The Harvest and the Road

Before this session, reread one or two of the psalms from this volume that meant the most to you, this time praying them in Christ. Then read Psalm 22:22–31, where the psalm of the cross ends in a proclamation to generations not yet born, and Isaiah 52:13–53:12, the song of the Suffering Servant. If you have time, read Acts 8:26–39 as well. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

A whole generation will serve him; they will tell the next generation about the sovereign LORD. They will come and tell about his saving deeds; they will tell a future generation what he has accomplished.

Psalm 22:30–31

We have come to the last page of the prayer book, and it is worth pausing to notice how the book has left us. Last session we gathered the portrait. We stood on the Emmaus road, heard the risen Lord name the Psalms among the Scriptures written about Him, and watched the whole sweep of His person and work come together across the psalms we studied: the blessed Man and the anointed Son, the Forsaken One and the Holy One who did not see decay, the Priest-King at the right hand, the Bridegroom, the Shepherd, the Son of Man crowned through suffering. That portrait is the heart of this volume, and nothing in this final session will add to it.

This session has a humbler and more practical job. A harvest is not finished when the grain is cut. It has to be gathered, carried in, and put where it can feed people through the winter. So we will do two things. First we will gather the harvest: not the portrait again, but what the Psalter has actually put into our hands, and how a believer keeps using it once the class is over and the study book is on the shelf. Then we will lift our eyes to the road ahead, because the Psalter does not end the way a closed book ends. It ends leaning forward, and it leans toward the Prophets.

Look again at the verses at the head of this session. They come from the end of Psalm 22, the psalm the Lord Jesus prayed from the cross. The psalm that began in the deepest darkness a human voice has ever prayed (My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?) does not end in darkness. It ends in a sermon that will not stop being preached. A whole generation will serve him; they will tell the next generation … they will tell a future generation what he has accomplished. The cross is not the last word of Psalm 22. The last word is proclamation, handed from one generation to the next, about a finished work. The One who cried out from the cross also cried out It is completed (John 19:30), and Psalm 22 ends with the church telling that news to people not yet born.

That is where this volume leaves us: holding a prayer book that was His, praying it in Him, and telling the next generation what He has accomplished. And it is where the series goes next. The Lord Jesus named three parts of the Scriptures in the upper room: the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms (Luke 24:44). Volume One walked through Moses. This volume has walked through the Psalms. The Prophets are waiting.

What the Psalter Has Put in Our Hands

Begin with the harvest. What, concretely, has thirty-one sessions in the Psalter given to the person in the folding chair?

It has given us words for every weather of the soul. That was Luther’s great observation about this book, and we have now seen it for ourselves. We found the Psalter has words for the believer who has waited too long for an answer (How long, LORD?, Psalm 13) and for the one whose darkness has not lifted at all by the last verse (Psalm 88). It has words for the one who thirsts for God’s house and cannot get there (Psalms 42 and 43), and for the one who has watched the wicked prosper until his own faith nearly slipped (Psalm 73). It has words for the one crushed by his own sin (Psalm 51), for the one who has just heard that sin forgiven (Psalm 32), and for the one waiting in the deep water for a word of pardon (Psalm 130). It has words for the traveler who needs a Protector (Psalm 121), the pilgrim glad to arrive (Psalm 122), the sheep in the dark valley (Psalm 23), and the whole creation called to praise (Psalm 150). It even has words for fury, and it taught us to hand that fury to God rather than to act on it ourselves (Psalms 109 and 137).

No one of us will need all of these at once. But every one of us will need most of them before we die. The gift of the Psalter is that when the day comes, we will not have to invent a prayer from nothing, in the dark, with no strength left. The words will already be there, tested by three thousand years of God’s people and prayed first by God’s own Son.

It has also given us a way of hearing the two words God speaks. The Psalter taught us law and gospel in the form of prayer. Psalm 1 held up the blessed man, and we found that the mirror did not flatter us; it showed us the man we are not. Then the Psalter handed us Psalm 51 to pray from the bottom and Psalm 32 to sing on the way up: How blessed is the one whose rebellious acts are forgiven, whose sin is pardoned (Psalm 32:1). We learned that the Psalms do not merely talk about repentance and forgiveness. They put repentance on our lips and then put the absolution in our ears. A believer who has prayed Psalm 51 and then heard the pastor say I forgive you all your sins has walked the whole road of the penitential psalms in ten minutes on a Sunday morning.

