Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 1-221 Sunday 16 Dec 2001

Reading: PSALM 91 – TRUE TO EXPERIENCE?

(From ‘Encounter with God’ Bible Reading Notes)

‘Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, grant us to be grounded and settled in thy truth by the coming down of the Holy Spirit into our hearts’ (St Clement of Rome, c. AD 95).

Philip Yancey’s book The Bible Jesus Read (Zondervan, 1999) contains a thoughtful chapter on the Psalms. Yancey talks of his struggle to move beyond an impoverished experience of this literature as a ‘spiritual medicine cabinet’ to be dipped into for Biblical pills to alleviate the need of the moment.

Reading like this led to boredom and cynicism. It was when he stopped trying to systematise the psalms and read them more as a spiritual journal that they began to resonate with him. A single page in my own journal would lead you to all kinds of odd conclusions about my spiritual state! Similarly, a psalm opens to us a journal page reflecting a particular mood of faith. Some psalms offer glimpses of faith hanging on by its fingernails, as we have seen.

Yancey cites Neil Plantinga’s reading of Psalm 91: ‘With a kind of quiet amazement, the psalmist bears witness that under the wings of God good things happen to bad people. You need another psalm or two to fill in the picture, to cry out that under those same wings bad things happen to good people’.

The Russian dissident Anatoly Shcharansky spent thirteen years in prison for his attempts to emigrate to Israel. His most treasured possession was a little book of the Psalms in Hebrew. His wife spoke of his experience: ‘locked alone with the Psalms … Anatoly found expression for his innermost feelings in the outpourings … of thousands of years ago’. Those outpourings include both this psalm (‘under his wings you will find refuge … no harm will befall you’) and Psalm 88 (‘you have put me in the lowest pit’).

‘Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows’ (James 1:17).

– Pauline Hoggarth

Copyright Scripture Union, 2001

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