Everything Written About Me
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Before this session, look back over the psalms we have studied in this volume, and read Luke 24:13–35 and 24:44–49: the risen Lord Jesus opening the Scriptures to His disciples on the road to Emmaus and in the upper room. Notice how He names the Psalms among the Scriptures that speak of Him. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.
And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
Luke 24:27 ESV
We have come to the gathering. For thirty sessions we have walked through the Psalter, psalm by psalm, from the blessed man of Psalm 1 to the Son of Man of Psalm 8, through the cross and the empty tomb, the laments and the thanksgivings, the King and the Shepherd, the songs of ascent and the great Hallelujahs. And all along, in session after session, we have done the same thing: we have read the Psalms as a book about the Lord Jesus Christ. We have found Him in the forsaken cry of Psalm 22 and the undecayed body of Psalm 16, in the priest-king of Psalm 110 and the Shepherd of Psalm 23, in the Son of Man of Psalm 8 and the faithful Shepherd-King of Psalm 78. Now, before we close the volume, it is time to ask the question we have been assuming all along: were we right to do so? Is this how the Psalms are meant to be read?
The answer of the New Testament is an emphatic yes. And that is not because the early Christians invented a clever new way to read an old book, but because the risen Lord Jesus Himself taught them to read it this way. On the very day of His resurrection, walking the road to Emmaus with two heartbroken disciples, He opened the Scriptures and showed them the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27 ESV), the words that give this whole series its name. And that same evening, appearing to the gathered disciples, He said it plainly: everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled (Luke 24:44). He named the Psalms by name. He said they were written about Him.
So the method of this whole volume is not ours; it is His. To read the Psalms as the things concerning Himself is to read them as the One who fulfilled them read them, and as He taught His church to read them. And the church learned the lesson well. The Psalter became the book the apostles quoted more than any other, and they quoted it, almost always, as a book about the Lord Jesus. Luther would later call the Psalter a little Bible, in which the whole of Scripture is briefly and beautifully gathered; and at the center of that little Bible, as of the whole, stands Christ.
And there is a reason the Psalms, of all the Scriptures, hold Christ so richly, a reason they became the prayer book of the church and the book the apostles quoted most. The rest of the Old Testament largely tells about God’s dealings: it narrates events, records laws, delivers oracles. But the Psalms do something the other books do not. They give us a voice: the first-person voice of one who prays, suffers, trusts, rejoices, cries out, and adores. And once we know that the deepest voice in the Psalter is the voice of the Messiah Himself, the whole book opens. In the Psalms we do not merely read facts about Christ from a distance; we overhear His prayers, we are let into His inner life, we hear the Son speaking to the Father. That is why this book, more than any other, became the church’s school of prayer: it is the place where the voice of Christ is given to us, and where our voices are drawn up into His. To read the Psalms christologically is, above all, to recognize whose voice we are hearing.
In this session we will gather the threads. We will stand with the disciples on the Emmaus road and watch the risen Lord open the Psalter. We will see how the apostles, following Him, could not stop quoting the Psalms about Christ. We will remember that these were the prayers the Lord Jesus Himself prayed: on the cross, in the upper room, throughout His life. We will gather the portrait of Christ that has emerged across the psalms we studied. And we will end where the volume has been pointing all along: that because the Psalms are His, they are also ours, and that the Lord Jesus prays them still, in His church, in us.
For the Psalms are not finally a museum of ancient Israelite piety, nor even chiefly a treasury of helpful prayers for hard days. They are the things concerning Himself: the prayer book of Christ, the testimony to Christ, and the prayer He gives His people and prays within them. To see this is to hold the whole volume in a single view.
Beginning with Moses and the Psalms
Picture the scene on the Emmaus road. Two disciples are walking home on the evening of the first Easter, their faces downcast, talking over the catastrophe of the crucifixion. A stranger joins them (the risen Lord Jesus Himself, though they are kept from recognizing Him) and asks what they are discussing. They pour out their grief: we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. And then the risen Lord does something remarkable. He does not first reveal Himself; He opens the Bible. Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27 ESV). He walks them through the whole of the Old Testament and shows them that it was all, from the beginning, about Him, including His suffering, the very thing that had shattered their hope. Later they would say, Didn’t our hearts burn within us while he was speaking with us on the road, while he was explaining the scriptures to us?
