We often long for revival in our churches and in our nation. But such revival must first begin with us — a revival of cool, complacent, apathetic hearts strengthened to a renewed life in Jesus Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit in us. “I am exceedingly afflicted; Revive me, O LORD, according to Your word” (Psalm 119:107). God revives His people through the ordinary means of His word, but He also does this through the ordinary means of prayer.

What a man is alone on his knees before God, that he is — and no more. ~ Robert Murray McCheyne
One of my favorite parables of Jesus is found in Luke 18:9-14 — the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. Of course, the parable is a little ruined for us in our day, because Pharisees are automatically considered to be “bad guys” in our thinking (although I guess that’s also true for tax collectors). It would not necessarily have been the case in Jesus’ day, however. The Pharisees were the religious leaders in the synagogues, and they were generally considered to be morally and religiously upstanding individuals (at least until Jesus begins to highlight their hypocrisy). It’s a bit like watching the first three Star Wars movies (that is, Episodes I-III) — because we’ve seen Episodes IV-VI and we know that Anakin Skywalker is going to become Darth Vader, it’s very difficult to watch those movies without expecting him to do something bad eventually. So it is with this Pharisee — we know he’s bad, and we almost expect him to pray a bad prayer. But for Jesus’ audience, that was likely an unexpected twist.
This post has to do with prayer, and in Terry Johnson’s wonderful book on The Parables of Jesus, he cites the brief quote from Robert Murray McCheyne that I posted above: “What a man is alone on his knees before God, that he is — and no more.” Johnson goes on to elaborate:
What McCheyne meant was that the contend and manner of our prayers reveal our true convictions about God, life, and eternity. Our prayers reveal our theology lex orandi, lex credendi. According to this ancient principle, the “law” of faith is the “law” of prayer. What we (truly) believe is revealed by how we pray. Moreover, our approach to prayer reveals our approach to life. We live as we pray. Our manner of addressing God reveals the theology through which we address the whole of faith and life. We may put it this way: nothing so reveals our true convictions about life and eternity as our prayer life. … Our beliefs directly shape both our prayers and our life. We live as we pray. We pray as we believe. (Terry Johnson, The Parables of Jesus, pp. 111-113)
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Written by Andrew J. Miller |
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
Reading the Psalms Theologically provides an interesting and encouraging advanced taste of editorial criticism, doing so with vigor and an apparent love for the Psalms. The overall thrust is that the Psalter does point to Christ, which should lead believers to reverence and awe of God.

