Love Your Psalms

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All right, so today this is going to be a bit more of an academic
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Sunday school than usual for me, if you'll permit me, more school -schoolish.
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But before I start, I want to tell a story. So, the summer of 1999, and I was a new
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Christian going to a gospel, new going to a gospel preaching church.
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And I remember it very vividly. The pastor was settling into the pulpit to begin his messages, and like most messages, he began by announcing his text.
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And I don't really remember the specific one, but he told us to turn to somewhere in Psalms.
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And out of nowhere, remember, I'm a brand -new Christian, I haven't been in church very much. Out of nowhere, from behind me about three rows back, this old man suddenly shouts,
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Amen! Just from the announcement of, you know, turn to Psalm 91,
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Amen! And I'm like, wow, okay, that's early. And that very long, drawn -out drawl of an
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Amen, right? I don't know how long he'd been going to that church for, but I came to learn that he shouted
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Amen every time anyone ever asked us to turn to the
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Psalms, or to read aloud from a Psalm. And because he was genuinely that excited about hearing the
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Psalms read. He loved them that much. And I also remember a few years later, when he went to Glory, and, you know, there are no coincidences, but it was not just maybe more, a couple weeks later that the time had come in our weekly readings or whatever, for the pastor to read something from the
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Psalms, and he announced Psalm, and just out of habit, stopped. Because he was expecting to hear the shout of the
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Amen, and we all just sort of, it all hit everyone in the congregation at once, that we weren't going to hear him announce that anymore.
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It was sort of a bittersweet thing, knowing that he's shouting Amen even all the louder today.
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But being a new Christian at the time, I didn't really think much of it. I just sort of thought that the
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Psalms were his favorite book. Like, you know, everybody has a favorite book, or a life verse, or something like that.
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But, you know, 24 years on now, into my Christian life, I've come to see that perhaps he had a wisdom that maybe we could all follow by example.
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And so, I title this lesson today, Love Your Psalms. Love Your Psalms.
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And that, the important message that I want you to take away from today, is that middle word,
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Your. Love Your Psalms. If you have one of the handouts, they were by the door.
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This is from number one. What is this?
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The Bible, right? We call it the Word of what? God. Okay, everybody here?
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Hello. Okay, it's the Word of God. Right? It's the Word of God. It's His message to us.
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It is how He speaks to us. Even today. And that is true of Psalms too, as well.
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But, there's something extra special, I feel, about Psalms.
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A special ownership. Because, for the Psalms, there is also us speaking to God.
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It's the one book where it's us speaking to Him as well.
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Calvin called the Psalms an anatomy of all parts of the soul.
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And up until the 18th or 19th century, even, the Psalms were the church's primary hymn book.
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Athanasius, way back in the 300s, talking about how much he loved the
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Psalms, he said, For they embrace the whole life of man, the affections of his mind, and the motions of his soul.
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I love that quote. And Luther said that in it is comprehended, most beautifully and briefly, everything.
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Everything that is in the entire Bible. And I remember that, you know, during the
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Reformation, in the French Protestants, the Huguenots, as they were undergoing persecution and being marched off to their martyrdom, famously, they all sang
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Psalms as they marched up to the platform. So the truth is, as number one says, the
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Psalms belong to the church. And you are the church.
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And so these are your Psalms. They are your Psalms. Now, this morning,
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I am teaching you, my primary reference from what I'm teaching you, is a book called
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Learning to Love the Psalms by W. Robert Godfrey. I forget what his title is.
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I think he's like President Emeritus now from Ligonier. He's an amazing scholar of the
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Psalms. And if you want, if you get excited at all about my lesson today,
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I really encourage you to go on YouTube. He's got several YouTube videos about the
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Psalms. Google it, find him. He's going to do a way better job than I am this morning. But I want to just sort of put my own love and conviction about the
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Psalms into what I teach you today, because I, too, really, really love the Psalms.
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Godfrey. It's on the back of your hand. So if you flip over to the back of your handout, I printed out some suggested future reading references, and the very top is his book.
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But you can also Google that to find the YouTube videos of him as well. All right.
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So first off, though, let's talk about why we don't get into the
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Psalms as much in modern times. Why is it really so hard to treasure and appreciate them?
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It's one of Godfrey's first chapters in his book, Difficulties in Learning the
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Psalms. And he cites five reasons. I'm going to talk about some of them very briefly, but I want to kind of dive into two of the first two a little bit more.
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The first one that he cites, and he's not a King James only kind of guy, but he does say that the fact that the
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King James is less frequently used now is one of the reasons that he thinks that people just don't get into the
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Psalms as much. To this, I would ask you, how many of you have memorized a whole psalm?
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OK. How many of you have memorized at least parts? OK. How many of you, when
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I ask you to recite Psalm 23, which is probably one that a lot of people have memorized, at some point start saying,
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Yay, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Right. We can't help it.