And it has given us the key to the whole book: Christ is not only the subject of the Psalms but their pray-er. We have learned to ask of every psalm three questions. How did the Lord Jesus pray this? What did He do so that we may pray it too? And how do we pray it now, in Him? The first question guards us from reading the Psalter as a book about ourselves. The second keeps the cross at the center. The third hands the book back to us, not as a law we must live up to, but as a gift we may use.

The Psalms We Already Pray

Here is something that surprises many Lutherans when they first notice it: they have been praying the Psalms for years without ever opening the book of Psalms. The liturgy did it for them.

Walk through an ordinary Lutheran service with this volume in mind. The service in many Lutheran orders opens with an Introit, and the Introit is psalm verses, usually closed with the Gloria Patri (Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit). That little doxology tacked onto the end of a psalm is one of the most quietly Christian acts in the whole liturgy. It confesses, every Sunday, that the God to whom Israel prayed these psalms is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and that the psalm is now prayed in the name of the Son who fulfilled it. Between the readings comes the Gradual, which again is psalmody. In many orders, as the gifts are prepared, the congregation sings Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me, the words of Psalm 51:10–12 in the church’s familiar liturgical wording. In others it sings What shall I render to the Lord for all His benefits to me?, which is Psalm 116, the psalm of the cup of salvation, and which, as we saw in that session, leads straight to the altar where the Lord gives His people the cup of salvation filled with the new covenant in His blood.

Matins opens with O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise, which is Psalm 51:15, and then sings the Venite, Psalm 95: Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD. Vespers prays Psalm 141: Let my prayer rise before you as incense. And the hymnal is full of the Psalter. A Mighty Fortress Is Our God is Luther’s setting of Psalm 46. From Depths of Woe I Cry to Thee is his setting of Psalm 130. May God Bestow on Us His Grace is his setting of Psalm 67. When the Reformation needed to teach the people to sing, it reached first for the Psalms.

Even the family table is in on it. The Small Catechism’s prayer before meals is Psalm 145:15–16: The eyes of all look to You, O LORD, and You give them their food at the proper time. You open Your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing. And its thanksgiving after meals begins with Psalm 136:1, Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good, and continues with Psalm 147:9–11. A Lutheran child who learns to pray at the supper table is learning the Psalter before he can read it.

This matters, because it means the harvest of this volume is not a new devotional program to be bolted onto our lives. It is a new set of eyes for what God has already been giving us. The next time the congregation sings Create in me, you will know you are praying David’s prayer after Nathan came, and praying it in the Son of David who had no sin of His own and bore David’s. The next time the table prayer is said, you will hear Psalm 145 and remember the open hand of the King. The liturgy has been catechizing us in the Psalms all along. Now we know what we are singing.

A Simple Way to Keep Praying Them

Still, it is good to pick up the book itself. Luther once wrote a little treatise for his barber, Peter, who had asked him how to pray. Luther’s advice was homely and honest. He admitted that his own heart often grew cold and unwilling to pray, and he said that when that happened he would take his little psalter, go to his room, and begin to pray the words of Scripture until his heart warmed to the task. He did not wait for the feeling. He took the book, and the book did its work.

That is the only method this study wants to leave behind, and it is simple enough for anyone. Here are a few ways the Psalter can stay open after the class ends. None of them is a rule. Take whichever helps.

A psalm in the morning and a psalm at night. Begin at Psalm 1 and simply keep going, one psalm when you rise and one before you sleep. At that pace the whole Psalter is prayed in about eleven weeks, and then you begin again. Long psalms can be divided; Psalm 119 will take a while, and that is fine.

A psalm for the need. Keep a short list in the front of your Bible of the psalms you have come to know in this volume and what they are for: Psalm 13 for waiting, Psalm 51 for confession, Psalm 32 for assurance, Psalm 23 for fear, Psalm 121 for travel, Psalm 130 for the night, Psalm 103 for thanksgiving, Psalm 88 for the darkness that will not lift. When the need comes, the list will spare you the search.

Pray them aloud, and pray them with others. The Psalms were written to be spoken and sung, most of them in the assembly. Read one aloud at the family table, or with your spouse at bedtime, or with a friend on the phone. Luther called the catechism a household book, and the Psalter belongs in the same house.

End with the Gloria Patri. It takes five seconds, and it does what the church has always done: it prays the psalm in the name of the Triune God and the Son who fulfilled it.