Reading The Psalms Theologically (Studies in Scripture and Biblical Theology), edited by David M. Howard Jr. and Andrew J. Schmutzer. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2023, 344 pages, $29.99.
Reading most books out of order would be a disaster. Encyclopedias and collections of essays aside, if I was to randomly rearrange the chapters of a story like Pilgrim’s Progress and have you read it for the first time, you would understandably struggle. The ordering of things communicates something—in the Westminster Confession of Faith, for example, effectual calling (ch. 10) comes before justification (ch. 11), matching and expressing our theological understanding of their logical ordering.
Yet curiously, readers of the Bible often skip over the intentional ordering of certain biblical books—the Psalms being chief among them, perhaps because it seems more to us like an encyclopedia than a narrative. Here the book Reading the Psalms Theologically helps readers to see the intentional ordering of the “chapters” of the book of Psalms and its significance. Reading the Psalms Theologically introduces readers to “editorial criticism,” wherein study of the final form of the psalter reveals the theological intention of the editor(s) (4). “Editorial criticism” could be described as a form of “canonical criticism,” associated with Brevard Childs and Christopher Seitz, which evangelicals can embrace to the degree that it reacts against the anti-supernaturalistic presuppositions of much modern biblical criticism by suggesting that we read the biblical books as the sacred Scriptures of the church.[1]
While Christians today are rightly cautious of anything with the term “criticism” in it, we should remember that this is essentially the same work that O. Palmer Robertson engaged in through his own The Flow of the Psalms: Discovering Their Structure and Theology.[2] In other words, editorial criticism, at its best, is reminding us that someone, by God’s inspiration, collected the Psalms (individually inspired at their composition) and put them in an order. Reading The Psalms Theologically asks why the Psalms were put in the order they were and what we can learn from that order.
This is a popular new way of looking at God’s Word, and thus pastors should be aware of it (if even to reject it). For example, another new Lexham title is Text and Paratext: Book Order, Title, and Divisions as Keys to Biblical Interpretation.[3] One more example is Don Collett’s intriguing proposal that Hosea has a signal position among the minor prophets (“The Twelve”), wherein
Hosea’s marriage to Gomer is intended to be a living parable of the Lord’s covenantal marriage with Israel….Hosea is not only the first prophet through whom the Lord spoke in the Twelve but also…the word the Lord speaks to Hosea is the founding agent or agency by which the witness of the Twelve is established.[4]
The first chapter, “Reading the Psalter as a Unified Book: Recent Trends,” sets the table nicely, describing the state of Psalms scholarship. Here we are told that notable scholars like Roland Murphy, John Goldingay, Norman Whybray, and Tremper Longman have been skeptical of the editorial criticism approach to the Psalms (24). Nevertheless, lamenting that “traditionally, most readers have approached the Psalter atomistically, looking only at individual psalms, assuming that they are included in the work in random fashion,” (31) the authors of the first chapter suggest there is indeed an intentional ordering to the Psalms. Again, this should set theological conservatives at ease: what we are after is the author’s intention as presented to us in the words of Scripture and its order. Explicitly we are told (and it is worth quoting at length because of the importance of this point),
We understand the entire Bible to be “God-breathed” (or “inspired by God”), as Paul puts it in 2 Timothy 3:16, and so another question arises in a collection such as the Psalter as to where, exactly, the locus of inspiration is to be found—in other words, what stage(s) of a text that came together over time is/are inspired? Only the original writing? Only the final form? Something in between? We affirm that the Spirit inspired the writing of the very words of individual psalms when they were originally written. We base this on Jesus’ words in Matthew 22:41–45 (NIV), where he states that David, “speaking by the Spirit,” uttered the words from Psalm 110:1. That is, when Psalm 110 was first written, this was done through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. But we also affirm that the Spirit superintended the process that finally resulted in the collection that we call ‘the book of Psalms.’ (32)[5]
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By contemplating the goodness of God, the attributes of God, the acts of God, the promises of God, the Word of God, and especially the gospel of God, we find we can actively begin to increase our sense of joy, and even happiness and contentment, in Christ. Contemplation of the Lord lifts our spirits in such a way that we are, in a sense, drawn nearer to God, and the closer our proximity to the Lord, the greater our sense of joy. 

When the Apostle Paul is outlining the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23, he lists joy as the second fruit, directly after love. There seems to be a rather compelling reason for this. In Matthew 22:34-40, when Jesus is asked what commandment is the most important, He responds that the greatest and most important is to love the Lord God with all of one’s heart, soul, and mind (vs. 37-38), and then explains that the second most important commandment is to love one’s neighbor as oneself (vs. 39). When one loves in this way, they subsequently find themselves fulfilling the Law of God, since the first four of the Ten Commandments deal with loving God, and the latter half deal with loving neighbor. Since love is the fulfilment of the two tables of the Law, the one who truly loves God and others both fulfills the Law and glorifies God. This, of course, is only possible for the one who has been indwelt by the Holy Spirit.
God as the Source of Joy
It is in glorifying God that the Christian finds joy because the supreme object of the Christian’s love is God Himself. We delight in obedience to the Lord because we love His Law as a reflection of Himself. We delight when others see our good deeds and thus glorify our God in Heaven (Matt. 5:16) because there is nothing we love more than pointing others towards the true worship of the living God. We delight when God is exalted in our lives because, whether we live or die, we love to live for the Lord (Phil. 1:20-21).
Out of our love for God and neighbor, then, flows a supreme joy that simply cannot be replicated anywhere else, or by anyone else. As a fruit of the Spirit, the joy the Bible describes as belonging to the Christian is peculiarly the Christian’s only. Nonbelievers may be able to experience momentary happiness, or perhaps even sense a glimmer of joy according to the common grace of God, but pure and unadulterated joy comes from God and flows to the believer through the Holy Spirit.
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