Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, September 25, 2023
You don’t have to be best friends with everyone you invite over but we are supposed to welcome strangers. Do it by degrees, go a little further than before, but make your table a hub of life and hope to those who eat at it. Beyond the commands of scripture, we could talk about cultural benefits and statistics and do some delightful social science, but let’s not. Instead, think of this. When you were far off, a rebel and exile from the presence of the living God, he decided to lay a table for you to come and eat at.

One of the qualifications for elders is hospitality (1 Timothy 3, Titus 1), which means ‘welcoming strangers.’ While this is an absolute expectation of pastors, most of the qualifications describe the ordinary Christian life. We’re meant to be welcoming strangers, and we’re all meant to be doing it (Hebrews 13).
Yet, we’re terrible at it.
It’s natural and human to be better at welcoming people who are like you than people who aren’t. You have a better sense of what they would receive as a welcome, conversation flows more easily because you have more things in common, and though we are often uncomfortable with the fact of it we also prefer to welcome those like us. There’s something in all humans where like calls to like.
This can be a normal innocuous, human thing, or it can grow into the excesses of racism or other prejudices. We shouldn’t be overly dismayed if you notice that you find it easier to welcome people who are like you. Welcome requires walls, and the walls of your household are more likely to be comfortably shaped for those whose walls look similar. That’s life.
Christians are also compelled to step out of our worlds and welcome the stranger. This means the literal stranger, the person you haven’t met at all before—I am now used to meeting people for the first time in my kitchen, strange though that would sound to many people—but it also means the person who is different to you. Those differences can be small or large, sometimes we are trying to join hands over vast cultural gulfs. We are not commanded to be the best of friends (though you can be!) but to welcome.
It’s not easy to do the difficult thing and have people in your home who you think you’ll struggle to talk to or that you’ll struggle to feed (hot sauce for West African friends who think your food is dreadfully bland is a winner), but we should.
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The danger of legalism lurks wherever we would relax God’s law from its high-as-heaven standard, dragging it down to a standard low enough for us to keep. Beware the leaven of the Pharisees! The painful truth is that none of us can reach God’s perfect standard. Rather, before his standard, we must tremble, crying out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24).

In every age, the church must be vigilant to avoid legalism. We must never be like the Pharisees, who “tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger” (Matt. 23:24). God tells us that his commandments are not burdensome (1 John 5:3), but to add to God’s commandments would indeed be burdensome.
The danger of legalism is one that all true ministers of the gospel of Christ must take with the utmost seriousness. Nevertheless, do we really understand what Christ was condemning when he warned us to “Watch and beware the leaven of the Pharisees” (Matt. 16:6)?
In this article, I want to raise the question of whether we understand the spirit and nature of legalism correctly, and to explore whether this misunderstanding may seriously skew our gospel ministry.
The Legalism of the Pharisees: Not too Strict, but too Lax
What exactly was the legalism that the Pharisees were teaching? A common thought is that the Pharisees were legalistic by being overly strict about the law, while the Sadducees were overly lax about the law. That is, the Pharisees are commonly characterized as legalists, and the Sadducees as libertines. While this view is both common and convenient as a way of categorizing the two groups, it does not match either the historical records or the biblical records, especially regarding the Pharisees.
Both Jewish and Christian historians have recognized that the Pharisees were trying to simplify the law, rather than complicating it. So, the Jewish scholar Alexander Guttmann writes:
Emerging from the ranks of the people, the rabbis spoke in terms intelligible to the populace and were therefore able to lead the people in accordance with their teachings, a feat the Prophets had been unable to accomplish. Uncompromising idealists, the Prophets demanded perfection and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth in their own time; therefore, they were doomed to failure. Prophetic Judaism never became a reality but remained only an ideal, a goal, like Plato’s Republic. The rabbis were idealists, too, but they were at the same time pedagogues. In guiding their people, they took the realities of life (among them the weakness of human beings) into consideration. They upheld the Torah as the divine code, but at the same time they recognized the need for harmonizing the Torah with the ever-changing realities of life.1
The mission of the Pharisees was not to create a set of extra rules to prop themselves up—even if this may have been the eventual result. Rather, the mission of the Pharisees was to boil down the law to principles, practices, and techniques that normal people could understand and keep.
To be sure, the Pharisees were legalists. Their legalism, however, was the result of trying to reduce the law down to something manageable in the lives of the people. This did not leave them to become too strict, but, far too lax in comparison to the fullness of what God required. 
The Bare Text of the Law vs. The Full Ethics of the Moral Law
Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham helps to see this point by observing that the text of the law does not give us a complete accounting for the fullness of what the moral law actually requires. Or, as Wenham puts it, there is a “gap” between the bare text of the law in the Bible and the fullness of the ethics (moral law) required by the Bible.2 So, the bare text of the law “sets a minimum standard of behaviour, which if transgressed attracts sanction,” but the “ethical ceiling is as high as heaven itself, for a key principle of biblical ethics is the imitation of God. Man made in God’s image must act in a godlike way: ‘Be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy’ (Lev. 19:2).”3
From this, we can see that the legalism of the Pharisees manifested itself in two ways: (1) they sought to keep the bare text of the law, rather than the fullness of the biblical ethic (moral law) of what it means to imitate God; and (2) they boiled down the full biblical ethic of the law into manageable principles that seemed to make the law possible to keep.
New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen makes this point powerfully:
The legalism of the Pharisees, with its regulation of the minute details of life, was not really making the Law too hard to keep; it was really making it too easy. Jesus said to His disciples, “Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.” The truth is, it is easier to cleanse the outside of the cup than it is to cleanse the heart. If the Pharisees had recognized that the Law demands not only the observance of external rules but also and primarily mercy and justice and love for God and men, they would not have been so readily satisfied with the measure of their obedience, and the Law would then have fulfilled its great function of being a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ. A low view of law leads to legalism in religion; a high view of law makes a man a seeker after grace.4
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1 Alexander Guttmann, Rabbinic Judaism in the Making: A Chapter in the History of the Halakhah from Ezra to Judah I (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), xii. Cited in Moisés Silva, “The Place of Historical Reconstruction in New Testament Criticism,” in Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon, ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986), 120. I am indebted to Silva’s article for much of what I have written about the nature of legalism here.
2 Gordon J. Wenham, “The Gap between Law and Ethics in the Bible,” Journal of Jewish Studies 48, no. 1 (1997): 17–29.
3 Wenham, “The Gap Between Law and Ethics in the Bible,” 18, 26.
4 J. Gresham Machen, The Origin of Paul’s Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 179.

Written by T.M. Suffield |
Tuesday, February 14, 2023
[The Psalms] end on Psalm 150 a parallel to Psalm 1. Those who love the Torah will worship. Wisdom turns to song, Word and Spirit together. As St. Gregory of Nyssa said “All creatures, after the disunion and disorder caused by sin have been removed, are harmoniously united for one choral dance.” We end in praise, because the King is coming.

The Psalms have a plot.
Which might seem like a revolutionary statement, or the most obvious one in the world. The Bible is a carefully crafted book. All of the elements of all of the books of scripture teach us—the Holy Spirit is a masterful editor and has written the grand story everywhere in carefully nuanced ways.
I stumbled across this when asking what I thought was an innocuous question. Why are the Psalms organised into five books?
It’s the sort of detail you might have noticed last time you read through the Psalms, but it also might have easily escaped your notice. There are five little heading that give us the book number, but nothing more than that.
These are original titles, too—though they might look like just another organising apparatus like verse or chapter numbers, these ones have the benefit of being part of the scriptures. If you crack open a few commentaries a surprising number will chalk this up to ‘Torah piety’, which amounts to saying that the editors who put the Psalms in their final collected form liked the Torah so much that as an act of devotion they collected the Psalms into five books.
Though, these books are of seemingly wildly different lengths, which ought to at least raise the question of why they grouped them as they did.
Beyond that, we should be more curious in our Bible reading. If there is a numbered feature in the Biblical text, like the five books of the Psalms, it is reasonable to ask why they have been grouped as they have. If we truly believe that the final editor of the scriptures was the Holy Spirit, then we should never assume that details are arbitrary.
So, I started to explore. Turns out a number of scholars have written in detail on the topic, and that the Psalms have a discernable plot. There is plenty of disagreement about the more intricate details, but we rest sure in this at least: each Psalm tells a story, and its placement by the editor tells another story. The first is primary, but the second is meaningful and can often shed some light on the Psalm’s text as it stands.
What are you reading?
Unfortunately, this is not a fully referenced paper interacting with the relevant Psalms in English and Hebrew—partly because I don’t currently have the capacity, mostly because I think that would stretch to a short book.
Instead, this is a short introduction to a topic well-trodden by scholars and a sketch of an idea—at some points you’ll notice I suggest a direction of thought that I won’t flesh out, that’s simply because I haven’t got that thought further than that along the track. I have not clearly referenced my sources, suffice to say that my work is mostly a harmony of the best of those scholars I’ve read: I have provided a bibliography of the most useful sources. This is where these ideas come from.  The only thoughts here which could be referenced as ‘mine’ are those in the section on the shape of the Temple and the connections to our story as modern Christians.
Why do we think the Psalms have a plot?
This might all sound a bit mad, or galaxy-brained, but there are features that make us suspect that something is going on in the editing of the Psalms into these five books. For example, we find in the first two books a series of 72 Psalms of David—especially if we understand those in between Psalms epigraphed as being from David to be by David as well—that end with a declaration that we have come to the end of David’s Psalms at the end of Psalm 72. Then there are a further 18 Psalms of David, which is surprising to say the least.
Books 1 and 2 predate 3-5 and were the original Psalter, so some of this is explained by the history, but it still leaves us with hanging questions.
Or maybe we notice the wildly different lengths of the books and wonder why a random arrangement wouldn’t have wrought even lengths.
Or perhaps we notice the parallels, the messianic Psalm paired with the law Psalm (1 & 2, 18 & 19, 118 & 119), or the way that in book 1 an acrostic Psalm is always preceded by a Psalm about creation.
Methodology
I have two methodological strategies.
Firstly, I align with the method of G. K. Beale for reading the Bible generally, which is to pay attention to the ‘bookends’. We read the whole story in the light of Genesis 1-3 and Revelation 21-22, but we can helpfully read each book of the Psalms in light of its first and last Psalm. I go a little further than Beale in suggesting that these are chiasms, and we should pay as much attention to the central ‘tentpole’ or hinge of the chiasm—the death, resurrection, ascension, and pouring out of the Spirit by Jesus in the case of the whole Biblical story—though identifying these in the books of the Psalms is typically more speculative.
Secondly, I read the Psalms as though they were all about Christ, because they are. This is the witness of the Church Fathers, but more importantly, we should take Jesus seriously in his lesson on Bible reading on the Emmaus Road (Luke 24): all of the scriptures are about him as well as all the other things they’re about.
The Plot

