Proclaimer Blog
Psalms commentaries that take the New Testament seriously
I preached on Psalm 102 last Sunday (you can listen here). It is a wonderfully surprising Psalm, because at the end, quite suddenly and out of the blue, the voice speaking changes from the Psalmist to God. From verse 1 to verse 24 the Psalmist has been crying out to God in his distress and hanging on to the promises of God. And then (from verse 25), God says to the Psalmist that famous quote we know from Hebrews 1, ‘In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth…’ It would be easy to assume this was still the voice of the Psalmist addressing God. But the LXX (translated of course well before Christ) understood that these final verses were addressed by God to his Messiah. And Hebrews says they were right. We hear here the Father addressing the Son, who is identified as the speaker of the Psalm. This unlocks a proper reading of the Psalm, as the prayer of the Son with the answer of the Father, and therefore a prayer that believers pray as men and women in Christ.
What has been interesting to me is how few of the dozen or so commentaries I have consulted take this New Testament control seriously. Of those I have read, only these three do so:
- Derek Kidner Psalms – the little IVP commentary first published in 1973, much too short, but gold dust
- Michael Wilcock Psalms (IVP Bible Speaks Today, 2001) – I have only dipped in to this so far, but it respects the New Testament wholeheartedly and seems full of insight
- Geoffrey W.Grogan Psalms (Eerdmans, 2008) – an excellent work both on the theology of the Psalms and then on individual Psalms.
Of the non-evangelical commentaries, I have often found the following helpful. Both are from a Lutheran stable. They are critical in an old-fashioned kind of way, but because they come from a vigorous theological stable, often have valuable insights. Although they ignore the NT control for Psalm 102, elsewhere they are not afraid to make Christian comments:
- James L.Mays, Psalms (John Knox Press Interpretation series, 1994)
- Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalms (Fortress Press, 1993)
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