Quotes about Psalms

The Psalms do not, that is, offer us an answer for "the problem of evil." But they are clear where the answer is not to be found. It is not to be found where the pantheist wants to find it, suggesting that "evil" is merely a matter of our perception and that the world just is the way it is and we should get used to it.

To recognize that the Psalms call us to pray and sing at the intersections of the times--of our time and God's time, of the then, and the now, and the not yet--is to understand how those emotions are to be held within the rhythm of a life lived in God's presence.

Paul does not quote the Psalms or Isaiah, but we can see the influence of their double vision of the One God all the way through: the sovereign God, high above and beyond the earth so that its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, yet gently at hand, gathering the lambs in his arms and leading the mother sheep.

the story the Psalms tell is the story Jesus came to complete. It is the story of the creator God taking his power and reigning, ruling on earth as in heaven, delighting the whole creation by sorting out its messes and muddles, its injuries and injustices, once and for all.

The Psalms are not only poetry in themselves; they are to be the cause of poetry in those who sing them, together and individually. They are God's gifts to us so that we can be shaped as his gift to the world.

The Psalms offer us a way of joining in a chorus of praise and prayer that has been going on for millennia and across all cultures. Not to try to inhabit them, while continuing to invent nonpsalmic "worship" based on our own feelings of the moment, risks being like a spoiled child who, taken to the summit of Table Mountain with the city and the ocean spread out before him, refuses to gaze at the view because he is playing with his Game Boy.

The Psalms are the steady, sustained subcurrent of healthy Christian living.

Dedication   Chapter 1 - Introduction Chapter 2 - Pray and Live Chapter 3 - At the Threshold of God's Time Chapter 4 - Where God Dwells Chapter 5 - All the Trees of the Forest Sing for Joy Chapter 6 - At Home in the Psalms Afterword - My Life with the Psalms Acknowledgments Scripture Index   About the Author Also by N. T. Wright Credits Copyright About the Publisher Chapter 1

The hope of Israel, expressed variously in the Torah, Prophets, and Psalms, was not for a rescue operation that would snatch Israel (or humans or the faithful) from the world, but for a rescue operation that would be for the world, an operation through which redeemed humans would play once more the role for which they were designed.

He was a Jew who believed in the goodness of the original creation and the intention of the Creator to renew his world. His gospel of "salvation" was about Israel's Messiah "inheriting the world," as had been promised in the Psalms. What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul's perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new "otherworldly" hope.

The Psalms welcome us to a faith where God's agenda is more important than ours and where we are asked to live out our faith in the context of a disastrously broken world. But this is also precisely where we experience the highest personal joys, as we put our hope in the covenant love of the Lord and make the pursuit of his glory the goal of our lives.

The largest body of content in the psalms is given to lament, in which the psalmist "laments" or mourns the situation he is in and the distress he is facing.