel Block declares: “True worship involves reverential acts of human submission and homage before the divine Sovereign in response to his gracious revelation of himself and in accord with his will.”¹⁴ Praise involves enthusiastic and joyful acclaim to God for his sublime characteristics and his saving deeds.

The Chronicler speaks in terms of two kinds of praising: “to praise” (hallēl) and “to give grateful praise” (hôdôt) (1 Chr. 16:4). The former, whose nominal derivative is t^ehillâ (“praise”), is a joyful response to God’s sublime essence and/or to the magnalia Dei—his might acts—such as the creation and the exodus. It is often called a hymn. The latter, whose nominal derivative is tôdâ (“grateful praise”), is the joyful response to God’s saving act in particular, such as to his answering a petition. Westermann notes, “The profane use of the two verbs indicates . . . that [hallēl, “praise”] is the reaction to an essence, [hôdôt, “give grateful praise”] the response to an action or a behavior.”¹⁵ “Thanksgiving” is the impoverished traditional gloss of Hebrew hōdâ. Indeed, all words are “clumsy bricks.” The derivative tôdâ, unlike English “thanksgiving,” always occurs in a group, never in private, and it finds fulfillment in expressing what God has done, not in the saying of “thank you.”¹⁶ The two terms for praise, however, overlap, because God’s nature expresses itself in saving acts. Moreover, “grateful praise” may also refer to the so-called peace sacrifice/offering that accompanied the words. Of the noun’s thirty-two occurrences, it refers to the sacrifice thirteen times (cf. z^ebaḥ tôdâ, “the sacrifice of grateful praise,” Pss. 107:22; 116:17; or simply tôdâ, Ps. 56:12[13]; 2 Chr. 29:31).¹⁷ So grateful praise psalms function as a libretto to accompany the grateful praise sacrifice. This interpretation finds support in Jeremiah 33:11, which speaks of “the rejoicing voices of those who bring grateful praise offerings to the house of I AM.”

II. Why Praise

We are not expecting the answer “because he is good.” We will come to that later. Rather, we are asking: “Why praise God at all?” Several answers come to mind and are given here without regard to their relative importance.

A. Praise Is Right and Fitting

The Christian liturgy historically prepares for the celebration of the Eucharist with this preface (or a variation thereof):

• Priest: “Let us give thanks to I AM, our God.”
• People: “It is right to give him thanks and praise.”
• Priest: “It is right, and a good and joyful thing.”

The psalmist agrees: “How pleasant and fitting to praise him” (147:1).

C. S. Lewis confesses that for som...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Psalms as Christian Praise
• 2. Psalm 90: The Voice of Chastened Wisdom
• 3. Psalm 91: The Messiah’s Invulnerability and Invincibility
• 4. Psalm 92:You Are on High Forever, I AM!
• 5. Psalm 93: I AM’s Throne and the Earth Stand Firm
• 6. Psalm 95: Venite
• 7. Psalm 96: The King Comes to Establish Justice
• 8. Psalm 97: His Chariots of Wrath the Deep Thunderclouds Form
• 9. Psalm 98: A Divine Warrior Victory Song
• 10. Psalm 99: Holy Is He
• 11. Psalm 100: Jubilate Deo
• 12. Psalm 103: Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven
• 13. Psalm 104: A Very Great God
• Glossary
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture References