As we read Jesus’s interactions with the Pharisees, we get the sense that the Psalm 81 rebuke would still apply: “Oh, that they would but listen to me!” May we not be the same. May we read our Bible and listen to God’s word. But more that merely that, according to what we see in the center of the center of the psalms, may we listen by preferring God’s ways and counsel over our own ways and counsels.

Overall Israel disobeyed the Lord. They turned from his ways to their own.
We can say more, though. For mere disobedience sounds too external. It can imply their primary issue was their actions. It can imply the root issue was what they did or didn’t do with their hands, without much concern for their hearts, or heads—or ears.
What Is the Center of the Psalms?
As I’m reading and praying through the Psalms in my Bible reading, I’m reading through W. Robert Godfrey’s Learning to Love the Psalms. On the chapter for Psalm 81, Godfrey begins unlike he does for any other chapter so far. He writes, “Psalm 81 is a remarkable and important psalm in the Psalter” (142).
He says this for a handful of reasons. But primarily, it’s because of something I’ve never heard before. Godfrey writes, “In a sense, [Psalm 81] is the central psalm in the book of Psalms” (143).
Godfrey clarifies Psalm 81 of course isn’t central in terms of chapters (since there’s 150 psalms). Nor is Psalm 81 central in word count. Rather, Psalm 81 is central as “it is the central psalm in the central book of the Psalter” (143). There are five “Books” in the Psalms—divisions that are in the original text—and Psalm 81 is the middle psalm in the middle Book.
And thinking more about this, it seems that if anything, this is most likely what the Israelites saw as the center of their song book. With these five inspired “Books,” we can imagine that if an Israelite were asked, “What is the central psalm?” They probably wouldn’t answer “Psalm 75,” like we would with our focus on the 150. Instead, answering “Psalm 81,” since it is the psalm in the middle of Book Three would perhaps fit better.
The Center of the Center
Anyway, that’s Godfrey’s argument for why Psalm 81 is the central psalm in the Psalms.
What’s more interesting, however, is what the center of Psalm 81 itself is. If Psalm 81 is the center of the Psalms, what’s the center of the center? Godfrey writes,
“At the center of Psalm 81 are these words: ‘O Israel, if you would but listen to me!’ (v. 8b). For all the mysteries of God’s providence with Israel, here is the central truth: Israel was suffering a crisis of exile because she had not listened to her God” (143).
Fascinating, right? The central issue wasn’t merely or mainly disobedience or idolatry. Those were symptoms, results. What was the root? Not listening. Deciding to disregard God’s words. From there, everything fell apart.
The Diagnosis: Not Me, But Their Own Counsels
But in God’s word this root is even deeper still than just saying they didn’t listen—and it’s deeper for us. We can hear that Israel didn’t listen and imagine that they had closed off ears. But no one does. Instead, as God tells Israel, when we don’t listen to God, it’s because we’re listening somewhere else.
Notice how God talks in Psalm 81 when he diagnoses this central problem. Hear God’s specific judgment on their non-listening. I’ll italicize the ending of each line to get the point across.
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Beginning on the very day of Livingstone’s death, the British naval patrol was instructed to prevent the export of slaves from the eastern coastal ports. Just five weeks after his death the great slave market at Zanzibar was permanently closed. Less than two years later “all conveyance of slaves by land under any conditions” was also outlawed, dealing a final death blow to the East Africa slave trade.

David Livingstone is best known as a renowned nineteenth century missionary and explorer in Africa. Another vital aspect of his ministry career was the crucial role he played in exposing and helping bring about the abolition of the slave trade in southcentral and southeastern Africa in the latter half of the 1800s. To follow is a summation of his important part in that epic accomplishment.
Throughout his first eleven years of missionary service in Africa (1841-1852) Livingstone heard of and witnessed instances of Boers oppressing and even enslaving Africans beyond the borders of Cape Colony in southern Africa. The Boers were Dutch farm families who had emigrated by the thousands in the 1830s and 1840s, resettling north of Cape Colony in order to avoid being under British rule there. Eventually a Boer militia attacked a group of tribes to whom Livingstone had been ministering and ransacked his residence at Kolobeng, destroying his personal property valued at more than 300 British pounds (then equaling over 1,500 American dollars, likely worth at least thirty or forty times that amount today).
In 1851 Livingstone came in contact with and began ministering to the Makololo, a powerful marauding tribe that had settled in the area between the Chobe River and the upper reaches of the Zambesi River. The Makololo had subjected a number of other tribes living in that same region, which was several hundred miles further north than Livingstone had previously ministered. Those tribal groups, including the Makololo, had a long history of attacking neighboring tribes and carrying off livestock and people as slaves. In addition, Portuguese traders from Angola to the west, assisted by African Mambari tribesmen, entered that region and carried away scores or hundreds of slaves each year.
Livingstone spent two and a half years seeking to determine if a river transportation route could be established from either the west or east coast of Africa, to effectively and affordably transport missionaries and supplies to the inner area of the continent. In doing so he became the first European ever to make a transcontinental journey across Africa. As he approached and stayed for a time at both coasts, Portuguese officials were uniformly supportive of and helpful to him. But he noted that a number of those officials were themselves involved in slave trading to help supplement their income.
While back in Britain during 1857-1858, Livingstone wrote his first book, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. In it he exposed and condemned the different types of slavery he had seen practiced by the Boers, various tribes and the Portugues. In his many well-attended speeches given throughout Britain he put forth a plan to bring Christianity and legitimate commerce to inner Africa, which would in time destroy the slave trade there. He accepted the British Government’s invitation to head the Zambesi Expedition in exploring the Zambesi and its tributaries. The expedition’s further objectives, which were clearly and repeatedly stated in official documents, correspondence and public speeches, were to promote commerce and Christianity to the tribes of that region, with the intention that doing so would help Africans in various ways—economically, spiritually and by putting a stop to the slave trade.
The Zambesi Expedition explored: the lower portion of the Zambesi; the Shire River region and Lake Nyassa (modern Lake Malawi) north and northeast of that part of the Zambesi; the Rovuma River east of Lake Nyassa. Portuguese slave traders, operating with the knowledge and approval of their regional Governors, were found to be active in the Zambesi and Shire regions while Arab slavers prosecuted their trade at Nyassa. Not a few tribes in those areas eagerly participated in the slave trade, selling into slavery people they had captured from other villages or sometimes even the undesirables of their own clans.
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Human beings will always worship, and that impulse to worship will always find expression at the political level. Either, then, the government will endorse and safeguard conceptions of religiosity that are chaotic and idolatrous, and thus corrosive and immoral, or it will endorse a religiosity that results in the genuine moral unity of the State’s members. The only reason why we assume that the political arena can be secular or religiously neutral is because in the West we were until comparatively recently a Christian people.

The case below presupposes several assumptions, with which one may or may not agree, but it is necessary to declare them from the outset for the sake of clarity.
I take it as a given that human nature exists. We are not self-creating beings, and nor can we change our nature. We can warp our nature, mutilate it, and depart from its laws in innumerable ways that as a civilisation we are currently exploring with great dedication—but that is to do violence to our nature, not to change it. Such a view entails that there is indeed a law of human nature, with which we can seek to align our lives in our pursuit of flourishing—or indeed by our own volition we can depart from that law. The ways by which we may align ourselves with that law are diverse and dynamic, but such dynamism presupposes the acknowledgement of such a law. I further take it as a given that political life—by which I mean the moral or practical ordering of our lives in community, and its regulation through leadership and positive law-making—is proper to human nature. As individual persons, we emerge out of, and naturally maintain, corporate persons. 
