Preface: Before You Begin

Someone handed you the Psalms as comfort. That person was not wrong, but they were incomplete. The Psalms do comfort — in the way that an honest conversation with someone who has seen everything you are going through comforts, not in the way that a warm blanket comforts. The blanket asks nothing. The Psalms ask everything.

What they ask is honest speech. Not polished speech, not the kind of speech you would compose if you thought someone was grading you. Honest speech — the actual words for what is happening inside you, said to the face of God without editing. That is what one hundred and fifty psalms, assembled over a thousand years of Israel's life with God, have been preserved to teach you.

The person who has been handed the Psalms only as comfort has been given approximately a third of the instrument. This book is an attempt to hand you the rest of it. Not to take away Psalm 23 — you can have it, it belongs to you, it is one of the most theologically precise poems in the entire Bible. But to add Psalm 88, which ends in darkness and gives you permission to stay there when you are there. To add Psalm 22, which begins in abandonment and prays all the way through to the other side. To add Psalm 130, which cries from the bottom and teaches you how to wait. To add the psalms that ask God to act against enemies in terms that make modern readers deeply uncomfortable and that were preserved in the canon precisely because the God who receives them can receive them.

This is the curriculum. You were enrolled in it by baptism. This book is the orientation session you may not have gotten.

Three Things That Are True Throughout

The Psalms were sung in community before they were read in private. They were Israel's hymnbook — used in the temple, in the synagogue, on the pilgrimage road to Jerusalem, at Passover. They are a community's speech before God, which means your individual use of them connects you to a chorus that has been singing the same words for three thousand years.

They were Christ's prayer book. He quoted them from the cross. He prayed them in Gethsemane. He said in the days before His death that everything written about Him in the Psalms would be fulfilled. The Son of God used this curriculum in His own human life — and He prayed all of it, not only the easy parts.

They are the Spirit's curriculum for living before the face of God — Coram Deo means living your whole life in front of God, not just on Sundays — in every condition. The Psalms train the whole person to be rightly oriented toward the living God in grief and gratitude, in anger and wonder, in the long dark and the moment of the doxology.

In John 17:3, on the night before the crucifixion, Jesus defines eternal life in His own words:

Now this is eternal life – that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent. — John 17:3, NET

Eternal life is knowing. Not knowing about — a different kind of knowing, the kind that only comes from sustained connection, from relationship that has gone through enough to be real. You cannot know someone while performing for them. The Psalms teach you to stop performing and start talking. That is where the knowing begins.