July 20, 2005

Reading through the Bible in one Year: Nehemiah 5:14-9:38; Acts 13:14-14:7

Good Afternoon Brothers and Sisters,

In the next step of our journey through the Old Testament, I am feeling a bit brave, or possibly foolish to bite on the Book of Psalms.  I plan to work on it until I get burnt out on it, hopefully we will work on the book straight through.  This should carry us well into the New Year. 

One of the problems with Psalms is that it is full of love, joy and peace, along with frustration, injustice and disorder.  The book is like a range of emotions, it changes as it goes, some psalms are easy to understand, others are rather difficult.  Philip Yancy calls the Psalms, "Spirituality in Every Key" in his book "The Bible Jesus Read". 

Philip indicated that Psalms are not about theology, they are about life.  It is like "reading over someone elses shoulder."  How often is it that we hold God accountable for our troubles and our problems in life?  How often do we give Him glory when things go bad?  How often do we turn from Him in good times and in bad times?  Psalms address theses aspects of life and more.  The majority of the Psalms are written by David, some were compiled by him.  They vary according to his mood and his trouble at the time of writing. 

In them we have an opportunity to look at life through a poet's eyes.  David did not hesitate to write about everything.  Many of the Psalms are Messianic, looking forward to the Messiah, if I miss any of this be sure to let me know. 

I believe that it will be a fun study, we will learn about the difficulties in life, learn about praise, and learn about how to have a deeper relationship with God.  It won't be from a theological standpoint, I just don't do theology.  It'll be from a practical standpoint, I hope to make the book practical and apply it to our daily lives as well as showing how it was laced to the other scriptures in the Bible. 

Psalms is intricate, reaching both into the Old and the New Testaments as David wrote both practically and prophetically.  From the introduction, I hope that you can see where my thinking is going on the book.  I hope to enjoy the journey, and hope that you will enjoy it as well as we journey together through the book.

Yancy spent a lot of time discussing the thought that in our world today we no longer can recognize evil as evil.  The opposite of that is that our view of good has also been altered.  Psalms will return us to reality, or at least move us out of our seats as we experience emotions and thoughts that called bad, bad and good, good.  It didn't justify sin, or rationalize away the evils of men; rather David called it as he saw it. 

Rather than make the study a long one today I am going to cut it short here with just a few reflections on this book.  We will start with Psalm one tomorrow.

Father as we embark on a new journey, show each of us what you want us to hear and to apply from Psalms.  Help us to understand and to build a biblical understanding of Your thoughts into our lives.

In Him,

Joe Turner.