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It's what we've heard over and over and over again. The truth is that the and that's only in King James.
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Right. The truth is, is that most of our most popular psalms and the ones that are most popularly memorized, the poetic wording of the
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King James is the one that was is, you know, that everyone just does and recites.
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And, you know, you might also know this. If you study the history of the English language, the King James Version had a big input, a big effect on what became modern
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English. Right. Just because people used it and read it. And it was the one English translation.
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Right. For a very, very long time. And a lot of even just common sayings that we have today come from the way that the translators chose to translate something in the psalms of the
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King James Version. They didn't have any meaning in English until they put it into the
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King James. And then we all sort of adopted it. Number two is that it's not in our hymn books anymore.
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Although, thankfully, that is becoming less true again. But for a long time, especially through most of the 20th century or all of the 20th century, because we're in the 21st now, in books, just kind of left them out.
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They just stopped being cool and interesting to put into your hymn book. And. And so because they're not in the hymn book anymore, there's a loss of familiarity with them.
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I'm really I really am thankful for a very recent interest. I find it to be very recent anyway of modern hymn writers to set psalms to music again, because especially because I think that it really helps with memorization.
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I really believe that it's a lot easier to memorize a psalm if you sing it. Of course, because it's the
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English version and not the Hebrew version, it can be hard to set it precisely to music. And so most of modern settings to the
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Psalms have to tweak the words here and there, which is not great. But I'd still rather sing that and at least get most, you know, the whatever version translation that it is that they're using in order to do the song.
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Yes, Andrew. Yeah. Yeah.
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Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's just different. Right. So. But yes, exactly.
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The Gettys are amazing. I wrote them on my notes. So like if you if you want to know people to find songs, songs are these are the three artists that I really like.
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The Gettys do a great job with their songs. In fact, they have an entire album that's just songs. Shane and Shane, more of a bit more of a modern even tunes melodies that they put on there.
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But they do an excellent job. They do an excellent job of being really close to the actual text of Psalms and the
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Harrow family. Kind of an obscure one. But they they're if you have kids, they do a really great job of creating scripture memorization
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CDs set to music for the various. So my kids memorize Psalm eight with the Harrow family
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CD. So, yeah. Oh, in the corner room. Thank you. Yes, that's another one.
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The corner room is another excellent one. All right. Two others that he mentions are the literary complexity of the
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Psalms. And that is in the fact that the styles are very difficult.
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Hebrew poetry is very unusual. And so it's even more difficult to then translate it into English.
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And for the English year, as I just called you in, I'm sorry that as Andrew will dive into that psychology later.
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And and so it's just it can be complex. Right. And that complexity can be very intimidating.
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Or many commentaries also love to get really technical with the
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Psalms. That's his fourth point. And that sometimes people just are like, I don't know, I need help.
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So they get intimidated by the literary complexity. They go, I don't know. Let me get a commentary to help me understand.
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I pull one off the shelf. They're like, whoa, what is this? And these guys like, you know, want to classify the
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Psalms into 14 different categories with all various different kinds of like, oh, it's this poetic form crossed with this type cross with that.
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Right. And it's just it's just too much for people too much. And then number five is one that I'm going to try to dispute now.
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But it is the idea that it seems like. The Psalms are really randomly arranged.
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Right. It's one hundred and fifty of them, but it's kind of all over the place when you just glance at it.
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Right. Like, why are they in this order? There are tons that are the Psalms of David, for example, but they do not.
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You know, they're not in chronological order of the way that he of the way he wrote them. They don't even really seem to be in any kind of like groupings necessarily that you can tell.
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But it turns out, actually, there is a structure in a grouping to the Psalms. It's just that, again, thanks to our loss of familiarity with the modern times, we've kind of collectively forgotten what that structure is.
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So I'm going to talk to you right now about that for part of the rest of the class. We're going to talk more about what that structure is.
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But to hint at it first, let me just say that the Psalms are divided into five books. Did you know that there's actually five books of the
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Psalms? Most modern translations or the publishers, they don't even indicate it for you.
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You have no idea that there's a division there, but there are five books of the Psalms, or maybe we'll call them sub books.
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But the books themselves even are not even divided equally. Right. There's unequal.
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It's not like, you know, there's 150 divide by five. Right. It's not that. And so it's at first glance, it can even be hard to understand why they're divided at all.
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But I hope to address this difficulty and others today to help you be able to dig in more and love your
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Psalms. All right. So that's my intro. OK. So hopefully you in one of those, you can pick your favorite of all those things
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I just said and write that in under your answer for number two. What makes it of all those things
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I just said, what has made it difficult for you to dig into the Psalms? And you can put that or just on your own reflection, something else that you want to write.
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All right. Let's talk some fundamentals. We'll start with authorship. All right.
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You everyone here probably knows this, but the Psalms are not written just by David.
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OK. There's a lot of David's Psalms, but they're not exclusively
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David. Jewish tradition counts at least 10 authors.
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OK. You don't have to write these down, but they count at least 10 authors. That's not the answer to number three.
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Don't write it down yet. They count at least 10 authors. Adam, Melchizedek, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Haman, Jeduthun, Asaph, and at least one son of Korah.
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OK. Now, not to quibble with the Talmud, but I think the right answer is seven.
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We can be definitive about seven. So that's the answer to number three. Why can we be definitive about seven?
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Anybody know? Because it actually lists their names.
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That is correct. Where does it list their names, John? Right. At the beginning of some of the
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Psalms. Turn to Psalm 88, 89, and 90 for me, please. 88, 89, and 90.
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John, would you please read Psalm 88, verse 0 for me?
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There you go. All right. Mark, could you please read Psalm 89, verse 0, please?
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Very good. And Andrew, how about Psalm 90? All right.
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You got the easiest one. OK. So these are the inspired titles offset from the rest of the text, right?
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They are verse 0 in a lot of Psalms. Not everyone has them, but a lot of them do.
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It is weirdly the only place in the Bible where there are words that don't get a verse number assigned to them.
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I don't know why they ever chose to do it that way. The original monk who did the versing verse numbering just chose not to.
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But and the reason I really hate that they do that is because these are in the inspired originals and in all the copies.
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These are part of the inspired word of God. They are not just like the headings.
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You know, when I look at Psalm 90 in my Bible, it also says as a heading from everlasting to everlasting is not inspired.
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That was just something that the publisher came up with to put at the top. Right. But a prayer of Moses, the man of God, that is in the
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Hebrew. That is in the Masoretic text. Right. Yes. Andrew. The say laws are in there, too.
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Yes. Yes. Thank you. I will. I will get to the say laws in a minute. But yes. Yep. Yep. So they are in the inspired original.
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OK. And those inspired titles. So. So by that, I assert, because I believe in biblical inerrancy, that they are all true and they are thus telling us the true names of the true authors of these
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Psalms. And so by that, there are seven. You don't have to go through the one hundred and fifty and count. I did it for you.
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OK, so there are seven of them. There's no Adam. There's no
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Melchizedek. There's no Abraham listed. But the other seven from that Jewish tradition that I mentioned are the
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Jews for reasons call Ethan Jettison. But it's the
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Ethan guy that we just read in Psalm 89. OK, so it's Moses, David, Solomon, Heman, Ethan, Asaph and at least one son of Korah.
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Let me tell you a little about. Well, let me let me just also say
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I'm saying at least seven, because there could be possibly more if, for example, there are 10
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Psalms that were written by a son of Korah. That's all it says. OK.
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And for all we know, that could be more than one person. Might be all 10 are one person or who is just being like John the
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Apostle, not wanting to use his real name and just sort of talking about himself in the third person. But he or it could be 10 different sons of Korah.
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We don't really know the same. And so there's there's that possibility. Right. So at least seven is the right answer to number three.
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All right. So let me tell you a little bit. Some bios of these authors. You already know about Moses. We just read him.
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Psalm 90 is his one and only credit that he wrote. Solomon, you know who
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Solomon is. He gets two credits. Psalm 72 and Psalm 127. And now let's talk about those sons of Korah a little bit more.
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OK, there are like I said, there are 10 of them. The roots of this go back to numbers.
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In numbers, there is surprisingly a story, surprisingly for the fact that there's all these authors identifying themselves with him.
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There is a story of Korah. Korah was a Levite. He was one of Moses's cousins. And he leads a rebellion in numbers, a rebellion that results in God opening up a fissure in the earth to swallow him and his followers into the pit.
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To demonstrate that God was on Moses's side and not Korah's very vividly.
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Right. But numbers takes a moment to point out to us.
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That Korah's sons were spared. Why? We don't know.
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Maybe they didn't. Maybe they sided with Moses. Maybe they were too young to at the time to have made a decision about whether they were siding with, you know, whose side they were on.
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We don't know. But numbers does make a point to tell us that they were spared. So his line continued despite his death.
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And when we hear sons of Korah here, it's not those particular men. OK, it's not those guys of that generation that we're hearing about.
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But rather, we then next hear this title when we get to the life of David.
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And we find that they remember they were of the tribe of Levi. We find that they are that there is a group called the sons of Korah and they are part of the
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Levites. They have special assignments during the tabernacle period. One of their they are the guys whose job it is to carry the holy furniture around as the tabernacle was moving from place to place.
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And it seems that by the time of David, they've taken on the job of music.
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But they seem to have this very special role in terms of they're in charge. They have a special charge of music at the temple.
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So to put it in modern terms, they are David's worship team. They're Charlie Crane and all and all the and all of our folks.
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Right. And in fact, then they seem to continue on even for several several generations after David, to the point where their name became more like an organization name or a band name than maybe even actual family descent from the original
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Korah. OK, so sons of Korah, you can think of them as like the name of a choir group.
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Next up is Asaph. Asaph, he's the author of 12. He's a contemporary of David.
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He's the chief minister before the Ark in First Chronicles 16. And he's called a skilled singer and a poet in Chronicles as well as a seer.
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And if he's called a seer, you should immediately think, oh, he's a prophet. Right. And that's exactly right. He's a prophet.
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But like the sons of Korah. Well, sorry. And the reason that's really interesting and important is then you go and read some of the
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Psalms of Asaph and you find that many of them are prophetic. So no surprise there.
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But like the sons of Korah, later on in Israel's history, there seems to be a group that named themselves after Asaph.
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And so we can't even say potentially that some of these 12 might have been written by one of the sons of Asaph, like part of the
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Asaph choir group. I don't know if they were rival choir groups going on here or what exactly. But there is this other choir group.
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So it could be that some of the 12 are written by one of those members and not Asaph himself.
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But I think most commentators tend to just want to give credit of all 12 to the original
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Asaph. And then we have Haman and Ethan, the
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Ezraites from 88 and 89. They just get one credit each. The ones we just read, 88 and 89.
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They are not descended from Ezra, the prophet, though you'd see in that name, you kind of think, oh, that's Ezra.
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Because that's Ezra with E -Z -R -A. Right. This is Ezra with an H. E -Z -R -A -H.
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The Ezraites. Okay. Not the heights. The heights. And they are, surprise, surprise, yet another choir group that have continued through many generations.
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In fact, because Psalm 89, if you read it, there are lots of parts of it that sound very post -exile.
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Like it's talking about describing a destruction of Jerusalem and whatnot. So. Okay. So the answer to number four is what do they all have in common?
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What are they? They're all choir groups. Right. They're all choir groups.
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All right. David, haven't mentioned him yet. David, he's the big gun, of course.
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He has 73 to his credit out of 150. Seventy three.
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So all these other guys, very much dwarfed by David. But and the fact that he wrote so many prolifically is just another, you know, just another part of what's the amazingness of the gift of David to the people of Israel and ultimately to the church through the generations.
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And that leaves 50 that are anonymous. Now, if you really want to get into some scholarly debate with me,
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I'm happy to. There are actual a lot of clues sprinkle in some of those anonymous 50 that we can feel pretty good about.
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Who was the author of some of those 50? But there's no inspired title thing to definitively tell it to us.
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So I'm just for the purposes of this class, we're going to leave it alone and just call it anonymous. OK. All right.
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So you go. All right. So now let's talk about the five books. That's number five that I talked about a minute ago.
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The five sub books of the Psalms. Now, I've listed here five titles.
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These are my titles because there is no title to any of the five books. And these titles are not perfect because not every song in the book.
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The sub book conforms to the theme that I'm about to give it. OK. But by and large, most of the songs, many of the songs within that sub book deal with these particular concerns.
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OK. I'm not the first, as you can imagine, to try to come up with titles for these books.
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Godfrey has very different titles that I don't particularly like because they use this sort of generic king in the title.
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As being the one who's having all the experiences. And I don't particularly like that. For example, he goes book three, the king's crisis over God's promises.
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And I just think that makes it sound too impersonal. So here's here's my list.
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OK, so I'm going to this is your challenge. You're going to try to I've printed these on the head handout in not in the correct order.
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So you're going to have to number them correctly as they go. And if you want, you can you might want to also note down the actual
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Psalms numbers that they break up, because like I said, it's not even.
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All right. So book one is facing down the enemy's external. Facing down the enemy's external and that Psalms one through forty one.
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By that, I mean that most of these songs deal with. External threats, they are songs about the psalmist feeling threatened or facing accusation or attack from an enemy outside of him, either outside of the entire kingdom, other foreign nations trying to assault or, you know, some other kind of like, you know, friends who have betrayed him, that kind of thing.
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Also, Psalm one through forty one, a lot of David Psalms in this section. Also in book two as well.
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There's a lot of David's in this one. These two books, book two, surprise, surprise is facing down the enemy's internal.
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Facing down the enemy's internal and that's Psalms forty two to seventy two. Forty two to seventy two.
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What I'm getting at with this title is the fact that. These songs start to get a lot more introspective.
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And in particular, the enemy. Of these songs is sin.
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And temptation. And of course, this set book contains the very famous Psalm 51, which is
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David's song of repentance after his sin with Bathsheba. And so, you know, it's it's a lot of these are are talking about struggling against sin, dealing with sin, overcoming sin, resisting the temptation in the first place.
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Again, not all. Generally speaking. All right. Book three is getting real in crisis.
