A Map of the Prayer Book
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Have Psalms 13, 110, 1, 121, 100, and 137 read before this session, and keep your Bible open to glance at each as we come to it.
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly … singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, all with grace in your hearts to God.
Colossians 3:16
Three sessions in, the foundation of this volume is laid. We have seen that the Psalter is the prayer book of Christ, opened by the blessed Man and the begotten King of its first two psalms; we have stood beneath the cross with Psalm 22 and at the empty tomb with Psalm 16. The crucified and risen Lord has been met in His own prayers. Now, before we range out across the rest of the book, we need one more thing. Not another psalm, but a way of reading. We need a map.
Luther felt the same need and put it memorably. In his preface to the Psalter he marveled that this one book holds words for every condition the human soul can pass through: whatever a believer is feeling, fear or hope, grief or gladness, he can open the Psalter and find his own heart already on the page, with language given to it he could never have found on his own. That is what makes the Psalter the church’s school of prayer: it does not leave us to scrape together words for God out of our own thin supply; it hands us words, tested and inspired, fitted to every weather. But a school has many classrooms, and the words for the storm are not the words for the harvest. To be taught to pray by this book, we have to know which classroom we have walked into.
Because the Psalter is not one kind of writing. It is a library of kinds bound under a single cover. Some of its hundred and fifty psalms cry out of trouble; some crown a king; some teach the difference between two roads; some are sung walking up a hill toward Jerusalem; some do nothing but praise; and some (the ones that trouble Christian readers most) call down the judgment of God on His enemies. To read a psalm well, you have to know which kind you are holding, the same way you have to know whether the paper in your hand is a love letter or a legal summons before you can read it rightly. Read a love letter as a contract and you will miss everything that matters; read a contract as a love letter and you may sign away your house.
So this session is a map of the prayer book, a short tour of its main rooms, so that when we walk into them one by one in the sessions to come, we will know where we are standing and what kind of prayer the room was built for. We will look at the laments, the royal psalms, the wisdom psalms, the songs of ascent, the hymns of praise, and the hard imprecatory psalms, and we will name, for each, how it is meant to be prayed.
But a word first about what kind of map this is, because there is a wrong way to make one. Scholars have been sorting the psalms into kinds for well over a century, and much of their sorting is genuinely useful; we will lean on it gladly. But the scholar who sorts the psalms only to file them away as the worship-poetry of ancient Israel, interesting for its forms and silent about Christ, has stopped exactly where this series refuses to stop. We do not learn the kinds in order to classify a dead religion. We learn the kinds in order to read each one better for the living Christ it carries, and to hear in each the law that exposes us and the gospel that saves us. The map serves the Master of the book. Sorting is the means; was Christum treibet, what shows forth Christ, is the end, in every room of the house.
One more thing the map will show, and it is worth saying at the outset. The different kinds of psalm are not only different in form; they are different in how they show Christ and different in how they preach law and gospel. The King stands forth in the royal psalms; the blessed and wise Man in the wisdom psalms; the great Pray-er in the laments; the Leader of praise in the hymns; the righteous Judge in the imprecations. And the wisdom psalms lean hard on the law, the laments cry under it and reach for the gospel, the hymns overflow with gospel-thanks, and the imprecatory psalms thunder the law’s last word. So learning the rooms is, at the same time, learning to rightly divide the two words of God across the whole book. Keep both of those in view as we walk: which Christ, and which word, each room is built to hold.
The Laments: Praying in the Dark
The largest room in the house, by far, is the room of the laments. Something like a third of the Psalter is given over to crying out of trouble, more psalms of complaint than of any other kind. That fact alone should reset a lot of expectations. If the Bible’s own prayer book is mostly laments, then the praying life God means His people to have is not a steady sunlit cheerfulness with the hard parts edited out. It is honest, and a great deal of honest praying is done in the dark.
