The Prayerbook of the Bible

The Psalms are a prayerbook, the prayerbook of the Scriptures. They contain multitudes. Athanasius of Alexandria said that the Psalms are like a garden, containing things of all kinds. What he means is that the Psalms contain every part of the Scriptures: the Torah/law, the prophets, and the rest of what we call the Old Testament. The whole of Scripture is contained in this little garden. 

But the Psalms are an odd book to find in the Bible. The Psalms are a book of prayers and that’s precisely what makes it odd. Why? Because the Bible is the Word of God to us. But prayers by definition are human words to God. 

And yet the Psalms are included in Scripture which is God’s word to us. The Psalms are odd because they are both the word of God to us and also the words of humans to God. How can our words to God also be God’s own word to us?

Who Prays the Psalms?

The only way to understand this is through Jesus. In the incarnation God becomes human. Jesus is simultaneously God and human, never separated but always at one and the same time. So, in Jesus’ mouth the words of human beings (the Psalms) become the word of God. When Jesus speaks it is simultaneously a human word and a divine word.

In this way the Psalms are pure grace. In Jesus, God has made his way to us and then also made our way back to him possible.

T.F. Torrance calls “the double movement of the Incarnation.” Jesus is both God’s word to us and our word back to God. We can see the double movement everywhere within Scripture.

Take the prophets. The Word of God comes to Israel by way of the prophets: “And the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah/Ezekiel/Hosea/etc.” But then that same word that came through the prophets to Israel is then offered back to God by Israel in the Psalms.

The word coming down to us from God and the word going back up from us to God is the same word. It is Jesus of Nazareth.

Which means that we can only speak to God in and with Jesus. He is our way back to God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it like this:

“It is not simply a religious given that we can come to God in prayer but rather is made possible alone through Christ. No prayer can find the way to God that our intercessor Jesus Christ does not himself pick up and pray for us, that is not prayed in the name of Jesus Christ.”

This is simple if we slow down over it. How do most of us typically end our prayers? Not in our own name, but “in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.” Our way to God is not in our own name, but in his. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through him (John 14:6).

But this means that the only true way to pray the Psalms is in the name of Jesus. Bonhoeffer makes this argument in his wonderful little book on the Psalms:

“It is a great grace that God tells us how we can speak with, and have community with, God. We can do so because we pray in the name of Jesus Christ. The Psalms have been given to us precisely so that we can learn to pray them in the name of Jesus.”

In other words, prayer is always prayer mediated through Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of Jesus. So, what’s the difference between praying in our own spirit vs. praying in the Spirit of Jesus?

Fire from Heaven?

Luke 9 gives us the beginning of an answer.

51 When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. 52 And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to prepare for his arrival, 53 but they did not receive him because his face was set toward Jerusalem. 54 When his disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them [some ancient manuscripts add: ‘as Elijah did’]?” 55 But he turned and rebuked them. 56 Then they went on to another village. (Luke 9:51-56)

James and John wanted to do what Elijah had done. They wanted to call down fire from heaven on their enemies and destroy them. That sounds like a request that you would find in the book of Psalms. And yet Jesus rebukes them. 

Crucially some later manuscripts of the book of Luke provide this line from Jesus at the beginning of v. 56:

“And he said, ‘You do not know what spirit you belong to, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy human lives, but to save them.’”

The Spirit of Jesus and the spirit of vengeance against our enemies are not the same spirit. The spirit that longs for vengeance is our own spirit.

Just a few verses later in Luke Jesus says that if you want to follow him you will have to do what deny yourself and take up your cross. You must lose your life. You must lose your own spirit and in that way you will find your true life, which is the Life/Spirit of Jesus.

This is key. If you pray the Psalms in your own name, you will lose yourself, but to truly find yourself in the Psalms you will have to pray them in Jesus’ Spirit. 

Paul says in 2 Cor. 3 that we must read all Scripture according to the Spirit, not the letter. The same dynamic is at play. To read the Scriptures according to the letter is to read them according to your own spirit—to read them in your own name—and Paul says the letter kills. But to read them according to the Spirit, is to read them according to Jesus’ Spirit. And Jesus’ Spirit is the spirit that inspired the Scriptures. Paul says that reading Scripture according to the Spirit gives life.

This is what the Psalms are actually about. They testify to Jesus.

“He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44).

But the New Testament doesn’t only tell us that the Psalms speak of Jesus, but that Jesus is actually the one speaking in the Psalms. 

“So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. He says, “I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters;  in the assembly I will sing your praises” (Heb. 2:11–12 ).

Hebrews is claiming that Jesus is the speaker of Ps. 22.

Or again:

“Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased.’ Then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—I have come to do your will, my God’” (Heb. 10:5–7).

Christ came into the world speaking Psalm 40. He is the true speaker.

But the danger always lurks. Are we going to pray the Psalms in our own name—which will lead to death—or will we pray the Psalms in the name of Jesus? 

According to “the letter” the Psalms can often be ugly, violent, and vindictive. But Jesus has cleansed our prayers by making them his own. When the Psalms are prayed in Jesus’ name they are made whole.

Rowan Williams puts it like this:

“Jesus hears all the words we speak—words of pain and protest and violence and rage. He hears them and he takes them, and in the presence of God the Father he says, ‘This is the humanity I have brought home. It’s not a pretty sight; it’s not edifying and impressive and heroic, it’s just real: real and needy and confused, and here it is brought home to heaven, dropped into the burning heart of God—for healing and for transformation.”

