Monday, September 28, 2009

the book of psalms - a (gentle) rant

a beautiful rendering of deeply lived experiences, yes. descriptive of many a spiritual struggle and triumph, yes. a natural response of a grateful or suffering people, yes. the confident song of a man beloved of his God, yes.

i wonder why we have psalms for responsive reading though. it's as random as taking it from the book of job, or paul's letters to timothy, in the sense that these are all individual accounts of privations and defeats and victories and revelations. i would read them to know my God better, but psalms are not any more or less extrapolatable than paul's epistles or the gospels or the prophets.

in fact, the sensible book to read publicly and regularly is the book of proverbs, because the proverbs were written to guide the living we presumably do after church. or we could read all the books of the bible, so that we knew what was in it. just not exclusively the psalms, because i don't get the logic.

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