Let the words outrun your feelings. Some days the psalm will say what you feel. Many days it will not. Pray it anyway. As we saw last session, the praise you cannot feel, the confidence you lack, and the innocence you cannot claim are all His, and He prays them in you. The prayer does not depend on your heat. It depends on His word and His Son.

And one word of gospel over all of this, lest a list of suggestions turn into one more law. You will not keep any of these perfectly. You will miss mornings and forget evenings and let the book sit closed for weeks. The Psalter is not a scorecard. It is a gift, and a gift is not revoked because it was neglected. When you come back to it, it will be there, and so will He. The Lord Jesus did not give you His prayer book so that you could fail at it. He gave it to you because you need it, and because He prays it with you.

Where the Psalter Leans

Now lift your eyes from the harvest to the road. There is a feature of the Psalter we have met again and again without always stopping to name it: the book keeps promising more than it explains.

Psalm 2 promised the Son the nations as your inheritance, the ends of the earth as your personal property (Psalm 2:8), and Psalm 72 prayed that all nations would be blessed in the King. But the Psalter never tells us how the nations will come, or how a Son of David will rule the ends of the earth from a throne that fell to Babylon. Psalm 110 promised a priest forever after the pattern of Melchizedek, but the Psalter never tells us what sacrifice such a priest would offer. And Psalm 22, most strikingly of all, gave us a sufferer whom God has set in the dust of death (v. 15) and then, in the same psalm, stands up in the assembly to praise God (v. 22) and sends word to all the people of the earth (v. 27). How does a man set in the dust of death praise God in the congregation afterward? How does one man’s suffering become good news for all the nations? The Psalter prays these things. It does not stop to explain them.

This is not a flaw in the Psalter. It is the shape of a prayer book. Prayer does not lecture; it cries out, trusts, and praises, often ahead of understanding. But it means the Psalter hands us questions that the rest of the Old Testament must help answer. And no book answers them more fully than the one that comes next in this series.

Put Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 side by side and something remarkable happens. They are two views of the same event, one from the inside and one from the outside. Psalm 22 is the Sufferer’s own prayer, spoken in the first person from the middle of the agony: But I am a worm, not a man; people insult me and despise me (Psalm 22:6). Isaiah 53 is the same figure seen from outside, described by those who watched him die and misunderstood what they saw: He was despised and rejected by people, one who experienced pain and was acquainted with illness; people hid their faces from him; he was despised, and we considered him insignificant (Isaiah 53:3). The Psalter lets us hear His voice. Isaiah lets us see His face, and then tells us what it meant.

For that is the great gift Isaiah adds. Psalm 22 cries why? and never quite answers the question in words. Isaiah answers it: He was wounded because of our rebellious deeds, crushed because of our sins; he endured punishment that made us well; because of his wounds we have been healed. All of us had wandered off like sheep; each of us had strayed off on his own path, but the LORD caused the sin of all of us to attack him (Isaiah 53:5–6). That is why He was forsaken. The Psalter gives us the cry; the Prophet gives us the reason. He was abandoned in our place.

And Isaiah answers the second question too, the one about how the sufferer of Psalm 22 could praise God afterward. Once restitution is made, he will see descendants and enjoy long life, and the LORD’s purpose will be accomplished through him (Isaiah 53:10). The Servant dies, and then He lives, and sees His offspring. That is Psalm 22:30 in another key: A whole generation will serve him. The Servant’s descendants are the generation that serves Him, the church born from His death and His rising.

Then Isaiah says the thing that every confessional Lutheran ought to underline twice. My servant will acquit many, for he carried their sins (Isaiah 53:11). The word the NET renders acquit is the Old Testament’s word for justify: to declare righteous in the court of God. Here, seven hundred years before the cross, the article on which the church stands or falls is announced by the LORD Himself. The Servant justifies many, and He does it not by teaching them how to be righteous, but by carrying their sins. That is the gospel of Psalm 32 (how blessed is the one whose sin is pardoned) and of Romans 4 with its cause set right beside it: the many are pardoned because the One bore what they owed.

Beginning with This Scripture

The New Testament has already walked this road ahead of us, and it gives us one scene that joins the Psalter’s lesson to Isaiah’s so neatly that it could serve as the hinge between this volume and the next.