And we should be clear that the lament is not the opposite of faith but one of its truest expressions. You do not pour out a bitter how long to someone you think is absent, or deaf, or powerless to help; you complain, hard, only to one you believe is listening and able to act. The lament is faith with its gloves off: faith that trusts God enough to tell Him the truth about how bad it is. Some laments are the cry of a single soul in its own trouble; others are the cry of the whole people together, over a defeat, a famine, a devastation that has fallen on all of them at once. But personal or communal, they share that startling permission: to bring God the worst, in words He Himself has provided, and to be heard.
Most laments run a recognizable course, and once you have seen it you will see it everywhere. They begin by addressing God, often with a raw how long or why; they pour out the complaint (the trouble, the enemies, the sickness, the silence); they make their petition, asking plainly for help; and then, most of them, they turn. The complaint gives way to a statement of trust and a vow to praise, as though the very act of praying has carried the pray-er from the pit to the promise. Psalm 13 is the model, short enough to hold in one hand: it opens How long, LORD, will you continue to ignore me? and closes, only six verses later, But I trust in your faithfulness. May I rejoice because of your deliverance! Same psalm. Same breath, almost. The turn from the dark to the trust is the shape of the lament, and it is the shape of the gospel breaking into a believer’s trouble.
We have already prayed the deepest lament of them all, Psalm 22, where the turn comes after the cry of dereliction and climbs to the praise of all the nations. That tells us how to read every lesser lament: as the prayer of a people whose Head has been to the very bottom of the dark and back, so that they may bring their own troubles to God in God’s own words and pray them in Him. Some laments are sharpened to a particular point: the penitential laments, where the trouble the psalm cries over is the pray-er’s own sin (we will spend real time with these, with Psalm 51 and Psalm 32 and the rest). And one lament, Psalm 88, does not turn at all; it ends in the dark, with the line those who know me leave me alone in the darkness. We will not skip it. The God who put a psalm with no happy ending into His prayer book knew that some of His children would need it, and we will let it do its hard, honest work when we come to it. The room of the laments has space for every weather of the soul, and a believer who learns it will never again have to pretend he is fine in order to pray.
Close beside the laments, almost a doorway off the same room, stand the psalms of trust, the laments that have come fully to rest. Psalm 23, the most beloved of all, is one. The trouble is still there, the darkest valley is still being walked, the enemies are still in plain sight across the table, but the cry has settled into pure confidence: I fear no danger, for you are with me. Psalm 16, which we have already prayed, is another; so are Psalm 27 and Psalm 91 and the small, quiet Psalm 131. These are not laments that have forgotten their troubles. They are laments that have found their God in the middle of them, and stopped trembling. They show us where the road of the lament is meant to come out.
The Royal Psalms: the King and the King
A second room holds the royal psalms, the psalms about the king, the LORD’s anointed. Some crown him, some sing at his wedding, some send him to battle, some celebrate his reign reaching to the ends of the earth. On the surface they are about the kings of David’s line, the men who sat on the throne in Jerusalem. But we have already learned, back in Psalm 2, what these psalms do: they say more about the king than was ever true of any king who actually wore the crown. You are my Son; today I have begotten you (Psalm 2:7 ESV) was never simply about a coronation in Jerusalem; your throne, O God, is permanent could not finally be said of a man who would be buried like every other.
The royal room is more varied than it first looks. One royal psalm crowns the king (Psalm 2); another sings at his wedding (Psalm 45); another sends his reign out to the ends of the earth (Psalm 72); another seats him as priest as well as king (Psalm 110). What ties them together is the figure at their center: the anointed one, the mashiach, the very word that comes into Greek as christos and into English as Christ. Every king of David’s line was a mashiach, an anointed one, a small christ; and every one of them was, by God’s design, a type, a real man on a real throne who pointed past himself to the Anointed One the whole line was waiting to produce. So the royal psalms are not flattery that outran its subject by accident. They are prophecy that fit its true subject exactly, and waited for Him.
