We come now to a wonderful but very different set of old testament books. Here’s a few introductory ideas that may help us feed on them…
First: How do we feed on the PSALMS?
Well: probably we all know the glorious Psalm 23!! But there are so many `greatest hits` here that we should each make sure we experience: only choosing twenty, Psalms 103, 104, 22, 24, 139, 8, 1, 51 (perhaps vv1-10 especially for public worship), 42, 32, 33, 36:5-10, 121, 61:1-4, 90, 84, 91,97,98, 150… Practically, why not pick a day in each of twenty weeks to read, absorb, and give Jesus worship with one of these?
As we read them, we’ll find the Psalms are diverse. They’re about real life, with all its seasons. We’ll find that some David wrote reflect the deep complexities of his personality. Sometimes that means we’re given amazing foreshadowings of Jesus, either fully or partially, and particularly of the cross: look at the passages that the new testament alludes to in 22:1-18, or 16:10, or 69:19-21, or 40:6-9. Yet at other times we find the damaged and hurt son of Jesse that we considered last post (eg Psalm 140); and God is saying: You know, I do understand how you feel. He and the other Psalm writers are often in major crises, times of testing and training when they are driven to prayer and a deeper, more honest experience of God; and as they bring their deep troubles to Him they are led to visualize and be encouraged by His deliverance that will come; going through that process with them can help us do the same. (Eg Psalm 6, or 59, or 54, or 56, or 71.) (Of course as new testament people we must remember the principle of `progressive revelation`, that sometimes what the psalmists write is in an old testament style not yet illuminated by God’s empowering to love their enemies; or in eg Psalm 139 it may be most helpful for us to read vv19-22 as about the demons that are our truest foes.) At yet other times we have to read the cry of a single psalm within the input of surrounding psalms from other seasons, in order to experience that shift from crisis to deliverance; which is just as it may be in our own life…
What the Psalms do is bring us face to face with God. They give us words of prayer for every intimate mood in our relations with Him: seasons of joy (eg Psalm 96), of fear (eg Psalm 13), repentance (51), despair (44), deep depression(88), feeling attacked though visualizing how deliverance might come (54,56), horror (79), outrage at injustice and evil (58 – imagine this era with no police or legal system), unbearable pain in slaughter and bereavement (137), doubt (73), hope (146), thanksgiving (148), celebration (150)… Bono calls them `the first blues`! (`There, you had man shouting at God, “Why have you left me? Where have you gone?”`) Rick Warren calls them a ` worship manual, full of ranting, raving, doubts, fears, resentments, and deep passions combined with thanksgiving, prayers, and statements of faith. Every possible emotion is catalogued in the Psalms. When you read the emotional confessions of David and others, realize this is how God wants you to worship him – holding back nothing of what you feel!` This is the old testament book most quoted in the new, and with good reason!
`If you bury yourself in the Psalms`, says Dallas Willard, `you emerge knowing God, and understanding life.` Consider this too: does anything else from this ancient era speak to us quite so intimately today; or does the world contain any such astonishing collection of outpourings of worship, either from the Psalms’ era or indeed from many, many centuries after? God’s Spirit (2 Sam 23:1-2) surely gave David and others a unique ability to express these things; hallelujah, how massively privileged we are to have them! (Which raises another question: how many of these have we used to enrich our own church’s worship?)
Having said all that: there are 150 Psalms, and that’s a really long haul if we set out to read them from start to finish in our personal time with God. So what to do? Well, two practical suggestions: First, read a seventh of the Psalms at a time. (Why a seventh? See the suggested reading plan at the end of the third (Leviticus>Ruth) post of this course. Or alternatively – as the Bible has 66 books – every time you finish a Bible book, read two or three psalms afterwards…
And each time ask Jesus: What have You given me here that I can respond to, first in worship, then in prayer, right now?
PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES, SONG OF SONGS .
The figure of David stands over the Psalms. Over these three books stands Solomon… What an amazing story we find here!
First a historical reminder: from the Exodus onwards, our God who loves human company was leading his people to the point where they could build Him a permanent dwelling-place; and it’s Solomon who finally accomplishes that. Solomon is the fascinating character at the centre, that highest point, of old testament history. It’s Solomon who writes most of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes apparently, and the Song of Solomon.
Now suppose there was someone who you knew was the wisest man on earth; and, he’d put his life-wisdom into a paperback. Wouldn’t you go looking for it? Suppose, indeed, that somehow you knew there had never been anyone wiser. Suppose somehow God Himself has said He’s given this man wisdom such that there’s never been anyone like him… with `a breadth of understanding as measureless as the sand on the seashore… wiser than any other man`… Don’t you wish he’d been videod? So we could sit and absorb it on Youtube? If only I had access … Well – we do! God says that as a direct gift from Him, Solomon came to have a wisdom that was supernatural and absolutely unique (1 Kings 3:11-12, 4:29-31, 10:4-7). And we’ve got that wisdom preserved to bless us in Proverbs! If we want life to work, this book is surely worth our time!
Proverbs is full of shrewd, practical wisdom; it’s even been recommended as a management textbook! It doesn’t take us to the spiritual heights in the manner of, say, Ephesians. Yet as not long back I reached two-thirds through it, it struck me how refreshing it is. (Apparently Billy Graham would read a chapter of Proverbs a day.) It is God’s Word, and read slowly (ten verses a week from ch10 onwards??), it both builds in a sense of the essential importance of right and wrong, and very practically challenges my daily ways, eg on hastiness or on failing to drop an argument. Try, for example, reading 15:1-10, pausing to close your eyes and absorb after each verse. (And if you need a commentary, try Kidner in the Tyndale series. Any commentary by Kidner is worth investing in, eg also on Psalms or Ecclesiastes.)
