Psalms….”Songs That Shape the Heart and Mind” Part 1

Posted on by Pam Larson

As we start our journey into the book of Psalms, let’s let Dr. John Piper share some thoughts from a recent sermon entitled,  “Songs That Shape the Heart and Mind:”

1. The Psalms are instructive about God and man and life.

First, the Psalms are meant to be instructive about God and man and life. When we read the Psalms, we are meant to learn things about God and about human nature and about how life is to be lived. Some poetry makes no claim to instruct the mind. The Psalms do. They are meant to be instructive about God and man and life.

One of the pointers to this (among many, including the doctrinal use made of the Psalms in the New Testament, like Matthew 22:44) is that Psalm 1 introduces the whole book of Psalms. The book begins in Psalm 1:2, “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” The word for law istorah, and the general meaning for torah is instruction. In other words, it covers the whole range of God’s instruction, not just legal ordinances. So the entire book of Psalms is introduced by a call to meditate on God’s instruction.

Then add to that the way the book of Psalms is structured. It is divided into five books that begin with Psalms 1, 42, 73, 90, and 107, and each collection of psalms ends with a kind of special doxology that marks the end of each book. From the earliest times, these five divisions have been seen as a conscious effort to make the Psalms parallel to the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) which are usually called the “law” books.1

So when Psalm 1 introduces all five books in the Psalter by saying that the righteous person “meditates on the law of the Lord day and night,” it probably means that these five books of psalms, not just the five books of Moses, are the law of the Lord—the instruction of the Lord—that we should meditate on day and night. So for this and other reasons my first observation is that the Psalms are meant to be instructive about God and man and life. That explains the word thinking in the title of this series: “Thinking and Feeling with God.”