So the royal psalms strain past every earthly king toward the true King they were always describing, and the New Testament reads them exactly that way, more than any other kind. Psalm 110, which we will study at length, is the most-quoted Old Testament psalm in the whole New Testament: Here is the LORD’s proclamation to my lord: “Sit down at my right hand.” It is the verse Christ Himself used, in the temple in the days before His death, to silence His opponents, the verse Peter preached at Pentecost the moment he had finished with Psalm 16. The room of the royal psalms is the throne room, and the One enthroned in it, when the strain of the language is followed home, is always the Lord Jesus Christ, the King whose reign the kings of Judah could only foreshadow and never fill.
The Wisdom Psalms: the Two Ways
A third room is the schoolroom: the wisdom psalms, which teach. They sound like the book of Proverbs set to music: the two ways laid side by side, the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked; the fear of the LORD as the beginning of wisdom; the long meditations on the LORD’s instruction. Psalm 1, which opened this whole volume, is a wisdom psalm; so is Psalm 37, which we take up next; so is the great Psalm 119, with its endless, loving turning-over of the torah of the LORD.
The wisdom psalms come with a built-in danger, and the map had better mark it. Because they are full of do this and be blessed, do that and perish, they are the easiest psalms in the whole book to misread as pure moral instruction, a self-improvement program with God as the rewards officer. Be like the blessed man. Avoid the assembly of scoffers. Delight in the law and prosper. Read that way, the wisdom psalms become law and nothing but law, and law preached as gospel always crushes or puffs up. We learned the better way back in Psalm 1: the blessed Man who keeps the law perfectly is Christ before He is anyone else, and the believer is blessed not by matching Him but by being joined to Him. The wisdom psalms do teach the two ways, and they do press the law on us, honestly, so that we feel our distance from the blessed man. But they press it in order to drive us to the One who is the blessed Man, in whom alone the way of the righteous becomes ours. Read for Christ, the schoolroom of the wisdom psalms graduates its pupils into the gospel.
Two strands run through this room worth naming before we leave it. One is the ache of theodicy, the hard question of why the wicked so often prosper while the faithful struggle. The wisdom psalms do not dodge it; Psalm 37 sits the believer down and counsels patience, and Psalm 73 walks right up to the edge of losing its faith over the question (my feet almost slipped) before it finds its footing again in the sanctuary of God. We will study both. The other strand is the love of the LORD’s torah, His instruction. These are the Torah psalms, where the law is not a burden to escape but something to meditate on, bringing greater delight than honey (Psalm 19), turned over and over for all of Psalm 119’s enormous length. Held wrongly, that delight curdles into the proud man’s confidence in his own keeping. Held rightly, as the delight of the blessed Man who kept it all for us, and then as the believer’s delight in the word that shows him Christ, it is one of the sweetest notes the Psalter sings.
The Songs of Ascents: Pilgrim Songs
A fourth room is small, warm, and full of the dust of the road: the Songs of Ascents, the fifteen short psalms numbered 120 through 134, each headed a song of ascents. These were the pilgrim songs of Israel, sung by families winding their way up to Jerusalem for the great festivals. Up, because Jerusalem sits high in the hill country and every road to it climbs. You can hear the journey in them: the lifting of the eyes to the hills, the relief of arriving inside the gates, the gladness of the household traveling together, the LORD keeping watch over the going out and the coming in. Psalm 121 is the best loved of them: I look up toward the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the LORD.
Three times a year the roads to Jerusalem filled with these pilgrims, at Passover, at the Feast of Weeks, at the Feast of Booths, whole households on the move, and these songs were the music of the journey. You can almost arrange them as stages of the trip: the homesick cry from far off in a hostile land (Psalm 120), the glad shout at setting out, I was glad because they said to me, “We will go to the LORD’s temple.” (Psalm 122), and the warm rest of arrival, the household gathered, how good and how pleasant it is when brothers truly live in unity (Psalm 133). And tucked among them is one of the great penitential cries of the whole Psalter, the De profundis, From the deep water I cry out to you, O LORD (Psalm 130), a reminder that even a pilgrimage of joy passes through the depths on its way up. We will travel several of these roads in their own sessions.
The church has always known itself in these psalms, because the church is a pilgrim people too, on a longer road up to a higher city. We are not yet home; we are traveling, often footsore, toward the Jerusalem that is above, and the One who leads us up the road is the same Lord Jesus who once went up to the earthly Jerusalem to die and rise. The Songs of Ascents are the traveling music of a people on their way to God, and they will teach us, when we come to them, how to sing on a journey whose end we have not yet seen but have been promised.
The Hymns of Praise: the Goal of the Whole
A fifth room is the largest and brightest by the end: the hymns of praise. These psalms do one thing: they praise the LORD, and they summon everything that exists to do it with them. Shout out praises to the LORD, all the earth! cries Psalm 100. They praise Him for what He is and for what He has done, in creation and in rescue; they are not asking for anything; they have moved past petition into pure response. And response is the right word, because praise in the Bible is never free-floating cheerfulness. It is always because: because He made, because He saved, because His loyal love endures. Praise is gospel come back around as song. We praise because He has first done something worth praising, and the something is the gospel.
The bright end of the book has more than one window in it. Some of these psalms are hymns of broad praise, summoning all the earth to worship the LORD for who He is. Others are psalms of thanksgiving, narrower and more personal, the song of one who was in trouble, cried out, and was delivered, and now comes back to tell the congregation what God has done (Psalm 116 is one we will study, the thanks of a man brought back from the edge of death). And others lift their eyes to the works of God’s hands. These are the creation psalms, where the heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19) and the believer, considering the moon and the stars, asks, Of what importance is the human race, that you should notice them? (Psalm 8). Whether the praise rises from the whole earth, from one rescued throat, or from the night sky overhead, the movement is the same: God has done something, and the only fitting answer is to say so, gladly, out loud.
And here the whole Psalter shows its hand. It opens, in Psalm 1, with a single blessed man quietly meditating on the law by the water; it ends, in Psalm 150, with everything that has breath called to praise the LORD on every instrument that can be blown, plucked, or struck. The book travels from the law murmured by one man to the praise roared by all creation, which is to say, it travels the road from law to gospel, and arrives at glory. And the praise is not ours alone to lead. We saw it in Psalm 22: the risen Christ stands in the midst of the congregation and leads its praise, the first voice, the great High Priest singing the Father’s name and handing us the words. Even in the brightest room, He is the one who started the song.
The Imprecatory Psalms: the Hardest Room
And then there is the room most Christians would rather lock and walk past: the imprecatory psalms, the psalms that call down the judgment and curse of God on enemies. They are not a few stray verses; they run through Psalm 69, Psalm 109, Psalm 137, and others, and they say things that stop a thoughtful reader cold. Pour out your judgment on them. The sharpest of all is at the end of Psalm 137, where the exile, sitting by the rivers of Babylon and remembering what Babylon’s soldiers had done to the children of Jerusalem, cries out a blessing on whoever would do the same to Babylon’s own: How blessed will be the one who grabs your babies and smashes them on a rock. There is no use pretending that verse is not in the Bible, and this series will not pretend it. We will not skip the imprecatory psalms. But we do have to learn how a Christian can possibly pray them, and the map needs to mark this room most carefully of all.
Begin with what these psalms are not. They are not permission for personal vengeance. The Christian is flatly forbidden to repay evil for evil: Do not avenge yourselves, dear friends, but give place to God’s wrath, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord (Romans 12:19). So the imprecatory psalm is not a license to curse the neighbor who wronged us. Just the opposite: it is the act of doing exactly what Romans commands, taking the vengeance out of our own hands and placing it in God’s, handing Him the wrong and asking Him, the righteous Judge, to deal with it. The psalm that cries for judgment is the prayer of someone who has refused to take up the sword himself and has carried the injustice to the only One who has the right to settle it.