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He's crises of faith. Getting real in crises of faith. That's book three and it's
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Psalm seventy three to eighty nine. Okay. Seventy three to eighty nine. These are the most emotional songs.
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These are the ones in which the Psalmists express deep hurt and despair and they cry out to God for help.
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They plead for him. There are songs in here in which they express worry that God does not even see them, does not even know what's happening, has turned his face away from them.
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Right. Just very difficult. Psalms. Book four is remembering
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God is faithful. That's Psalms 90 through 106. Remembering God is faithful.
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And these songs tend to have a lot of recounting of Israel's history in them.
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Or also, there's a bit of like individual history where somebody, a Psalmist just says, like, I remember what
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God did for me. But, you know, there's a lot of remembering what God did for the nation and or for God's people.
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And then finally, book five, which is 107 to the end, 150, celebrating
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God for who he is and what he has done. And these ones just are the. A lot of these are just pure praise.
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Whole lot of hallelujahs in these ones. Right. In fact, to the point where the last five, as if almost a climax on it.
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Right. The last five, 146 to 150, are just praise the Lord, praise the
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Lord, praise the Lord over and over and over again. And that praise the Lord in Hebrew is hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.
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Right. So there is a whole lot of hallelujah going on in those last Psalms. All right.
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So in order. And now I want you to pay attention to the order a little bit more carefully.
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Facing down the enemies external, facing down the enemies internal, getting real in a crisis of faith.
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Remembering God is faithful and celebrating God for who he is and what he has done.
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I find extra special meaning in the way that I've titled these because there's a strong correlation with the typical progression of a lament song.
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I'll get into the types in a minute, but a lament song that element song is one in which the author is facing some kind of emotional distress or struggle.
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And nearly all of the lament songs have this shape of a V in terms of their author's emotional state.
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They start with a statement of their situation outside of them that has caused them distress.
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The external. They proceed then to confess their emotions to God. That's the internal.
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They end up bottoming out with cries of despair. And sorrow.
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But then somewhere in the middle of the psalm, there is this distinct turning point.
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Where they look up to God instead of down at their troubles. And by the end of the psalm, they're celebrating
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God and they're shouting hallelujah. That same progression that we see like that, you can see in a big overarching scope through the whole five books of the psalms.
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And that the fact that the psalms end with those five hallelujah psalms, pure choruses of praise,
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I think just really reinforces that, that, you know, about how much this is all about praise.
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And then would it surprise you if I tell you that within each one of the sub books, the last verse of each one of those five books is a praise verse.
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Is a verse saying praise the Lord or something about praising God. The last verse of each one of those books, as if just always trying to focus this focus on coming back up out and praising
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God. The Hebrew name for the entire collection of psalms is actually the book of praises.
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That's what the Hebrews call it. The book of praises. It's also not surprising that considering this because that Hebrew poetry is organized around what's called a chiasm.
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Which means that this is number six, that it's patterned around a central point.
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Rather than rhyming. Most, you know, when you think of poetry, you're thinking either rhyme or meter or that kind of thing.
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But rather, Hebrew poetry is sort of this idea of parallelism. Like you start with a center point and then the two verses to either side parallel each other.
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And the next two verses outward parallel each other and so on and so forth. Right. Maybe it's not a single verse or it's like a section parallels and parallels, but it sort of builds out.
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And it's not always the exact center either, just for fun, like just to make it a little bit harder to necessarily analyze.
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But what that does mean is when you're reading your psalms, the most important verse or the key message may be of the verse.
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You're going to find it of the psalm. You're going to find it in some middle verse somewhere. You're going to find that pivot, that hinge somewhere.
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Whereas most English poetry, right, that key verse is either the very beginning or the very end.
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Right. Yeah. Yeah.
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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's especially true of the laments.
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That's especially true of the laments. Not always true of all the other ones. Like the praise ones are almost too short for that whole progression to even happen.
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But yes. Yep. Yep. But even ones like dealing with the enemies external very often, it's like there's this descent of complaint, complaint, complaint about how the enemies are attacking, assaulting, and then.
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But wait, God is with us. But wait, God is, you know, but God sort of becomes the the overarching theme of the second half of that song.
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So this structure and the laments, I think, of the laments, but others I think are an indication of what kind of instruction we should take from the
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Psalms. All right. And the first is that we are emotional creatures and that's
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OK. That's OK. More than OK. It is good. Adam and Eve were created with emotional capacity and they were declared very good.
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OK. It's OK to feel. Unfortunately, there are a lot of strains of Christianity out there that tend to want to make it seem like we need to be super stoic about everything.
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I like the British version of Christianity, I guess. Right. The stiff under the stiff for stiff upper lip.
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I can't say it right. That is not how we were created. And God, that's second.
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My second point is that God knows those emotions and he knows our hearts.
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He knows them probably better. Not probably. He definitely knows them better than we know them even.