Such communally reliant flourishing is not accidental to the kind of things we are, but rather it is proper to our nature. Humans are not found to be solitary, non-political animals anywhere on earth, nor have they ever been such. All philosophies that begin from the assumption that human beings are by nature solitary, and merely opt into synthetic communities with accidental forms for some prior, rationally apprehended reason, are flawed in their first principle.
Finally, I take it as a given that we are by nature question-asking and meaning-seeking beings, and hence, we are religious by nature. We ask questions about our origin, our purpose, and our ultimate destiny, and we come up with workable answers to those questions. More importantly, we develop art, mythology, and ritual by which we both seek to embody our quest for meaning and seek some personal encounter with the God or the gods who form the object of our devotions. Religion is baked into our nature.
Thus, because human beings are both political and religious by nature, there has never been such a thing as a secular society. Societies have always been religious. The moment society was declared secular in the 18th century by the French philosophes and their political activists, that society immediately erupted in a religious frenzy of sacrifice, paraliturgical activity, and the deification of the State as a new providential deity, with all the ritualistic expressions proper to religion subordinated to such anti-religious religiosity.
Given that religion is natural to mankind, and political government is the highest natural authority that exists over mankind—that is, mankind instantiated in his communities, nations, and empires, etc.—the proper authority over the religious life of any given natural community is its government. This fact has always been recognised. The Roman Emperor was arbiter over which were the public gods and which were the hearth gods, and eventually he even placed himself among the former. The Athenian statesmen were the protectors of religious life in their polis, and they lawfully executed Socrates for corrupting such religiosity among the young. The barbarian warlords of the north appointed their sacrificial priests and druids just as they appointed their lesser chieftains.
Why, then, is it so alien to us to think of political leaders as the apposite authorities over the religious beliefs and practices of the citizenry? The answer is simple: we are all stumbling about in the shadow of Christendom, and simultaneously we are attempting to run on its fumes.
Political leaders, as the highest authorities in any natural society, are the proper authorities over the religion of their people, which is always some manifestation of natural religion. But our civilisation has historically held that this is the age of Jesus Christ, and consequently supernatural religion has entered the world. Christians claim that their religion does not have its origin in the natural religious impulse of human nature, but has come into the world from without, and in doing so has assumed into itself that natural religious impulse, has transformed it, and superseded it. 
In short, Christians claim that their religion is not a natural religion, but a supernatural one. Thus, they claim it requires an institution of purely supernatural origin to be both its interpreter and promulgator, namely the Christian priestly hierarchy. Political leaders, whose role is rooted in the requirements of human nature, are simply not competent to be the highest authorities over this supernatural religion. Thus, in a Christendom model, we have two authoritative institutions on earth, one of natural origin, customarily called the State, and one of supernatural origin, customarily called the Church.
The terminology of Church and State, however, is deeply misleading. States, once they are Christian political communities, are no longer deemed by Christians to be merely natural communities. They are supernaturalised natural communities by virtue of the baptism of their members and the recognition of Christianity by their existent political and legal organs. Thus, in a Christendom model, what we customarily call ‘Church and State’ are more accurately called the spiritual and temporal divisions of the one supernatural community of Christians called the Church. The monarch or prime minister or president of a Christian nation, then, is as much a leader in the Church as any bishop, except as a layman he is ordinarily competent in the temporal matters of that supernatural community, and only extra-ordinarily competent in spiritual and doctrinal matters—whereas this is the reverse for a bishop.
If the Church’s kerygmatic enterprise withdraws from the public arena, or it is excluded from that arena by a political movement of apostasy, this has several harmful effects from a Christian perspective. First, the Church atrophies, as it cannot fulfil its own mission, and it increasingly attempts to justify its own existence by presenting itself as a club committed only to temporal concerns, within the jurisdiction of an increasingly anti-religious State. Second, this situation leads to a kind of moral schizophrenia among the baptised—especially baptised statesmen—who are expected to be Christians at home and secularists at work. Third, such an arrangement does not lead to what is widely claimed—namely a religiously neutral public arena. 
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