Then see who finally prays them, and against whom. These are, first, the prayers of Christ, the righteous One, the only one with clean enough hands to call down a holy judgment without sin in it. And His deepest enemies are not flesh and blood but sin, death, and the devil, the powers that have ravaged His people and defied His Father. When the church prays the imprecatory psalms in Him, it prays for the overthrow of those enemies and the final triumph of God’s justice over all evil. It is the very cry the martyrs raise from under the altar in heaven, How long, Sovereign Master, holy and true, before you judge … and avenge our blood? (Revelation 6:10). That cry is not sub-Christian. It is the longing of the redeemed for God to make the world right. And we pray it now in what we might call the eschatological mood: not demanding judgment this afternoon by our own hand, but asking the LORD to bring, in His time, the last judgment in which every Babylon falls and every wrong is answered. Babylon itself, in the end, is less a city than a name for the whole God-defying world-order, the Babylon the book of Revelation watches God finally bring down. The hardest room in the Psalter turns out to be the room where the church learns to hate evil as God hates it, to renounce its own revenge, and to long, with the martyrs, for the day the Judge sets all things right. We will give Psalm 109 and Psalm 137 their own careful session when we reach them.
Bonhoeffer, who prayed the Psalter daily under a regime that gave him real enemies to think about, saw the point plainly: only the One who is entirely without sin can pray the psalms of vengeance without sin, and so the Christian prays them only in Christ, never in his own name and never out of his own grudge. There is a mercy in that discipline, and there is also a warning in keeping these psalms at all. A faith that cannot bear to look at them is usually a faith that has gone soft on evil. It no longer believes God hates what He hates, no longer aches for the brutalized and the murdered to be vindicated, no longer longs for the day the accounts are settled. The imprecatory psalms will not let us have that sentimental religion. They make us face the wickedness of the world honestly, hand it to the Judge who alone may answer it, and wait for Him. That is, in the end, a far more loving thing than pretending the evil does not matter.
Reading Every Room for Christ
Stand back now and look at the whole house. Six rooms, six kinds of prayer (laments, royal psalms, wisdom psalms, songs of ascent, hymns, and imprecations), and the map is not even complete, because the psalms overflow their categories. A single psalm can be a royal lament, a king crying out of trouble; a wisdom psalm can rise into praise; a lament can carry a confession of sin in its middle. The kinds are a guide, not a cage. A wise reader holds them loosely, lets a psalm be what it is, and does not force a poem into a box it was never built for.
But hold the kinds loosely around two things that never change, room to room. The first is that every kind is read for Christ. He is not crammed into the psalms by our ingenuity; He is the One the whole book is finally about, and each kind shows Him from a different angle: the King of the royal psalms, the blessed and obedient Man of the wisdom psalms, the great Pray-er of the laments who has been to the bottom of the dark, the Leader of the hymns who sings in the midst of the congregation, the righteous Judge of the imprecations before whom every Babylon will fall. Walk into any room of the prayer book asking where is Christ here, and the room will answer.
The second is that every kind preaches law and gospel, though each in its own key. The wisdom psalms press the law until we feel our distance from the blessed man, then send us to Him. The laments cry under the law’s troubles and turn, most of them, into the gospel’s trust. The hymns are gospel overflowing into thanks. The imprecatory psalms preach the law’s last and most terrible word, the certain judgment of God on all evil, and in doing so they drive us, hard, into the only refuge from that judgment, which is the crucified and risen Christ who bore it for us. So to learn the rooms of the Psalter is, at the same time, to be trained in the two words a Lutheran must always rightly divide. The map is not literary housekeeping. It is how we keep from preaching the law as gospel or the gospel as law, all the way across a hundred and fifty psalms. With it in hand, we are ready to walk the rooms one at a time.
Gathering the Threads
We took a session away from single psalms to draw a map, because the Psalter is not one kind of writing but a library of kinds, and a psalm read in the wrong key is a psalm half-lost. We walked six rooms: the laments, the largest room, where a third of the book cries out of the dark and most of it turns to trust; the royal psalms, the throne room, where the language strains past every earthly king to the true King the New Testament quotes more than any other psalms; the wisdom psalms, the schoolroom of the two ways, easy to misread as mere moral instruction and meant instead to drive us to the blessed Man who is Christ; the Songs of Ascents, the pilgrim songs of a traveling people on the road to the city above; the hymns of praise, the bright far end of the book, where gospel comes back around as song and the whole Psalter climbs from one man’s quiet meditation to all creation’s roar; and the imprecatory psalms, the hardest room, where the church renounces its own revenge, hands the judgment to God, and longs with the martyrs for the day every Babylon falls.