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And so to that, I would say it is no use for us what the Psalms teach us. It is no use for us to hide those emotions from him when we're experiencing any of the range of emotions.
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In fact, it probably does more harm than good. Do not fake your prayers to God.
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The Psalmists say. Right. I understand that sometimes when you are here in this building and someone asks you, how are you doing?
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And you just don't want to tell them how you're doing. But that should never be true in your prayers.
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Should never be true in your prayers. You can be honest and real with God. And so the
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Psalms to me, I believe they really serve as a guidebook to us on how to process these emotions that we experience in a sin, cursed and fallen world.
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With a sin, cursed, fallen nature. How to process them, how to rightly deal with them, because some of them are negative and sinful.
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I'm not excusing them. All of them. Some of them are not. Some of them are.
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But how to rightly deal with them and how to live with them. And especially
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I don't know who needs to hear this, but somebody here or somebody watching on the video today needs to hear this. The Psalms tell us that we are not alone.
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You are not alone. I needed that.
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When I read the Psalms, there are times where you are experiencing some emotion that you think.
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What is wrong with me? How can I you know, the devil comes
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Spurgeon, who wrote a beautiful, incredible book about the Psalms, the treasury of David talks of how
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Satan would come along to whisper in his ear and say, you call yourself a
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Christian. And you think like this or you believe this or you feel this.
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And David and Spurgeon would say. You know, basically get behind me, Satan, because Jesus is my all in all.
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And that's what the Psalms say to us over and over again. I'm feeling these, but God. I'm struggling with this, but God, it's the great answer.
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The great prescription. We are not alone.
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The Psalms, I truly believe, cover the whole gamut, the entire range of emotions, not just the negative ones, but the
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Psalms also tell us how to celebrate. They tell us how to be joyous. They tell us how to praise.
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So there are two approaches here. If you're already in the midst of an emotional experience, find a song and use it to deepen your relationship with God.
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And I admit that this might be hard to do in the moment, especially with negative emotions of anxiety or despair.
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But they can also be a real lifeline. A real lifeline. The second approach.
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It is also great to and helpful to meditate and consume the
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Psalms outside of those hard times so that the Holy Spirit can bring them to mind when they are most needed.
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Right. So you're not necessarily so behind the eight ball. The one where you love your
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Psalms now, reinforcing those girders, so to speak, of your mind, heart, and soul, so you're better prepared for both the trials and the triumphs of life.
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Because like I said, I do think you need a Psalm to process feelings of great joy. So let me just give you some examples.
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We don't have a lot of time. I knew I wasn't going to have a lot of time. But let me just give you a few examples of this in case you need it.
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Psalm 42. Psalm 42 is a great Psalm for those who have had a good plan thwarted.
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And now they're really struggling with what's happened. If you're anxious about disasters that you're hearing about in the news, you've been watching a little too much
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Fox News, and you're a little anxious about what's happening in the world, Psalm 74.
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I'm a little late with this next one, but maybe you're preparing to celebrate a holiday with your family.
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You got a birthday coming up. Psalm 113. Maybe you just got a promotion at work or a big raise or some other great financial windfall.
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Psalm 150. All right.
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Now, if you're going to go searching Psalms like this for the one to fit the current occasion of your life, it is helpful to have a map.
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And most times when you hear people talk about maps of the Psalms instead of the five books, they start talking about types.
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Types. And that's our next set of true false questions. Eight, nine and ten. Watch me land this plane super fast.
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Ready? All right. But yeah, buckle up. Unfortunately, with types,
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I think too much ink has been spilled, in my opinion, over arguing about types.
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All right. There are commentators who are like, who have big fights about like, there are six types.
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There's five types. There's eight types. Like, and Psalm 42 is this type. No, it's this type.
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Like, enough. All right. It's ridiculous. It's a waste. And I think it's one of the things that make people kind of freak out about trying to study a psalm.
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They're like, wait, I don't know. Is this a lament psalm or is it a wisdom psalm? Right. OK. Approach it by making room for the possibility that any given psalm might belong to more than one type.
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OK. Just relax. Belong to more than one type.
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For example, while Psalm 42 that I just mentioned is clearly a lament psalm, it could also be considered a song of trust or a wisdom psalm.
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OK. So that's OK. Just label it with both. It's fine. But let me talk about the types.
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There are the unofficial, quarry, the very much unseminaried layman list of types.
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But it's my favorite list. All right. And what they mean. OK. Try to do it quick. Is that all right?
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I'm going to go a little bit, but I don't want to stop. All right. I only get one week. So unless you want to talk,
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Stephen, to let me have another week. All right. Here we go. Lament. We've already been covering that. An example of lament is.
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So, by the way, obviously, the answer to number eight is false. Very good. OK. There's lament psalms.
