Dan B. Allender & Tremper Longman III
Some excerpts from Cap.2:
'[...] No section of the Bible teaches us the language of the soul better than the Psalms, which reflect the movement of the human heart in rich, evocative, and startling language. In a voice that disrupts, invites, and reveals, the psalmist draws us to the voice of God.
The Psalms teach us how to praise and worship. But they also teach us how to wrestle with doubt until it gives way to the first rays of hope. The Psalms light our way on the path of change.
Writers and thinkers throughout the Christian tradition have recognized the soul-exposing function of this pivotal book of the Bible. John Calvin offered this brilliant insight:
"What various and resplendent riches are contained in this treasury, it were difficult to describe.… I have been wont to call this book, not inappropriately, an anatomy of all parts of the soul; for there is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror." [reference: Institutes of the Christian Religion]'
'[...] A Voice that Disrupts Our Denial
The Psalms provoke us to move out of denial. Christians are particularly adept at numbing themselves against painful emotions. “After all”, we reason, “we should be joyful because we know that God is in control”. Negative emotions such as fear, anger, or depression are stigmatized as inappropriate because God is love and grants us peace.
But our spiritual songbook of Psalms does not contain 150 hymns of joy. As a matter of fact, a close look shows that the psalms of complaint and songs of accusation—the music of confusion, doubt, and heartache—significantly outnumber the hymns of joy. We may seek to flee from the feelings inside of us, but a look into the Psalms exposes them to our gaze. {John} Calvin described this exposure:
"[The psalmists] lay open their inmost thoughts and affections [emotions], call, or rather draw, each of us to the examination of himself in particular, in order that none of the many infirmities to which we are subject, and of the many vices with which we abound, may remain concealed." [reference: Psalms]
The psalmist’s ruthless honesty compels us to look beyond the surface of our tumult, deeper into our soul, where we expose our battle with God. As the psalmist cries “out of the depths” (Psalm 130:1), we find ourselves crying out to God along with him.
The Psalms disrupt our assumption that we can escape the “groaning” of this life. They call us back from our natural tendency to flee from pain and fight against any who provoke discomfort. They expose the essence of our emotional turmoil—the commitment to find life apart from trusting God.'
'[...] A Voice that Disrupts Our Depravity
Our culture presumes that emotions are amoral—neither right nor wrong. According to this perspective, it’s not what we feel that’s potentially sinful, but rather what we do with our feelings. The problem with this view is its assumption that some element of our personality escaped the consequences of the Fall.
It seems more accurate to say that our feelings are not any more or less sinful than our thoughts, desires, and behaviors. But God can use our emotions to disclose sin through revealing the depths of our battle with Him.
The Psalms expose the sinfulness of our anger, fear, jealousy, despair, contempt, and shame. Notice how envy exposed the psalmist’s inner disease (Psalm 73:1–3).
The psalmist’s jealousy reveals his sinful desire for the rewards of the wicked, but it does more—it exposes his sense of futility in remaining pure. Why be pure when God seems to give the blessings of life to the wicked and not to the righteous?
From our limited perspective, emotions seem to spring from horizontal cause-and-effect. Someone is unkind to me; I feel hurt or angry. Another person is kind; I feel happy. My colleague receives an award; I feel jealous. Feelings seem to follow the ups and downs of relating to others—they don‘t, at first glance, seem to have much to do with God.
A friend once told me (Dan): “I feel like I’m part of a cosmic, county fair bumper-car ride. I know I’m going to get hit; it’s only a matter of when and how hard”. I asked him if his sense of dread was related to God. “Not really”, he replied. “I just wonder when things are going to collapse, or when I’m going to get knocked down again”.
But all dread is related to the question, Is life predictable? All anger is related to the question, Is life just? Change the word “life” to “God”, and the questions become personal. Is God predictable? Is God just? The psalmist’s jealousy surfaced in the horizontal context of human circumstances, but it was rooted in his underlying question, Is God fair?
The Psalms help us understand that every emotion is a theological statement. All feelings reveal our attempt to maneuver into a position of regaining access to the pleasures and perfection of God. All dark emotions are rooted in our reactive response (flight) to being out of the Garden and our aggressive response (fight) to regain access to Eden.
Our natural response to pain is the attempt to get relief from our suffering—either by fighting in anger or fleeing in fear. When we’re angry, we naturally attack or threaten assault if the perceived unjust offense continues. When we’re afraid, flight seems like the most reasonable course in the world.
Notice what these people of God do when they feel the pain of hunger: “Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land; when they are famished, they will become enraged and, looking upward, will curse their king and their God” (Isaiah 8:21).
Unrighteous anger demands that others respond to our plight or pay the consequences. Ultimately, when we are empty and God does not respond as we wish, we feel justified to act on our own behalf. And we turn our rage against Him because He could alleviate our suffering.
The psalmist disrupts our denial that we are angry or afraid. He disrupts our pretense that our anger and fear are not directed against God. “The problem is not the situation that provoked your fear and anger”, he tells us. “The problem is that your heart is opposed to God”.
