I’ve been charged with writing a blog about my recently published book on Psalms 38–51 called My Exceeding Joy. Actually, I don’t write blogs; I rarely read blogs. I remember theologian Addison Leitch saying that magazines were the enemies of books. I think blogs are the enemies of books. We’d be better off if far fewer bloggers wrote blogs. So my writing a blog to commend my book is clearly hypocritical. But it’s only temporary.
Comedian Emo Phillips has a routine in which he refers to the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy in November of 1963. Emo notes how so many can remember exactly where they were when they heard the news of the shooting. He has his own response to ‘Where were you when JFK was shot’—‘I don’t have an alibi!’ By a sort of rough analogy, if I were asked why I wrote this latest book I would have to say: I don’t have a reason. It’s not like I think the world is just waiting for another book on the Psalms. So why a book on these psalms? Well, they were just there. I had written three previous books on previous psalms and Psalms 38–51 came next.
There is something strangely attractive and contagious about the Psalms.here is that odd ‘something’ that tempts and lures people to them, especially if they are Christians. They are simply drawn to them, strangely comforted by them, even the oddest of them (psalms, not readers). Christians just can’t leave them alone.
Sounds terribly pedantic. But it doesn’t stay that way. Simply because the Psalms are psalms is reason to write about them. What I mean is that there is something strangely attractive and contagious about the Psalms. Even the saddest of them. There is that odd ‘something’ that tempts and lures people to them, especially if they are Christians. They are simply drawn to them, strangely comforted by them, even the oddest of them (psalms, not readers). Christians just can’t leave them alone. At least this is what I have sensed.
And no wonder. Believers who read the Psalms have the sense that the psalmists have walked in their shoes before their shoes were made. And though the whole book of Psalms has its own overall structure and ordered–ness, there’s still a certain ‘messiness’ about the Psalms that fits our lives. Eugene Peterson has said that these psalms are not filed in neat categories—we don’t have five on despair, six on persecution, followed by four on hope, and so on. Rather, they just seem to come at us willy–nilly, one after another, one on the Lord’s kingship, the next on how deep our pit is. Such a bit of realism. So the Psalms don’t merely appeal to us—they seize us. Makes one want to write about them.
The ‘draw’ of the Psalms is God.
But all this is pretty low–down stuff. The ‘draw’ of the Psalms is God. In recent months I have been newly impressed with what Jesus said to Nathanael in John, chapter 1. A rough paraphrase would be: ‘Oh, Nathanael, don’t be so impressed with the fact that I saw you under the fig tree; that’s really nothing at all—you will see greater things than these!’ That’s what is true of the living God in the Psalms. We’re always seeing greater things about him. He’s always holier than we thought, angrier than we thought, kinder than we thought, closer than we thought. Hence the title of my book. The writer of Psalms 42–43 was so ‘taken’ with God that in a streak of ecstasy he called him ‘My exceeding joy.’ I want to think of Him that way. Hopefully the Psalms will help me with that.
I once had a student who proposed a one–liner for a book that one might have to review. Adapted to my present book it would be: Of all the books on the Psalms, this is one of them! That, at least, is accurate. Whether you buy it is up to you.