Jesus "is not scared of anything we have to say.” He can handle it. Not because he is insensitive to our suffering, but because he is the one who can heal not only the fact that we suffered, but also the way we speak about our suffering.

Bathe Your Feet in the Blood of the Wicked

Learning to pray the Psalms “in Jesus’ name” can be especially hard in the places where the Psalms talk about enemies. If we pray these Psalms in our own name, we will easily identify our enemies and pray for their ultimate destruction. But what might happen if we pray them in Jesus’ name? The Spirit of Jesus is to love your enemies and pray for their forgiveness, even if those enemies are crucifying you.

To pray the Psalms in this way takes practice. And the best way to practice is apprenticeship to a master craftsman. In July of 1937 Bonhoeffer preached a sermon on Psalm 58 to the students at the underground seminary in Finkenwalde. Psalm 58 contains some of the harshest language of vengeance against the enemy.

“O God, break the teeth in their mouths; tear out the fangs of the young lions…” (v. 6)

“Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime; like the untimely birth that never sees the sun…” (v. 8)

“The righteous will rejoice when they see vengeance done; they will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.” (v. 10)

Upon reading the Psalm aloud to the seminarians Bonhoeffer asks this question: Are we permitted to pray like this? He answers:

“No, we, we cannot pray this psalm. But not because we are too good (what a shallow notion, what incredible arrogance!), but because we are too sinful ourselves, too evil! Only those who are themselves completely without guilt can pray like this.”

To pray like this would not only be to call down God’s righteous wrath on our enemies, but on ourselves as well. We are not completely without guilt. Who can pray this way?

“Only the one who is completely free from any desire for vengeance on his own and free from all hatred, and certainly only the one who does not use his prayers to satisfy his own hunger for revenge can pray in the purity of heart: ‘O God, break the teeth in their mouths; tear out the fangs of the young lions, O Lord!’ That is to say, O God…It is your honor that is violated. O God, may you now step in and destroy your enemy, exercise your power, let your righteous wrath be kindled.”

But how can we hear a line like "The righteous will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked” in the Spirit of Jesus? Shouldn’t we shrink back from praying words like these? No, Bonhoeffer says. What we need is to gain a better ear to hear the voice of Jesus in this.

“Is it not utterly impossible for us, as Christian, to pray the end of this psalm? My dear congregation, if we shrink away here then we have understood nothing… Anyone who shrinks back in horror from such joy in God’s vengeance and from the blood of the wicked does not yet understand what happened on the cross of Christ. God’s righteous wrath at the wicked has, after all, already come down upon us. The blood of the wicked has already flowed. God’s death sentence over the wicked has already been pronounced. God’s righteousness has been fulfilled. All this happened on the cross of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ died the death of the wicked…Christ, the innocent one, died the death of the wicked so that we need not die that same death.”

The blood of the wicked has already flowed, but in this surprising way: it was the blood of the Son of God. The righteous one became the wicked one for the sake of the wicked.

Bonhoeffer finishes his sermon:

And now a virtually incomprehensible riddle is solved: Jesus Christ, the innocent one, prays in the hour in which God’s vengeance is visited upon the wicked on earth, in which our psalm here is fulfilled: Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing… He alone is permitted [to pray this way]. 

The blood of the wicked in which we bathe gives us…a portion in God’s victory. The blood of the wicked has become our redemption; it makes us free of all sin. That is the miracle…

Christ prays this psalm for us in a vicarious representative fashion. He accuses the wicked, summoning God's vengeance and righteousness down upon them, and offering himself on the cross for the sake of the wicked with his own innocent suffering…

And now we pray along with this psalm, with the ardent petition that God bring all our enemies to the cross of Christ and grant them mercy, with fierce yearning that the day might soon come when Christ visibly triumphs over all his enemies and establishes his kingdom. Thus we have learned to pray this psalm. Amen.

Origen and the Music of Scripture

Origen of Alexandria (3rd century) describes Scripture as the music of God. He says it is a composition with strange, unexpected, and perplexingly intricate harmonies that bewilder and frustrate untrained readers. This is why, Origen says, that unskilled hearers hear only dissonances in the Scriptures, as if the Old Testament conflicts with the New, or the Prophets conflict with the Law, or Paul’s letters conflict with the Gospels. In order to hear the deep, beautiful harmonies of the Scriptures, readers will have to be trained for it. We need to apprentice ourselves to masters like Origen or Bonhoeffer.

Origen goes on to say that Scripture is not just the music of God, but it is also the instrument on which we can play the music of God. But, again, he argues that believers can only “hear” the harmonies in Scripture that they can “play.”

If you can only bang on the piano and pretend it is a song (like my 4 year old loves to do) then that cacophony will be all you will be able to hear in Scripture. But if you can hear the music of the love of God even in the dense, difficult, dissonant chords that Scripture often throws at us, you are like someone who can hear and play sonatas by Bach.

The music of God is, at its heart, a four-chord chorus: Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. But that simple chord progression is transposed in all sorts of keys, time signatures, and voicings throughout the Bible. What we are called into is to join the great fugue that is the life of God, and as we join we grow in our musical understanding. We can begin to hear complex harmonies in the places that before we only heard dissonance.

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