Yet even as he exposes the depths of our hearts, the psalmist does something quite odd—he invites us to question, doubt, and rage against God.'
'[...] We fear the same may be true with God. We shudder with dread that we will suffer terrible consequences for our inner rebellion. Precisely at this point, the Psalms surprise us. They not only help us articulate and understand what we feel, but they also dare us to struggle. Even more, they give us the words to vocalize our desperate struggles with the Lord.
The psalmists felt, and publicly expressed, the gamut of emotions—from hurt to fury, from desire for vengeance to contempt against God. How comforting to know that we are not alone when we ache with loneliness, burn with anger, and tremble with fear. Someone before us has faced these emotions and, in the midst of that conflict, learned to love God.'
'[...] A Voice that Invites Us to Hurt
The psalmist is not afraid to speak his heart to God. Unwilling to hide behind trite spiritual platitudes, he declares (Psalm 6:6–7).
In this declaration, the pain of life is not spiritualized away or tempered by trite steps to get a handle on personal agony—it is entered into and vocalized with passion. We are invited to enter the pain of our hurt without apology or compromise.'
'[...] A Voice that Invites Us to Rage
The psalmist brings his struggle to God and, at times, accuses Him of being faithless—even a lousy businessman. “You gave us up to be devoured like sheep and have scattered us among the nations”, he scolds God. “You sold your people for a pittance, gaining nothing from their sale” (Psalm 44:11–12). He wags his finger at God’s face, accusing Him not only of negligence, but idiocy.
Elsewhere the psalmist furiously mocks God for bringing pain into his life (Psalm 88:8–11).
Some believers cringe from this language of desperation and rage, even though they have the model of the psalmist. “The psalmist didn‘t have Christ, but we do—so we can’t be lonely, angry, or afraid!”
But this is presumption, not faith. The laments of the Psalms encourage us to risk the danger of speaking boldly and personally to the Lord of the universe.
Walter Brueggemann reminds us that “the laments are refusals to settle for the way things are. They are acts of relentless hope that believes no situation falls outside Yahweh’s capacity for transformation. No situation falls outside of Yahweh’s responsibility.” [reference: Old Testament Theology: Essays on Structure, Theme, and Text]
The Psalms do not offer an analytical treatment of emotions. They are not a how-to text from which we can extrapolate four easy steps to resolving difficult emotions. Such simplistic reductions of our inner world, and of life itself, strip the heart of calling out to God in the darkness of His mysterious involvement with us.
Instead, the Psalms invite us to question God. But they do this in the context of worship—they were the hymnal used in public worship. God invites us to bring before Him our rage, doubt, and terror—but He intends for us to do so as part of worship. This is the kind of emotional struggle we must engage in if we are to fathom the nature of God’s heart for us.'
'[...] The Need for a Revealing Voice
What can we expect from God? What is He really like? What will He do with us once our denial and sin is disrupted and our hurt and fury drawn forth?
It is in the dark struggles with God that we are surprised by His response to our anger and fear. What we receive from Him during our difficult battle is not what we expect. We assume He wants order, conformity—obedient children. Instead, we find that He wants our passionate involvement and utter awe in the mystery of His glorious character.'
'[...] A Voice that Reveals God’s Heart for Us
The Psalms disclose God’s fiery love for His people. He draws us to the extreme edge of life, where we cannot live by careful, well-planned control. This is where the desert begins. It is where darkness draws us to a realm of desperation and dependence. It is the place where trust can grow. God’s passion is to rig the world so that we are compelled to deal with whatever blocks us from being like His glorious Son.
The psalmist marvels that he can’t fake God out. Wherever he runs, God is already there:
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.…
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?…
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me”,
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
Wherever we flee, there God is—to express His love for us and reveal our unique role for His purpose. The Psalms reveal that God is slow to anger, rich in mercy, and long-suffering in grace. His purposes for us are good.
In the darkness our emotional wrestling with God, we grow in our understanding of Him. When He does not respond to us as we expect, we learn about His surprising character. We attack Him with anger, but we do not receive His judgment in return. We plead desperately for Him to save us from terror, but He does not necessarily rescue us with immediate resolution of our circumstances. However, what He does reveal is His heart for us.
Further, our darkest emotions reveal something—though in a skewed, bent, and tarnished way—about God’s emotional life. How can we begin to understand the nature of God’s anger unless we enter into our own? How are we to gain any picture of what it means for a holy, righteous God to be jealous for His people if we ignore our human envy and jealousy? In the most peculiar fashion, He chooses to reveal His perfect heart by analogy with human emotion that is stained by depravity. If we are to comprehend more richly the heart of God, it is imperative that we seek to understand our internal world.
The Psalms propel us into the deepest questions about ourselves, about others, and about God. As we let them expose the depths of our emotion, they will lead us to the God who reveals Himself in the midst of our struggle.'