An excerpt from "God's Big Picture", by Vaughan Roberts (which I'm reading at the moment):
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Figure 26: The Psalms: 'The Lord is King' (Psa 10:16)
The book of Psalms is a collection of hymns and prayers used by the people of Israel in their worship. It does not belong to any one period in Israel's history, the individual psalms having being written over a long period of time, many of them King David. The bok has been described as 'the little Bible', as all the Bible's themes are found within it. Let us notice three themes.
Praise
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Prophecy
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Personal Experience
In the Psalms we find not just God speaking to his people, but his people speaking to him. We are given an insight into the believer's heart. The experience of faith in God the King is laid bare before us in all it's variety. The mood veries from great certainty and joy to doubt and depression. The Christian believer can expect to experience similar feelings: the King has not changed. The words of the psalmist can become our own:
"How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever?
How long will you hide your face from me?" (13:1)
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Not too sure what to make of this...anybody?
5 comments:
Hmm... Interesting, although I don't know you are unsure about exactly.
Haydn.
Not to sure about the doubt and depression part (not saying that we as christians never feel depressed of course), but the example taken from Psalms 13: in a nutshell, King David's times (I gather that he wrote that psalm when undergoing punishment for what he had done, from reading it) are different from the christian's, in the end times, in the light of the full revelation of God's fulfillment of His promises. So I;m not too sure whether we can expect to experience the depression that David went through as from the example in psalms 13.
John Woodhouse and some others said that the key to understanding the Psalms is Psalm 2. Not very sure what that means, but interesting point of view...
Seen from that light, Psalm 13 can also be a foreshadow of the separation from the Father that Jesus was to face on the cross as a result of taking our sins upon himself.
It is also a legitimate cry of God's people (like David), when we're experiencing times of trouble and even depression when God seems far from us. Of course, we know God is always with us, just that our sin and doubts may seem to alienate us from him...
Will continue to think abt it..
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