Praying the Psalms transformed Israel’s faith because it made God’s people to repeatedly redefine themselves and their relationship with God to conform to God’s revelation and will. They had to replace false hope and a false interpretation of events with the truth of God. They had to face their denial of how bad the reality was, denial of their own culpability for their situation, and denial of their anger and distrust they felt toward God whom they often held responsible for their misfortunes. Praying the Psalms helped the Israelites come to a new understanding and entailed several shifts in their thinking and believing.1 For example, Ps 50 admonishes the people to serve God with true devotion and purity of heart and actions, reminding them that their sacrifices to God are meaningless without these qualities. Psalms 78, 81, and 89 correct the people’s tendency to create false hopes by highlighting only God’s faithfulness to His covenant and neglecting their own obedient response of faith to Him.
Tremper Longman rightly says that “when we read the Psalms with faith, we come away changed and not simply informed.”2 The language of the Psalms is creative and transformative. Praying the Psalms does not always pronounce what is, but rather “evokes into being what does not exist until it has been spoken.”3 In other words, the Psalms are not simply ancient human words that help the believers express their inner feelings before God. The Psalms are the Word of God by which the believer is transformed into, for example, a person with a broken and contrite heart as described in Ps 51. The constitutive power of the Psalms in relation to piety is demonstrated in the ability of a particular psalm to enable the believer through the Holy Spirit to act in the way demanded by that psalm. In other words, “the praying of the psalm is an event by which God’s grace is made manifest in the lives of believers.”4
God’s grace is made manifest because we pray the Psalms in the name of Jesus. This means that we allow God’s Word to shape us according to God’s will and unite us with Christ, who demonstrated God’s will perfectly and prayed the Psalms as the incarnate Son of God. Bonhoeffer ponders on the profound unity between the believers and Christ, their intercessor:
It is the incarnate Son of God, who has borne every human weakness in his own flesh, who here pours out the heart of all humanity before God and who stands in our place and prays for us. He has known torment and pain, guilt and death more deeply than us. Therefore it is the prayer of the human nature assumed by him which comes here before God. It is really our prayer, but since he knows us better than we know ourselves and since he himself was true man for our sakes, it is also really his prayer, and it can become our prayer only because it was his prayer.5
When we pray the Psalms, we seek to find Christ who is revealed in the Psalms,6 and we understand their message in the light of God’s revelation in Christ. This approach can help us adopt certain difficult psalms, such as the psalms with imprecations (e.g., Ps 109), and pray them as divine-human protests against evil and in the light of God’s grace and judgment in Christ.
A mere repetition of the words of the Psalms with only a slight comprehension of their meaning may not produce the authentic transformation intended by their use. Thus, believers need to carefully and methodically study the Psalms and seek a profound understanding of them. Praying the Psalms is not meant to serve as a kind of use of amulets with quotations from the Hebrew Psalter which are believed to have some kind of magical curing power.7 Mays observes that the words of the Psalms may become empty and perverted if they are spoken without an understanding of the distinctive faith of the Psalms. One must, by means of the Psalms, enter and live in that particular world of faith if prayer with their words is to be authentic.8 Praying the Psalms enables the believers not only to understand but also to inhabit and celebrate the biblical worldview in which, contrary to most modern assumptions, God’s time and ours overlap and intersect, God’s space and ours overlap and interlock, and the sheer material world of God’s creation is flooded with God’s love and glory.9
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1 Kathleen Harmon, “The Role of the Psalms in Shaping Faith Part 2: How Praying the Psalms Transformed Israel’s Faith,” Liturgical Ministry 15 (Winter 2006): 58.
2 Tremper Longman III, How to Read the Psalms (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1988), 13.
3 Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms, 18.
4 Harry P. Nasuti, “The Sacramental Function of the Psalms in Contemporary Scholarship and Liturgical Practice,” in Psalms and Practice, 83.
5 Bonhoeffer, Psalms, 20-21.
6 Jesus pointed to the Psalms as inspired resources about his person and ministry (Luke 24:44). The Psalms are quoted extensively in the NT in relation to Christ (e.g., Christ’s sonship, Ps 2:7 in Matt 3:17; Heb 1:5; obedience, Ps 40:6-8 in Heb 10:5-7; suffering, Ps 69:4 in John 15:25; resurrection, Pss 2:7; 16:10 in Acts 2:25-28; 13:33-35; priesthood, Ps 110:4 in Heb 5:6; and kingship, Pss 2:6; 89:18-19 in Acts 5:31).
7 Eli Davis, “The Psalms in Hebrew Medical Amulets,” VT 42, no. 2 (1992): 174.
8 Mays, The Lord Reigns, 6.
9 N. T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: Why They are Essential (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 22.