That same evening, the risen Lord appears to the gathered disciples in Jerusalem, and He makes the point explicit and complete: everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled (Luke 24:44). The Jewish Scriptures were reckoned in three parts, the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings, and the Psalms stood at the head of that third division, its largest and best-known book, large enough to give its name to the whole. So when the Lord Jesus names the psalms alongside the law and the prophets, He is naming the entire sweep of Scripture, and singling out the Psalter in particular as a book that speaks of Him and must be fulfilled in Him.
This is the warrant for everything we have done. It means that to find Christ in the Psalms is not to read something into them that is not there, like a man seeing faces in the clouds. It is to read them as their risen Author and Fulfiller read them. The text says that the disciples could not see it until He opened their minds so they could understand the scriptures (Luke 24:45), and that is true for us as well. We need the same Lord, by His Spirit, to open the Psalter to us, or we will read it and miss Him, as a man may read a love letter in a language he does not know. But the Christ is there, on every page, waiting to be seen: not because we are clever readers, but because He is the subject the whole book was always about. The Psalms do not become about Christ when a Christian reads them; they were about Him before the ink was dry, and the risen Lord simply lifted the veil.
And notice what the disciples had missed, and why. Their grief was not that the Messiah had come, but that He had been crucified. Like most of their countrymen, they had expected a triumphant deliverer, a King to throw off Rome, and a cross looked like the final proof that the hope had failed. The one thing they could not fit into their picture of the Messiah was suffering. And so the risen Lord rebukes them gently: Wasn’t it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and enter into his glory? The cross was not the refutation of His messiahship; it was its fulfillment, written into the Scriptures long before, and nowhere more clearly than in the Psalms, where a righteous Sufferer is forsaken and pierced and mocked, and then vindicated and raised. The disciples had read those psalms all their lives and never seen the suffering Christ in them. We are warned by their blindness: it is possible to know the Psalter by heart and still miss the One it is about, until the risen Lord opens our eyes to see that the road to glory always ran through the cross.
The Book the Apostles Could Not Stop Quoting
Having learned to read the Psalms this way from the Lord Jesus, the apostles never stopped. Of all the books of the Old Testament, the Psalter is the one the New Testament quotes and echoes most (more than Isaiah, more than the books of Moses), and it quotes it, overwhelmingly, as a book about Christ. Wherever the early church went to explain who the Lord Jesus was and what He had done, it reached first for the Psalms.
Consider the very first Christian sermon. When Peter stood up at Pentecost to proclaim the risen Christ, the backbone of his message was two psalms. He quoted Psalm 16, you will not leave my soul in Hades, nor permit your Holy One to experience decay (Acts 2:27), and argued that David, who died and was buried and whose tomb was still among them, could not have been speaking finally of himself; he was speaking of his greater Son, whom God raised, and whose body did not see decay. And then Peter quoted Psalm 110, The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand” (Acts 2:34 ESV), to proclaim the ascended Christ enthroned at God’s right hand. The first Christian sermon was, at its heart, an exposition of the Psalms about the Lord Jesus.
Notice the logic Peter used, for it shows how the apostles read the Psalms. He did not merely assert that the psalms applied to Christ; he showed that they said more than could be true of David. David, he reminded them, died and was buried, and his tomb was a known landmark in Jerusalem. So when David sang that God would not let His Holy One experience decay, he could not finally have meant himself, who experienced decay like every other man. There was a surplus in the words, a promise that overflowed the psalmist who first sang it. And Peter explains it simply: David was a prophet, who foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ. This is the key the apostles turned in psalm after psalm. The great king of Israel, the LORD’s own anointed, was given to see beyond himself to his greater Son, and to put into the prayers and songs of his people words that would only come fully true in the Messiah. So the Psalter is shot through with a holy excess: words too large for the men who first prayed them, waiting for the One they were really about.
And it never stopped. When the church was threatened, it prayed Psalm 2, recognizing in the raging of the nations against the LORD’s Anointed the very plot that had crucified Christ. When Paul preached in the synagogue at Antioch, he reached again for Psalm 2 and Psalm 16. And the Letter to the Hebrews is so soaked in the Psalter that it can hardly speak of Christ except in its words: Psalm 2 and Psalm 110 for the Son enthroned and the priest forever; Psalm 8 for the Son of Man crowned through suffering; Psalm 40 for the Christ who came saying a body you prepared for me; Psalm 22 for the Christ who sings God’s praise in the midst of the congregation. The apostles did not treat the Psalms as a grab-bag of edifying sentiments. They treated them as sworn testimony to the person and work of the Lord Jesus, a witness God had been recording, in the prayers and songs of His people, for a thousand years before the witness took flesh.
Nor was it only in their sermons that the apostles reached for the Psalms; it was in the way they told the story of the cross itself. The Gospel accounts of the passion are written, almost line by line, in the language of the Psalter, because the evangelists saw the crucifixion foretold there and narrated it accordingly. The soldiers divide His garments and cast lots: Psalm 22. The crowds wag their heads and mock, he trusts in God; let God, if he wants to, deliver him now: Psalm 22 again. They give Him sour wine to drink in His thirst: Psalm 69. The friend who ate bread with Him lifts his heel against Him: Psalm 41. The soldiers break the legs of the others but not His, and not a bone of Him is broken: Psalm 34. He is the stone the builders discarded, become the cornerstone: Psalm 118. The evangelists were not decorating the story with proof-texts; they were showing that the deepest event in history had been scored, in advance, into Israel’s book of prayer. When the Lord Jesus died, He died the death the Psalms had been describing for a thousand years.
The Prayer Christ Prayed
But the Psalms are not only a book about the Lord Jesus; they were the prayer book He Himself prayed. As a faithful son of Israel, He prayed and sang the Psalms all His life: in the synagogue at Nazareth, at the great feasts in Jerusalem, in the daily rhythm of Jewish prayer. The Psalter was His native language of prayer, the words in which He poured out His soul to His Father. And nowhere is this clearer than in His passion, where, in His extremity, the words that came to His lips were the words of the Psalms.
From the cross He prayed Psalm 22: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The deepest cry He ever uttered was a psalm, the lament of an innocent sufferer, surrounded by mockers, his hands and feet pierced, his garments divided by lot, every detail of which the Gospels saw fulfilled before their eyes at Golgotha. And His last breath, too, was a psalm. Into your hands I commit my spirit: that is Psalm 31, the prayer of a child laying himself down to sleep in his Father’s keeping, prayed now by the dying Lord as He gave up His life. Between the cry of forsakenness and the word of trust, the whole passion of Christ was wrapped in the language of the Psalter.
And there is one more, almost unbearably tender. On the night He was betrayed, after the Last Supper, the Gospels tell us that after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. The hymn was the Hallel, the great psalms of praise sung at Passover (Psalms 113 through 118), which means that on the night before He died, the Lord Jesus stood with His disciples and sang Psalm 118: the stone which the builders discarded has become the cornerstone … may the one who comes in the name of the LORD be blessed! He sang the song of the rejected stone, knowing He was the stone the builders were about to reject; He sang of the one who comes in the LORD’s name, going out to be crucified. The Psalms were on His lips to the end. And this changes everything about how we pray them. When we open the Psalter and pray a lament or a thanksgiving, we are not praying alone, or for the first time. We are praying the prayers our Lord prayed before us, taking onto our own lips the words that were on His.
