Quotes About Psalmists

Israel is pressed, it is a suffering country. People feel the pressures of enemies as perhaps the psalmists felt them, and sometimes seem ready to cry out, "Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth.

Neither prophets nor priests nor psalmists offer quick cures for the suffering: we don't find any of them telling us to take a vacation, use this drug, get a hobby. Nor do they ever engage in publicity cover-ups, the plastic-smile propaganda campaigns that hide trouble behind a billboard of positive thinking. None of that: the suffering is held up and proclaimed—and prayed.

Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?

Biblical laws and standards sound oppressive and restrictive in our lawless, arrogant twenty-first century culture. But the psalmists rhapsodize about the law of God as sweet, precious, life-giving, wise, pure, enlightening, liberating and good. In our homes, we follow the absolutes and principles of Scripture and apply them to the "stuff" of family life. The church supports our love of the law of God as satisfying and necessary for an edifying and productive life.

The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.

As the psalmists cry out in joy or grief, they stir us as we identify similar emotions in ourselves.

Our psalmists were not Judaizers, nor were they Calvinists, Arminians, Theonomists, Dispensationalists, Legalists or Antinomians. They were worshipping believers, members of a people who knew themselves to be in a unique covenant relationship with the LORD their God, redeemed by God's saving grace, and privileged to have been given a land to live in and a law to live by. Let us, then, do our best to understand and appreciate the law through their eyes.

But if Jesus is raised from the dead, then the scriptures have reached their goal in him, and it's now time for the moment the psalmists and prophets longed to see, when the nations of the earth will bring their treasures in loyalty and obedience to God's anointed king, Israel's Messiah. The