In Acts 8 an official of the queen of Ethiopia is riding home from Jerusalem in his chariot, reading aloud from the prophet Isaiah. He has come to the right text, Isaiah 53, and he cannot make sense of it: He was led like a sheep to slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth (Acts 8:32). So he asks the question every honest reader of the Old Testament eventually asks: who is the prophet saying this about, himself or someone else? (Acts 8:34).

Notice what happens next, because it is the method of this whole series in a single verse. So Philip started speaking, and beginning with this scripture proclaimed the good news about Jesus to him (Acts 8:35). Beginning with this scripture: that is the Emmaus road again. The risen Lord began with Moses and all the prophets; Philip begins with Isaiah 53; and both arrive at the same place, the good news about Jesus. The Old Testament read rightly is a road that ends at Christ.

And it does not end in a classroom. The eunuch hears the Word, and the Word does what the Word does. Look, there is water! What is to stop me from being baptized? (Acts 8:36). Philip baptizes him on the spot, and the man went on his way rejoicing (Acts 8:39). The Scriptures opened, Christ proclaimed, and then the washing that joins a sinner to the Servant who was led like a lamb to the slaughter. This is how the Lord still gathers His harvest: through the preached Word and the water and the Supper, the means by which the Holy Spirit calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth. The eunuch did not climb up to Christ by understanding Isaiah better. Christ came down the desert road to him, in a preacher and a pool of water.

We should expect nothing less as we turn to Isaiah. We will not be reading the Prophet in order to become better students of ancient literature, though we will try to read him carefully. We will be reading him because, as John tells us, Isaiah said these things because he saw Christ’s glory, and spoke about him (John 12:41). The Prophet who saw the LORD high and lifted up in the temple (Isaiah 6) saw the glory of the Son. When we open his book, we are walking where Philip walked, and we will begin with this scripture, and it will bring us to Jesus.

Setting Our Faces Toward the Road

So here, briefly, is the road ahead.

Isaiah is sometimes called the fifth gospel, and the name is earned. In his pages we will meet the virgin’s son whose name is Immanuel, God with us (Isaiah 7:14, as Matthew reads it in Matthew 1:23). We will meet the child who is born and the son who is given, whose names include Mighty God and Prince of Peace, who will rule on David’s throne and over David’s kingdom … from this time forward and forevermore (Isaiah 9:6–7), the answer to every royal psalm we studied and every prayer for the house of David that seemed to go unanswered when the throne fell. We will meet the shoot that grows from the stump of Jesse (Isaiah 11:1), life out of a family tree cut down to the ground. We will hear the voice that cries Comfort, comfort my people (Isaiah 40:1) over a people whose warfare is ended and whose iniquity is pardoned.

We will walk slowly through the Servant Songs, where the Servant of the LORD is chosen, called, rejected, beaten, silent, and finally lifted up, until we stand before Isaiah 52:13–53:12 and hear the whole gospel preached from the Old Testament. We will listen as the anointed One of Isaiah 61 announces good news to the poor, and then we will sit in the synagogue at Nazareth as the Lord Jesus rolls up that very scroll and says, Today this scripture has been fulfilled even as you heard it being read (Luke 4:21). And we will end where Isaiah ends and where all the Scriptures end, with the promise of new heavens and a new earth.

The four commitments that have governed this series will go with us. Christ is in the Old Testament, and in Isaiah we will not have to look hard to find Him. Law and gospel run through the whole Bible, and no prophet thunders the law more fiercely or sings the gospel more sweetly than Isaiah, often in the same chapter. The narratives are history, and Isaiah’s oracles are anchored in real kings (Uzziah, Ahaz, Hezekiah) and a real Assyrian army at the gates of a real Jerusalem. And typology, with its guardrails, will have firmer ground under it than ever, because the apostles quoted Isaiah almost as often as they quoted the Psalms, and nearly always about Christ.

And the Psalter will come with us too, not as a finished course but as a prayer book in the pocket. When Isaiah shows us the Servant despised and rejected, we will already know His prayer from Psalm 22. When Isaiah promises comfort to Zion, we will already know the pilgrim songs that longed for it. When Isaiah shows us the nations streaming to the mountain of the LORD, we will already have prayed Let all the nations worship you! (Psalm 22:27). The prayer book of Christ is the best companion there is for reading the Prophets, because it lets us pray what they preach.