And this is a particular comfort in the darkest psalms. We have spent whole sessions in the laments, the how long, LORD of Psalm 13, the unbroken night of Psalm 88, the cry from the deep water of Psalm 130 (older translations, out of the depths), and we have seen how honest the Psalter is about anguish. It can feel almost too raw to pray such words to God. But here is the wonder: those words were sanctified by being on the lips of the Lord Jesus. He prayed the forsakenness of Psalm 22, and He prayed it not from the safe shallows but from the very bottom, where the forsakenness was real. He has been into the depths the laments describe, and prayed His way through them, and come out the other side in resurrection. So when you must pray a lament, when your own how long rises bitter in your throat, you are not praying something foreign to God or unworthy of Him. You are praying a prayer your Lord prayed before you, and from a deeper pit than yours. The Psalter’s darkest words are safe to pray precisely because He has already prayed them, and they did not have the last word over Him.
The Christ the Psalms Proclaim
Now let us gather the portrait. Look back over the psalms we have studied, and see how the whole sweep of Christ’s person and work stands written across the Psalter, as if the Holy Spirit had sketched His likeness in advance, scattered through the prayers of Israel, waiting to be assembled. There is His eternal Sonship and His anointed kingship in Psalms 1 and 2: the truly blessed Man who keeps the law perfectly, and the King to whom the Father says, You are my son. There is His suffering and death in Psalm 22, drawn in such detail that the evangelists needed only to point. There is His resurrection in Psalm 16: the Holy One not abandoned to the grave, His flesh not experiencing decay.
There is His ascension and His reign in Psalm 110: David’s Lord, seated at God’s right hand, a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. There is His marriage to His bride, the church, in Psalm 45, and His just and gentle kingdom over the poor and helpless in Psalm 72. There is His shepherding of His people in Psalm 23, and His being the very Word that Psalm 119 loves, the word that is a lamp to walk by. There is the Son of Man of Psalm 8, crowned with glory and honor through the suffering of death; and the faithful Shepherd-King of Psalm 78, given by God to a people who could not keep themselves. The incarnation, the righteous life, the cross, the empty tomb, the ascension, the heavenly session, the shepherding, the return to judge and to reign: it is all there, the whole gospel, written into the prayer book of Israel centuries before it came to pass.
And He is present even in the psalms that do not seem, at first, to be about Him at all. He is in the laments (Psalm 13’s how long, Psalm 88’s unbroken darkness, Psalm 130’s cry from the deep water), for He is the One who went down into our depths, who knows the forsakenness from the inside, who prayed those cries Himself and answers them with His resurrection. He is in the penitential psalms: though He had no sin of His own to confess, He bore ours, and so Psalm 51’s plea for a clean heart and Psalm 32’s joy of forgiveness are His gift to us, purchased by the sinless One who was made sin for our sake. And He is in the great praises (Psalm 103’s catalogue of mercies, Psalm 145’s open hand, Psalm 150’s final Hallelujah) as the One in whom all those mercies are secured and the One who leads the everlasting praise. There is no corner of the Psalter where He is not, once the eyes are opened to see Him.
Luther saw this so clearly that he called the Psalter a little Bible, a book in which, he said, everything contained in the whole of Scripture is beautifully and briefly gathered, compressed into the form of prayer and song. And the heart of that little Bible, as of the great one, is Christ. To pray through the Psalms with opened eyes is to be taught the whole counsel of God: the majesty of the Creator and the dignity of His creatures, the weight of sin and the gift of forgiveness, the terror of the law and the sweetness of the gospel, the life of the church and the hope of the resurrection, and Christ Himself at the center, holding it all together. This is why the church has always made the Psalter the backbone of its prayer and the school of its faith. A believer who learns to pray the Psalms in Christ is not merely picking up devotional habits; he is being catechized by the Holy Spirit in the whole of the faith, one psalm at a time, with the Lord Jesus as the lesson on every page.
