Chapter: Psalm 2

Prepared for Monday Psalms, August 30, 2021

Video for Session 8 of Truthful Speech for Common Prayer: Jesus and the Psalms.

Our Savior the Lord Jesus Christ was the perfect worshiper of God and lover of people, the most authentic and genuine human who has ever lived. He knew and prayed the Psalms, even with his dying breath. He models the Psalms’ transformative power and use in an open, submitted human heart. He died for our sins and our wounds so that his heart and all of our hearts, his brothers and sisters (That’s us!), can be one in him. 

Prepared for Psalms Group meeting on January 3, 2021

Unlike the culture’s predominant view of the calendar year of 2020, our just-concluded journey through the Psalter ended this week with rounds of increasing praise—singing, instruments, dancing and lots of bragging and boasting about YHWH’s ultimate power over creation and nations, and His love for His people…His pleasure in us (147:11, 149:4).   (See Psalms 146-150.) 

In his short chapter, “The End,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer observes that our hope as Christians is directed to Jesus’ return and the resurrection of the dead. Bonhoeffer also observes that “life in fellowship with the God of revelation, the final victory of God in the world, and the setting up of the messianic kingdom are objects of prayer in the psalms.”  The Psalter reminds us to pray for, find comfort in, and praise God for his rescue plan for all his creation and our part in it.  Here’s how Bonhoeffer describes psalms like Psalms 2 and 149 in “The End”: