The longing a lover feels for his beloved is what the psalmist feels in Psalm 84. His language is love language: “How lovely is your dwelling place. . . . My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord” (emphasis added).
This psalmist knows God and has been, one could say, wounded by His presence, so that the only balm is to return to that presence. He longs for it. He yearns for it.
The great church father Gregory of Nazianzus described this feeling in his poem De rebus suis as knowing in his inmost being “the sharp stab of desire for the King.” C.S. Lewis gave fine expression to this desire in his Reflections on the Psalms: “I have rather—though the expression may seem harsh to some—called this the ‘appetite for God’ than ‘the love of God.’ The ‘love of God’ too easily suggests the world ‘spiritual’ in all those negative or restrictive senses which it has unhappily acquired . . . [the appetite for God] has all the cheerful spontaneity of a natural, even a physical, desire. It is [happy] and jocund.”
The psalmist knows that his true happiness—blessedness—is found there, in the presence of the King. Scripture is incredibly clear on where true, profound, enduring happiness is found, and this is because the Bible addresses our deepest longings and desires.
Augustine said in his Confessions that “all men want to be happy” and do what they do in order to be happy. But not all are happy, because they do not seek happiness in the place where it can be found. The Bible tells us where it can be found. Psalm 84 tells us where it can be found. The source of happiness is in God’s presence and its receptor in man’s heart. The context of Psalm 84 is pilgrimage, something required of the faithful Israelite, yes, but also something greatly desired because of what it means for the lover of God—he is celebrating pilgrimage to worship God in His temple.
The Hope of the Psalmist
In the first four verses of Psalm 84, the immediate reference for the psalmist’s hope is the temple, seen in imagery: dwelling place, altars, courts, house. Why? Because God’s presence is concentrated there. He is homesick to return.
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD of hosts!
My soul longs, yes, faints
for the courts of the LORD;
my heart and flesh sing for joy
to the living God.
Even the sparrow finds a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young,
at your altars, O LORD of hosts,
my King and my God.
Blessed are those who dwell in your house,
ever singing your praise!
The psalmist is comforted that he will find rest and shelter in the temple by the tender reality that even birds find a home there. He is most likely recalling the literal temple with its stone facades and eaves where birds find shelter in crevices, just as might be seen today in grand stone building facades in the great cities of the West.
If a bird can find rest and shelter there, certainly a humble follower of God made in His image can.
The Experience of the Psalmist
The experience of the psalmist confirms his hope for God’s presence. God’s presence is something he knows, allowing him to exclaim, “Blessed are those whose strength is in you” (Ps. 84:5). His experience is the flip side of the first beatitude—“Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt. 5:3). Indeed, it goes from strength to strength (Ps. 84:7).
There is a dynamism, a growth, a freshness that comes from frequency in God’s presence.

As fate—or perhaps providence—would have it, Darby’s premillennial eschatology and the stark intensity of his heaven-earth dualism caught on not just in Southern England, but in America. Reshaped in the hands of other ministers, theologians, and popularizers, his ideas and those of his Plymouth Brethren colleagues would in due time change the trajectory of American evangelicalism and the nation’s culture. The ideas presidents kicked around in the Oval Office can be traced back to his work.

A century ago, dispensationalism was the most dynamic force in American Christianity. Generations before Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind novels took America by storm, millions fervently believed the rapture could happen at any moment. The signs of the times seemed to say as much, since according to the dispensationalist reading of Revelation, plagues, wars, and a one-world government headed by the Antichrist would come as soon as Jesus spirited his people away to heaven. 
The institutional empire of nonprofits, colleges, and parachurch organizations built by Dwight Moody and his protégés grew in part out of this expectancy. So did the ministries of innumerable premillennialist evangelists, including the aging Billy Sunday. It is what drove sales of that landmark piece of dispensationalist scholasticism, the Scofield Reference Bible. Most important of all, belief in Christ’s imminent coming drew many thousands to burgeoning Bible colleges, serious-minded prophecy conferences, and missions agencies. These institutions inculcated the movement’s theology in a vast army of pastors and interested laymen, who disseminated it to their readers, followers, and congregants. While dispensational thought involved far more than eschatology, all this cultural momentum came from apocalyptic speculation and the scientific aura about its inductive, literalist approach to the Scriptures. A betting man might have put his money on dispensationalism swallowing the nascent Fundamentalist movement whole. 
A betting man would have backed the wrong horse. To be sure, other cultural and theological forces like covenant theology also had significant numbers of adherents in the interwar period. But as Daniel G. Hummel shows in his invaluable new book The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, neither liberalism nor covenant theology proved to be the movement’s undoing. It was instead dispensationalism’s own vast cultural appeal. By the turn of the twenty-first century, one could hardly find an evangelical theologian who took traditional dispensationalist ideas seriously. What remained, Hummel writes, was “a movement with no vested national leaders, a scholastic tradition with no young scholars, [and] a commercial behemoth with no internal cohesion.” Dispensationalism was dying.
Which is why the story Hummel relates badly needs telling. Magisterial studies like Matthew Avery Sutton’s American Apocalypse, Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals, and George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture left unexamined the depth of dispensationalism’s impact on the broader evangelical movement, and the roots of dispensationalist theology lay outside the purview of these studies. Hummel, by contrast, takes the reader back to Plymouth, a midsize port city on England’s southern coast that birthed the nonconformist sect known as the Plymouth Brethren.
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Biblical theology tells the story of God’s redemption throughout history, tracing themes that run from Genesis to Revelation. Most often, this is described in the overarching timeline of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation (or restoration). Leading children to read the Bible through a lens of Biblical Theology (or a redemptive-historical perspective) is important.
 
Biblical Theology can be a pretty scary term. It sounds a bit like another field of study reserved for the guys in the pulpit or the ones teaching at our seminary halls, but it’s much more than that. It’s important in the discipleship of our children.
What is Biblical Theology?
Reformed theologian Geerhardus Vos defines it this way: “Biblical Theology is that branch of Exegetical Theology which deals with the process of the self-revelation of God deposited in the Bible.”(1)
But . . . what does that mean? Focus on that word process.
Biblical theology tells the story of God’s redemption throughout history, tracing themes that run from Genesis to Revelation. Most often, this is described in the overarching timeline of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation (or restoration).
Leading children to read the Bible through a lens of Biblical Theology (or a redemptive-historical perspective) is important. It’s primarily important because it’s the way God reveals himself in Scripture, but there are also some other reasons worth noting.
5 Reasons to Teach Kids Biblical Theology:

It gives them God-centered perspective.

The Bible isn’t me-centered; it’s Christ-centered. When we read the Bible, we need to know that it’s speaking firstly about God, his character, and his plan. For example, while the story of David may show children how to be brave or how to follow God, the bigger picture shows how God is faithful to preserve his people and how he offers himself as a perfect King.

It gives them a firm foundation.The Bible isn’t just a compilation of stories or laws; it’s a larger story of God at work. This truth helps them understand that God has been at work in the world, is at work in their lives, and will continue to work out his perfect plan. From that vantage point, the past has purpose and the future has hope.

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