Christ Prays in His Church
And so we come to the deepest truth of all, the one toward which this whole volume has been reaching. The Lord Jesus does not only stand as the subject of the Psalms, nor only as the One who once prayed them in the days of His flesh. He prays them still: in His church, in His people, in us. The church has long confessed that Christ and His people are so joined, Head and members, that they form one body, the whole Christ, and that when the body prays the Psalms, the Head prays in them. The voice that rises from the praying church is never ours alone: His voice is taken up into ours, and ours is lifted into His.
This is an immense comfort, and it solves a problem every honest pray-er of the Psalms feels. We open the Psalter and are asked to pray words that do not match our condition. We are sorrowful, and the psalm before us bursts with praise. We are anxious and faithless, and the psalm speaks with serene confidence. We are guilty to the bone, and the psalm protests its innocence. How can we honestly pray such words? The answer is that we pray them in Christ, and He prays them in us. The praise we cannot feel, He feels perfectly, and lends us His joy. The confidence we lack, He has in full, and carries us in it. The innocence we cannot claim, He alone possesses, and clothes us in it. We never pray the Psalms out of our own resources only; we pray them as members of a body whose Head prays perfectly, so that our halting, ill-fitting prayers are gathered up and made whole in His.
Which means the Psalter is, in the end, a gift the Lord Jesus hands to His church and says: here is how to pray; pray this with me. It was His prayer book, and He makes it ours. He prayed these psalms in the days of His flesh, and He prays them now in His members, and He will lead them at the last in the unending praise of heaven. So the great invitation of this whole volume is not merely to study the Psalms about Christ, as we have done, but to pray them in Him. Take the Psalter as your prayer book, as it was His. Pray it in the morning and the evening; pray it when you have no words of your own; pray it when your own feelings fail, trusting that the One whose prayer it perfectly is prays it in you. For the Psalms are the things concerning Himself, and to pray them in Him is to find that He is nearer than the words on the page, praying with you and for you, your great High Priest who ever lives to intercede.
And when we take up the Psalter to pray, we are not praying alone in another sense too: we are joining a praying that has never stopped. For three thousand years the people of God have prayed these psalms: Israel in the temple, the Lord Jesus and His disciples, the apostles, the martyrs, the monks at their hours, the Reformers who set the Psalter at the center of the church’s daily prayer, the believers of every century since, down to the saints who prayed them at our own bedsides and will pray them when we are gone. To pray Psalm 23 or Psalm 130 today is to add our voice to a vast chorus stretching back to David and forward to the last generation, and upward into heaven where the praise never ceases. There is deep comfort in this for the believer whose own prayer feels small and faltering. You do not hold up the praise of the church by the strength of your private devotion; you step into a river already flowing, a prayer already rising (the prayer of the whole Christ in all His members across all the ages), and your weak voice is caught up and carried in it.
Gathering the Threads
We gathered the threads of the whole volume, and found them all running to one center. We stood on the Emmaus road and watched the risen Lord Jesus open the Scriptures and show His disciples the things concerning himself, naming the Psalms by name as a book that speaks of Him and must be fulfilled in Him, so that the method of this entire volume turned out to be not ours but His, the way the risen Lord taught His church to read. We saw how the apostles, having learned the lesson, could not stop quoting the Psalter about Christ: Peter at Pentecost preaching the resurrection from Psalm 16 and the ascension from Psalm 110, the church praying Psalm 2, the Letter to the Hebrews soaked through in the Psalms, all treating the Psalter as a thousand-year-old witness to the Lord Jesus. We remembered that these were the very prayers He prayed: Psalm 22 and Psalm 31 from the cross, Psalm 118 sung on the night He was betrayed, the Psalms His native language of prayer to the end.