Gathering the Threads

We gathered the harvest of this volume and set our faces toward the road ahead. We saw that Psalm 22, the psalm of the cross, does not end in darkness but in proclamation, one generation telling the next what he has accomplished, and we took that as our own charge. We counted what the Psalter has put into our hands: words for every weather of the soul, from How long, LORD? to the final Hallelujah; the two words of law and gospel prayed and heard; and the key to the whole book, that Christ is not only the subject of the Psalms but their pray-er, so that we pray them in Him.

We discovered that we have been praying the Psalms for years through the liturgy: the Introit and the Gloria Patri, Create in me and What shall I render, the Venite and Psalm 141, Luther’s psalm hymns, and the Catechism’s table prayers. We took up Luther’s little psalter and set out a few simple ways to keep the book open, a psalm in the morning and at night, a psalm for the need, prayed aloud and with others, and we heard the gospel over all of it: the Psalter is a gift, not a scorecard, and He prays it with us.

Then we noticed how the Psalter leans forward, promising more than it explains, and we laid Psalm 22 beside Isaiah 53: the Sufferer’s prayer from the inside and the Servant seen from the outside, the cry of why? and the answer, he was wounded because of our rebellious deeds. We heard the LORD announce justification seven centuries early (My servant will acquit many, for he carried their sins), watched Philip begin with Isaiah 53 and preach Jesus and baptize a man in the desert, and learned from John that Isaiah saw Christ’s glory. And we set our faces toward the Prophet: Immanuel, the child born and the son given, the shoot from Jesse’s stump, the comfort of Zion, the Servant, the anointed Preacher, and the new heavens and new earth. The things concerning Himself run on, from Moses through the Psalms and into the Prophets, and they all run to Him.

For Discussion

1. Psalm 22 begins with My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? and ends with one generation telling the next what he has accomplished (Psalm 22:31). What does it mean for us that the psalm of the cross ends in proclamation rather than in silence? How is your congregation “telling the next generation”?

2. Looking back over this volume, which psalm has given you words you expect to need, perhaps words you have already needed? Share it if you are willing, and say what it has come to mean to you in Christ.

3. Walk through the order of service your congregation uses and find the Psalms in it (the Introit, the Gradual, Create in me, What shall I render, the Gloria Patri, the table prayers of the Catechism). How does knowing where these words come from, and whose prayers they first were, change how you will sing or pray them?

4. Luther said that when his heart grew cold he did not wait for the feeling to return but took up his little psalter and began to pray. Why is it good news that the Psalms do not depend on our feelings? How can a plan for praying the Psalms stay a gift and not become one more law?

5. Read Psalm 22:6–8 and Isaiah 53:3–6 side by side. What does the Psalter give us that Isaiah does not, and what does Isaiah give us that the Psalter does not? Why do we need both views of the Sufferer?

6. In Acts 8, Philip beginning with this scripture proclaimed the good news about Jesus, and the eunuch was baptized and went on his way rejoicing. What does this scene teach about how the Lord uses His Word and His sacraments to bring people to Christ? What would it look like for us to read Isaiah the way Philip did?

Looking Ahead

This session closes Volume Two of The Things Concerning Himself. The series continues into the Prophets, and the next volume will take up the book of Isaiah: the Prophet who saw Christ’s glory, heard the seraphim cry Holy, holy, holy, and preached the Suffering Servant seven centuries before Golgotha.

Until then, keep the Psalter open. Pray one psalm in the morning and one at night, and end each with the Gloria Patri. And as a first step onto the road ahead, read Isaiah 6, the Prophet’s call, alongside John 12:37–41, and then read Isaiah 52:13–53:12 once more, this time with Psalm 22 open beside it.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, Servant of the LORD and Son of David, You prayed the Psalms before us and You pray them in us still. We thank You for the harvest of these weeks: for words to pray in every trouble and every joy, for the law that shows us our sin and the gospel that covers it, and for the gift of Your own prayer book placed into our hands. Forgive us for the days we have left it closed, and warm our cold hearts through Your word, that we may take it up again and find You praying with us.

You were despised and rejected, wounded for our rebellious deeds and crushed for our sins; You carried our sins and acquit the many. Keep us in the faith You have given us in Holy Baptism, feed us at Your table with the cup of salvation, and make us a generation that tells the next what You have accomplished. Open the Prophets to us as You opened the Scriptures on the Emmaus road and as Philip opened Isaiah on the desert road, that beginning with every scripture we may find You, and go on our way rejoicing. For You live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.