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I've already mentioned 42. Twelve is another example of a lament psalm. And twelve is interesting because it's a community lament.
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So it's a lament for the entire nation of Israel or on behalf of the nation of Israel. The repentance psalms.
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Psalm 51. Psalm 38. Specifically, the psalmist repenting over a sin that they've committed or sins.
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Creation psalms. Like Psalm 104, which celebrate God as our creator and the upholder of the universe and just the majesty of his power.
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Thanksgiving psalms. Like Psalm 107. I think you can understand what those are.
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Imprecatory psalms. Shout out to the video room guy. I know it's his favorite. It's not his favorite, but he loves when
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I say the word. Imprecatory psalms. Like Psalm 69. These are prayers against the enemies of God's people.
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And that's a whole other lesson. So I won't do that today. Wisdom psalms.
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The most famous one is Psalm 1. But there are several other psalms that kind of have that Proverbs flair to them, right, that are just talking about what is wise and good.
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Psalm 49 is another one. And then the last type of my list of types is the praise.
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Hellel psalms, right? Of someone like Psalm 150 and 146 through 150.
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OK, now those are my types. And I will tell you that I had every intention before this lesson to have printed out for you this glorious list of all the 150 psalms with my type assignments to them.
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Then this happened. And I didn't have enough time to actually get it done. But I do.
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I'm saying it aloud to you because I want to commit to actually doing it for you. So I do really want to do it. And I'll find some way to distribute it to the church when
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I get it done. But you'll give me the grace to have a little extra time to finish it, please. So, OK, but I would also say there are three super types.
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And the reason I don't put them as types is because I don't think a psalm isn't like one of these things or even something to really label it with.
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But rather, they kind of are like currents running across the whole psalms. There are some psalms that are very individual, right?
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That they're about a specific person, the psalmist, and what they are dealing with. So it's a very, very individualized psalm.
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And then there are many psalms that are very community, right? Where they're kind of talking on behalf of a group of people or maybe the whole of the nation of Israel as a political entity.
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Or even beyond that, talking about like all God's people, which would thus mean us, right?
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The church. So we got those two types. But that's super types. And then the third super type that you're all probably waiting.
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Why haven't I talked about it yet? Is messianic, right? Messianic psalms. And these are psalms that prophesy or somehow speak of Messiah of Israel, Jesus Christ.
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And this one might be the most controversial. A lot of commentators want to assign it as a type and say, you know,
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I want to label these six ones as types. But would you be surprised to hear that John Calvin tried to argue that all 150 are messianic?
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Now, while I don't agree with Calvin on that score, I do think there are some that just aren't.
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I do side with the commentators that are maybe a little more free with their assignments and say that a lot of them are.
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A lot of them are. There are some that are strongly messianic.
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I'll call them strongly messianic in that they very clearly are a prophetic statement about something that's going to occur during Christ's life or ministry or the crucifixion.
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Psalm 22, right? But there are plenty of others that just sort of speak of the idea of Messiah or Messiah's kingdom and whatnot.
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And so I would call them messianic as well. But because of that, you have to understand that the answer to number 10 is that the psalms, not all of them are entirely messianic, right?
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Like you might say that there's a messianic element or a certain verse even within this psalm that is messianic.
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But that doesn't make the entire psalm messianic. And that's why I don't really like calling it a type. Because too many commentators latch on.
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They see one verse and they go, well, that verse is clearly messianic. But then the whole rest of the psalm isn't. And that's okay.
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It's just kind of misleading for you to then try to read Jesus into the rest of the psalm, right?
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You get into that eisegesis instead of exegesis if you do that. So a psalm does not have to be entirely about Jesus to be considered messianic.
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I don't really have time for this, but I just want to give you a great example of this, that there are a lot of times where a psalm doesn't even sound messianic to us unless you go read the
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New Testament. And then the New Testament straight up tells you that this psalm was talking about Jesus.
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You didn't even realize it. The Jews didn't realize it, but it was. And my favorite example of that is
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Psalm 102. And in that, if you go and read Hebrews, chapter 1, verses 10 through 12, it quotes
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Psalm 102. And if you read Hebrews 13 .8,
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it quotes Psalm 102. And in the context of quotes, of the quote,
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Hebrews is saying, the Father speaking to the Son, and then quotes the psalm.
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So, now you go back and you read Psalm 102, and you go, like, you had been reading
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Psalm 102, and it was all about, like, the title is Of One Afflicted, by the way.
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And the whole psalm, as you're reading it, is just like, oh man, this guy is going through something really bad. Like, he is suffering, he is hurting, he's in physical pain.
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This doesn't sound good. Like, he's just sick. It's almost, at first you would think it's like a psalm for someone who is dealing with an illness.
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Right? And then you get to the very end of the psalm, and that's the part where that Hebrews quotes.