We gathered the portrait the Psalter draws of Him: His Sonship and kingship in Psalms 1 and 2, His death in Psalm 22, His resurrection in Psalm 16, His reign in Psalm 110, His marriage to the church in Psalm 45 and His just kingdom in Psalm 72, His shepherding in Psalm 23, His being the Word of Psalm 119, the Son of Man of Psalm 8 and the Shepherd-King of Psalm 78; the whole gospel written into Israel’s prayer book before it came to pass. And we found Him present even where He seemed absent, in the depths of the laments He prayed Himself, in the penitential psalms whose forgiveness He purchased, in the great praises He secures and leads. And we came at last to the deepest truth: that because the Psalms are His, they are also ours; that the whole Christ, Head and members, prays them together, so that we never pray them alone, and the praise we cannot feel and the innocence we cannot claim are supplied by the One in whom we pray. The Psalms are the things concerning Himself, and the prayer book He gives His people and prays within them. To see this is to hold the whole volume in a single view, and the only fitting response is to take up the Psalter and pray.
For Discussion
On the road to Emmaus the risen Lord Jesus interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27 ESV), and later named the Psalms among the Scriptures that must be fulfilled in Him (Luke 24:44). Why does it matter that finding Christ in the Psalms is His own way of reading them, and not a later Christian invention?
The Psalms are the Old Testament book the New Testament quotes most, and almost always about Christ. Why do you think the apostles turned so constantly to the Psalter to understand and proclaim the Lord Jesus?
The Lord Jesus prayed the Psalms: from the cross He prayed Psalm 22 and Psalm 31, and He sang the Hallel on the night He was betrayed. How does it change the way we pray the Psalms to know they were His prayers first?
Looking back over the psalms we have studied in this volume, where have you most clearly seen the sweep of Christ’s work (His incarnation, suffering, death, resurrection, and reign) written across the Psalter?
The church has long confessed that when we pray the Psalms, Christ the Head prays in His members, so that we never pray them alone. How is this a comfort when we must pray a psalm we cannot fully feel: praise in sorrow, confidence in fear, innocence in guilt?
If the Psalms are the prayer book the Lord Jesus prayed and prays in His church, what are some concrete ways a believer might make the Psalter part of daily prayer?
Looking Ahead
One session remains, and it will close this volume and open the way to the next. Having spent these many weeks in the prayer book of Christ, we will pause to look back over the whole of what we have learned in the Psalms, and then to look forward, for The Things Concerning Himself does not end with the Psalter. The series continues into the Prophets, and the next volume will turn to the book in which, more than any other, the gospel is written before the gospel: the prophecy of Isaiah.
In Isaiah we will meet the child who is born and called Mighty God, the shoot from the stump of Jesse, and above all the Servant of the LORD who was wounded because of our rebellious deeds and crushed because of our sins, because of whose wounds we have been healed. If the Psalms gave us the prayers of Christ, Isaiah will give us the clearest portrait of His suffering and His glory drawn anywhere in the Old Testament. In our final session we will gather the harvest of this volume and set our faces toward that road.
Before the final session, take time to reread one or two of the psalms from this volume that meant the most to you, this time praying them in Christ. And, if you are able, read Isaiah 52:13–53:12, the song of the Suffering Servant, as a foretaste of where the series turns next.
Closing Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, You walked with Your downcast disciples on the Emmaus road and opened the Scriptures, showing them the things concerning Yourself, and You named the Psalms among the words that must be fulfilled in You. Open our minds also, by Your Spirit, to understand the Scriptures, that we may find You on every page of the Psalter: in the cross of Psalm 22 and the empty tomb of Psalm 16, in the throne of Psalm 110 and the Shepherd of Psalm 23, in the depths of every lament and the joy of every praise. We thank You that these were the prayers You prayed: that You cried Psalm 22 from the cross and commended Your spirit in the words of Psalm 31, and sang the songs of praise on the night You were betrayed.
We bless You that because the Psalms are Yours, they are also ours, that You give us Your own prayer book and pray it within us, so that we never pray alone. When our praise is thin and our faith is weak and our hearts condemn us, pray in us, we pray; lend us Your joy, carry us in Your confidence, clothe us in Your innocence, and gather our halting words into Your perfect prayer. Make the Psalter our prayer book, as it was Yours, until at the last You lead us in the unending praise of heaven. For the whole Psalter speaks the things concerning Yourself, our great High Priest who ever lives to make intercession; who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, now and forever. Amen.