And we marked the two things that hold true in every room: that each kind shows the one Christ from its own angle, and that each kind preaches law and gospel in its own key. The map is not a scholar’s filing system; it is a way of reading every kind of psalm for the Christ it carries and the two words of God it speaks. With it drawn, the rest of the volume is a walk through the rooms, and we know now where we are standing in each.
For Discussion
The session compared reading a psalm in the wrong genre to reading a love letter as a legal contract. Choose one psalm from this week’s reading (Psalm 13, 110, 1, 121, 100, or 137), name what kind it is, and describe how knowing the kind shapes the way it should be prayed.
The session said each kind of psalm shows the one Christ from a different angle: the King, the blessed Man, the great Pray-er, the Leader of praise, the righteous Judge. Pick two of the kinds and describe how Christ is present in each.
Laments make up the largest part of the Psalter, and most turn from complaint to trust. Read Psalm 13 and find the turn. What does it teach a believer about bringing real trouble to God rather than pretending to be fine before Him?
The imprecatory psalms call down God’s judgment on enemies. Restate, in your own words, how the session said a Christian prays them: against which enemies, in what mood, and why they are not a license for personal revenge (compare Romans 12:19 and Revelation 6:10). Why can we not simply skip these psalms?
The session distinguished how scholars sort the psalms into kinds from why this series does. What is the difference in purpose, and how does it connect to Luther’s rule that all Scripture is read for what shows forth Christ?
The Psalter opens with one blessed man meditating on the law (Psalm 1) and ends with everything that has breath praising the LORD (Psalm 150). What journey does the whole book make from its first psalm to its last, and how does that arc match the movement from law to gospel?
Looking Ahead
Map in hand, we walk into the first room: the wisdom psalms, and the two ways. The next session takes up Psalm 37, the long acrostic that begins Do not fret when wicked men seem to succeed. It is a psalm written for the believer who looks around and sees the wicked prospering and the faithful struggling, and wonders, quietly or aloud, whether it pays to follow the LORD at all. It is an old ache, and the Psalter does not scold it. It answers it.
Psalm 37 answers with patience and with a promise: the meek shall inherit the land (Psalm 37:11 ESV), the very promise the Lord Jesus took up and made His own in the Sermon on the Mount, Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5). The wisdom of this psalm is not a strategy for getting ahead; it is the long, patient trust of those who have set the LORD always before them and can therefore afford to wait while the wicked have their brief afternoon. We will read it as the wisdom of Christ, the truly meek One, and as His training of a people who must live by faith in a world that often seems to reward the opposite.
Read Psalm 37 in full before the next session. It is long; read it slowly, and watch how often it returns to the contrast between the brief prospering of the wicked and the lasting inheritance of those who wait for the LORD.
Closing Prayer
Almighty God, who gave Your church not one prayer but a whole book of them, and put into it words for every condition the soul can pass through: we thank You that there is no darkness we can enter where the Psalter has not already gone ahead of us with a prayer, and no joy so high that it has not given us a song. Teach us to read this book rightly: to know the cry of the lament from the shout of the hymn, the law that the wisdom psalms press upon us from the gospel they drive us toward, and the righteous judgment of the hardest psalms from the revenge You have forbidden us to take.
Above all, let us find Your Son in every room of His prayer book: the King upon the throne, the blessed Man in the schoolroom, the great Pray-er in the dark, the Leader of our praise, the Judge before whom all evil falls. Give us His voice to pray with and His Spirit to pray by, that whatever kind of psalm we open, we may pray it in Him and be led by it deeper into Him. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.