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And you now can look at it, thanks to the illumination of the New Testament, and say, wait a minute. This end part is the
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Father talking to the Son. You realize that this very last part of the psalm is actually the response of the
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Father to what the Son has been saying all through the first part of the psalm. So the whole first part of the psalm is
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Jesus speaking, and then the last part is the Father replying to Jesus. And now you realize that verses 1 -11 are
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Messiah's sufferings. Verses 12 -22 are Messiah's eager anticipation of his kingdom.
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And then 23 -28 are God the Father's reply. That, you know, eventually heaven and earth will pass away, but God and his children will be forever.
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And you don't really get that if you just read Psalm 102. You have to see the
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New Testament in order to get it. There are also some psalms, it's really fun, where you can go where sort of the reverse is true, in that Psalm 69,
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I think it is, is like an exposition of Jesus' parable of the rich fool.
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Right? Where Jesus doesn't get a lot into the explanation, but if you then go back and read the psalm, you can see a much richer sort of layout of what
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Jesus was getting at with that parable. So it's really great. All right,
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I have on my notes here questions about types, but you don't have any time, so you don't get to ask any questions. All right, so number 11, how can you make psalms more a part of your life?
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If all of this has made you feel more intimated about getting into psalms, I'm very sorry, because that was not my intention.
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I'm trying to make them feel more accessible and get you more excited about them.
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I'm giving you all this knowledge, I'm trying to equip you with these things so that you can more confidently launch into your own exploration and not be intimidated by them.
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Let me just recap. Here is what you now know about the psalms that maybe you didn't know before you walked into this class this morning.
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You know now that the psalms are not just some random assortment. You know that you can look at the inspired titles, the verse zero, and the authors for clues about the context.
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You know that the psalms are written from the hearts of the psalmist to express and process their negative and their positive emotions.
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They are a word from God, but they are also a word from us. God has used the hearts of those men almost as a spokesman for all of us.
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And finally, you know that the psalms are meant to be sung and they're meant to be prayed in response to God across all the situations of life.
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So how can you make psalms more a part of your life? Well, here's some things I recommend.
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Read them often, maybe at a certain meal. Don't just read them straight through in order, though that's great.
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But also be sure to read the ones that are, this is where topical is a good idea.
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Read the ones that are relatable to the current season of your life or situation or circumstance.
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Read them with heart when you read them, please. Listen to what the psalmists were expressing.
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Ask yourself, is this what my heart also needs to express? And also try to find some musical renditions that can help you to memorize them, especially with your kids.
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Because this is, after all, the authorial intent. The authorial intent of the psalms is that you sing them.
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So if you can find a way to sing them, learn to sing them. And learn to sing them as your own words as you sing them.
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Taylor. Nice. Poor Bishop Hooper. Oh, there's another one.
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All right. And then again, as I said, if you flip over on the back of the handout
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I provided, these are my favorite books about the psalms, the ones that I find the most accessible.
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Kidner's probably the most on the theological, academic side of things.
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Boyce is beautifully pastoral. You can just sit down and read the chapters of Boyce.
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And they are adapted from his sermons on the psalms, but they're really fantastic.
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And Spurgeon as well. Just really fantastic. And Spurgeons are free. You can just go download that, thanks to being in public domain.
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All right. All right. I will entertain one question.
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Does anybody have one question they want to ask? Oh, I didn't get into the say list.
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Yes, thank you. Sorry. So there are a few strange words that we don't translate.
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Mascule, Selah, Mitflum. There's a few other things. The answer.
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What are these strange words is they are musical terms. OK, if you are a musician, you know that on our sheet music, there's all sorts of Italian words, right, that we don't translate.
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Right. There's Forte and Mesoforte. And it's the same idea. Right. Like and we also have symbols that mean, you know, rest.
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Right. Or or or hold out the note and that kind of thing. So it's the same idea. That's what all these words mean.
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Selah in particular means rest. OK, so if you see Selah, that is supposed to be like an extended pause in the song at that moment where the musicians were supposed to everybody just be quiet.
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So even as you read, I suggest if you get to a Selah, it doesn't mean you're not supposed to read it out loud. You're just supposed to be quiet for an extra moment before you read on.
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OK. All right. Thank you. OK, let's pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you so much for these dear people and their attention this morning to just be able to share with them a subject that's near and dear to my heart.
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And I pray that it would be of great help to them. Pray, Lord, that you would for all of us, that we would either learn to love or deepen our love of the
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Psalms to make them indeed a part of our everyday life, that we might be better equipped to live in this sin -cursed world, to be able to both celebrate with you and to mourn and to understand how to process the emotions that we are experiencing as we are presented with the situations of both the everyday and the extraordinary.
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Lord, I thank you so much for giving us this guidebook. It is just another example of how incredibly sufficient your scriptures are, that you gave us this guide, you gave us these
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Psalms through which we can sing to you with our whole heart.