Introduction: 1-2
WISDOM

Book 1: 1-41 (3-41)
THE KING SUFFERS

Book 2: 42-72
THE KING REIGNS

Book 3: 73-89
WAITING

Book 4: 90-106
REPENTANCE

Book 5: 107-150 (107-145)
RESTORATION

The Hallel (Conclusion): 146-150
PRAISE

I’ll now proceed through each book of the Psalms to make some brief comments on its plotting.
Introduction: Psalms 1 & 2
Wisdom
These two Psalms are widely considered the introduction to the Psalter as a whole—considering Psalm 1 as an introduction is an almost universal opinion and there are lots of reasons for connecting the two Psalms together. They share vocabulary enough to think they’ve been selected as an introduction—maybe even written to be one. Psalm 2 ends as Psalm 1 began, which is an indication that we should take them as a pair, and they both end in the same way.
Psalm 1 is our guide to reading the Psalter, and to some extent the Bible. It is worthy of careful study. The Psalm introduces the wisdom theme that continues through the Psalms—this is wisdom literature as well as ‘a book of songs’. There is a connection between wisdom and singing.
We have placed front and centre an individual’s relationship to God. The tree symbolism links us to the start, middle, and end of the Bible—to every significant encounter that God has with people and to the Temple. This text is a frame for the whole Bible.
Then in Psalm 2 we escalate from the wicked people of Psalm 1 to wicked nations, and we narrow the righteous everyman to the figure of the King. In other words it particularises the theology of Psalm 1, and it grounds it in the narrative of Scripture. It turns wisdom to story.
Between the two we have the first hints of God’s grand plan in history to install his son over the earth. This is a summary of the Psalms, and of the whole Bible. Tom Schreiner summarises the introduction as “Those who submit to Yhwh’s kingship keep the Torah, and they also place themselves under the reign of the Lord’s anointed king.” Greg Beale points to the theme as “eschatological kingship throughout all creation and judgement … is the heartbeat of the whole Psalter.”
If that’s our entry point, that should define how we read and sing and pray the rest of the Psalms—our twin themes are Wisdom and the King.
Book 1
The King Suffers
Book 1 is the book of David—especially his attempt to become king. These Psalms can be situated in the early part of his story as related in 1 Samuel.
It begins with the introductory Psalms of 1 and 2 as we’ve just explored, though in Psalm 2 we see the covenant David made with Yahweh. The book ends in Psalm 41, where David rests secure in those same promises. 41 is a prayer of triumph over the enemies that the King has wrestled with from Psalm 3 onwards.
The book travels through the tentpoles of 8 and 9, a messianic Psalm that is a meditation on the Adamic commission of the king and a Psalm devoted to the law, to the central pillar of Psalm 22. This sits in the middle of a poetic pyramid of Psalms (20-24, a common feature of the Psalter), and the collection turns on the King in suffering, struggling for victory. It pivots on the cross—book 1 is the book of the cross.
Most of Psalms 3-41 are laments. If we siphon off the introduction as its own thing and treat Psalms 3 and 41 as the bookends of book 1—which may not be a reasonable move, this isn’t how Psalms presents itself—then we see that despite treachery to the king (in 3 from his own son, in 41 from his closest friend), God still gives the king triumph over his enemies.
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