What is it about the Psalms that makes them so powerful and timeless? Psalm 1, 23, 51 and others have lodged themselves in my mind and spoken to me deeply. Yet to be honest, I’ve also failed to appreciate many Psalms because they seemed confusing, foreign, or irrelevant. Here lies an enigma: the Psalms give voice to some of the greatest truths in Scripture, yet they often leave us bewildered. In Learning to Love the Psalms, Robert Godfrey helps us to appreciate the beauty and understand the complexities of the Psalter.
The beauty of the Psalms has many layers. First of all, the Psalms use poetry to paint spiritual truth in vivid depth. Consider how many pages of tedious description it would take to explain what “He is our God, and we are the people of his pasture” tells us in a handful of words. Second, the Psalms show us the full range of human emotions—not only joyful praise, but also doubt, discouragement, and frustration. In this way, they “teach us how to express our emotions to God in all the circumstances of our lives” (4 Third, “the Psalms are full of Christ” (4). Godfrey demonstrates not only how they prophecy Christ’s coming, but also how the whole message of the Psalms continually points toward him.
Yet what about the difficulties of the Psalms—the unfamiliar poetic style, the strange metaphors, the abrupt shifts in theme or tone? Here too we find riches, if we are willing to dig for them. “Form draws us into reflecting on the meaning of the words,” says Godfrey (32). For that reason, it’s important to understand the structure of Hebrew poetry. For one thing, it doesn’t depend on rhyme and meter, but instead on connected phrases that repeat or contrast. Another important poetic structure is called chiasm: the poem builds toward and descends from the center, where the main point is found. (Godfrey uses Psalm 23 as an example of this, where the central phrase “for you are with me” unifies the metaphors on either side). Far from a hindrance, these poetic devices make the Psalms more vivid once we notice them.
Perhaps another difficulty is that the book of Psalms “seems to us to have no structure” (14). We struggle to see any overarching theme that unites the parts. Here, Godfrey is most insightful. He points out that the Psalms are divided into five books. Though not starkly different, each book emphasizes a different note—from confidence in God, to crisis over his promises, to celebration of his salvation. While many threads weave through the Psalms, one great theme unites the various voices and emotions: “God’s goodness and unfailing love for the righteous” (16). In response, the overarching response of God’s people is praise.
Learning to Love the Psalms is less a commentary on the Psalms and more a how-to manual. While Godfrey does examine almost 40 of them, he does so with an eye toward uncovering the Psalter’s riches and teaching us to do the same. He encourages us to return to the practice of meditating on them, singing them, and praying them. When we do so, we discover them shot through with praise and hope and Christ—eternally relevant in the midst of all our struggling.