PSALMS

When Our Lord explains to the Apostles that His suffering, death and resurrection are the fulfillment of “the law of Moses, and the prophets, and the psalms,” (Luke 24:44) one could make the case that by the psalms he is referring to all of the Writings, since the Psalms are a part of that division of Scripture. However, there is a certain fittingness in His focusing simply on the Psalms. In the CLAA Bible course, we are going to be doing the same thing by devoting one whole course just to the Psalms!

Why the Psalms?

If the New Testament is anything to judge by (and we think it is) then the Psalms are absolutely central to understanding everything is Scripture. The New Testament quotes the Psalms more often than any other book of the Bible (with the prophet Isaiah a close second). This is very significant—when the New Testament Christians want to understand more deeply the nature of the reality they just experienced in the Person of Christ, where do they go? They turn to the national prayer book—the Psalter—to understand Him.

Most of the rest of Scripture is spoken in third person narration: “So and so did such and such” and is about the relationship between God and His People. But with the Psalms, this changes: the Psalms don’t talk “about” God and Israel in third person narration, they are God and Israel speaking to one another in prayer! Because the Psalms are prayers and because the purpose of Creation is the worship of God, the Psalms in a special way reveal the heart of all created reality and of God’s work of redemption in His Son.

The Church has also made the Psalms the heart of her own official prayer life in the Liturgy of the Hours. The Second Vatican Council strongly encouraged lay people to pray the Liturgy of the Hours and the CLAA echoes this encouragement. As an aid to growing much more deeply in our understanding of the Psalms the CLAA also offers this course. The ultimate goal of this course will be not only a better understanding of the Psalms, but a deepening of prayer with the Psalms.

Problems and Solutions: Content, Order, Significance

Although many people love and appreciate some of the Psalms (such as Psalm 23 “the Lord is my shepherd”), there are many that are confusing to them. One major step in overcoming this difficulty is in understanding the life of David in detail. David, although he did not write each and every one of the psalms is nevertheless the person whose life and character governs the whole book. This course will make the whole of the Psalter approachable by taking the Psalms at a slow pace—an average of three or four per lesson. We will deal first with the content of each Psalm—what the words mean and what events from the life of David or the history of Israel they refer to. Second, we will show how the Psalms are not just a random collection, but rather that the order in which they appear is meaningful and tells a story from beginning to end, continuing the story of the Torah and the Kings. Finally we will read the whole as Christ taught the Apostles to do-- in light of the history and Prophecy of Israel with Himself as the fulfillment of both.