The Psalms: finding the God of soldiers and singers

David’s psalms and worshipping the God of all 

I only got as far as verse 1.

And it stopped me in my tracks. It was Psalm 144. One of David’s:

‘Praise be to the LORD my Rock,

who trains my hands for battle,

my fingers for war.’

And I suddenly realised that David was praising God for training him to be effective in his day job (as he wants to do for us all) but, uncomfortably, David’s job was to be an effective soldier, a dealer of death in the defence of God’s people.

Somehow, I’d read the psalms as if David was some sort of professional, contemporary singer-songwriter/worship leader, touching people’s hearts across the centuries through the sheer range of emotions he expresses and the rawness and honesty with which he does so. I’d often too quickly turned the language of ‘swords and arrows’ into metaphors. Indeed, David mentions ‘enemies’ in at least 53 of his 75 psalms – and he usually means people who want him dead.

David’s day job was dangerous. That’s what he’s seeking God’s wisdom for and that’s what he’s recognising that God is sovereign over. The God he worships is not just Lord of creation, not just Lord of the nations, but Lord of his daily life and work.

But this context is easy to forget, obvious though it is. Yes, when the superscription tells us that a psalm comes out of a specific experience, we will almost certainly explore it. However, that doesn’t mean that we read all David’s psalms in the consciousness that before he sings them in his palace on a ten-string lyre, he’s lived them out in his everyday experiences as shepherd, soldier, commander, fugitive, outlaw-chief, and king. Indeed, the psalms of contentment, settled hope, and yearning for the house of the Lord are all the more striking when read against that backdrop. If we’d been on the run for a decade, wouldn’t we thirst to worship God freely in his courts?

Yes, of course, many of the New Testament writers invite us to recognise the prophetic elements in the psalms, and record too how King Jesus himself taught and prayed them. However, that should not deflect us from first exploring how this ‘man after God’s own heart’ brought his whole life and work to the God of all in deep recognition of his LORD’s supreme worthiness of adoration and trust.

Mark Greene is Mission Champion at LICC and the editor of Worshipping the God of All in All of Life, six group studies in David’s psalms, a joint LICC/Spring Harvest resource.