Obviously, to God, wisdom is massively important. Indeed, His infallible Word tells us wisdom is to be valued more than gold or silver (Prov 8:19). And we learn from 1 Kings 3 that Solomon came to have more of it than any other man; and what he had is recorded for us in Proverbs. So it’s surely worth our absorbing!
But here is where matters get intriguing, as we begin to think about Solomon as a human being. For what may strike us is how the first 9 chapters oscillate repeatedly between sections extolling wisdom, and sections warning at considerable length against the perils of adultery, using prostitutes, and promiscuity (2:16-19, 5:1-23, 6:20-35, 7:1-27, 9:13-18). This isn’t surprising. Solomon wasn’t just a brain; his sex-drive was a huge issue for him. That’s obvious in anyone who (later when things were going badly wrong) could accumulate 700 wives and another 300 sleeping-partners; you don’t do that unless you have (among other things) a fairly strong urge towards sexual activity. (Even in Proverbs it’s interesting how Solomon felt the imaginative power of sex’s dark side – notice how the female figure personalizing wisdom walks the street calling out to men just like the hooker a few verses earlier or later (7:6-21, 9:13-18, cf 8:1-5, 9:3-5).) It’s scarcely surprising ,then, that in the early chapters of this book to which he gave so much input, so much attention should be paid as to how wisdom can help us avoid going astray sexually.
Nor is it just those first 9 chapters. At the book’s other end, when we look to see how it culminates, we find the last-but-one section begins with the mother’s plea, `O my son, O son of my vows, do not spend your strength on women, your vigour on those who ruin leaders.’ (Isn’t this what happened to Solomon in the end?) And then the very last section moves on to where wisdom and sexuality meet and fuse: counsel as to how to find the ideal woman; and that ends unsurprisingly, two sentences from the book’s close, by emphasising the fear of the Lord in this; just like in the book’s beginning.
Sexuality in itself, in the right place, is a gift of God – ok, and far more than ok! Ephesians 5, we remember, shows us how the whole human experience of love, marriage and sex are a vital picture from God of His relationship with us His Bride. And perhaps the only way Proverbs could have taken that theme further would have been to turn into the next-but-one biblical book, the SONG OF SOLOMON. Once we’ve grasped this theme we can find the Song deeply enriching (and – yet again – in a unique direction where no other part of Scripture leads us; how rich the Bible is!) It can be a path harnessing unashamedly the deepest places of desire in our hearts, in passionate relationship with God; it’s both a joyous celebration of human love and sexuality, and of full-blooded relationship between God and ourselves…
However: intelligence, and sexuality, can both go wrong; and with Solomon they did. For it was he whose later years squandered all the gains made patiently through the years of Samuel and David. Solomon built, indeed, a house for God that could be a wonder to the nations, demonstrating the glory of the God of Israel. But in the record of his accumulation of wealth in 1 Kings 10, don’t we sense a dangerous situation developing? What Kings tells us is tragic and helpful: prosperity and accumulating wealth lead Solomon to a slow neglect of God, forgetting (wealth can do this; cf Deut 8:13-14) God’s commands, and the fear (awe) of the Lord that he had repeatedly emphasised throughout Proverbs, and knew was the root of all wisdom (Prov 9:10). It isn’t surprising when we learn how that failure had, towards the end, been accompanied by a heavy-handed attitude towards his subjects and workforce (12:1-4, 10-11). Nor when we recall that in his accumulation of wealth, wives, and (10:26) the means of military security, he was ignoring God’s Word, going against His direct commands (Deut 17:16-20). And most immediately destructive was the `culture’ he had allowed to grow in the minds of his heir, Rehoboam, and the friends and advisers who grew up with him: a proud self-centredness that perhaps they’d learned from this wealthy king, but which (the teaching of Proverbs should have warned them all) would destroy the kingdom and lose ten of the twelve tribes (to their lasting ruin) to the house of David.
And beneath this decay were two key problems, both of which were faced very clearly in Proverbs’ teaching. We’ve noted Solomon’s sex-drive, and this is what Scripture highlights as the fatal point where failure surfaced. Solomon is led catastrophically astray by his sex-drive; he collects unbelieving wives (700 of them!?), and they ruin him: Solomon `loved many foreign women… from nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, “You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.”‘ (An example of how choosing the wrong spouse leads sooner or later to following the wrong gods; cf 2 Cor 6:14-16.) Sure enough, Solomon did end up building `a high place for Chemosh the detestable god of Moab [for one of his wives], and for Molech the detestable god of the Amorites [for another]. He did the same for all his foreign wives’ (11:7-8; NIV as usual). This, says Kings, is why judgment came: `So the Lord said to Solomon, “Since this is your attitude and you have not kept my covenant and my decrees, which I commanded you, I will most certainly tear the kingdom away from you”‘(v11). Yet when Solomon was busy building `a high place for … Molech` (amazing once we recall the horrific child sacrifice by fire that Molech-worship could involve), the deepest problem was something else he had forgotten: the `fear of the Lord’ he had so often stressed throughout Proverbs. As people of destiny we may think back to Paul again: `I beat my body and make it my slave; so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize’ (1 Cor 9:27). Solomon became a disaster; and Israel never recovered. Within a generation the nation split permanently in two, and turned to appalling sin.
But something else had happened besides; Solomon’s vast intelligence had gone sour. Read ECCLESIASTES. I find it a difficult book (“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher at the very beginning. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless”` (1:2)). But it seems a fascinating, even tragic, God-given picture of wisdom – even supernatural wisdom – gone wrong. (See Bible intros #2 of petelowmanresources.com for another way of reading it, however.) Everything here is viewed from `under the sun`, and we read a grim series of `postcards from the edge` (in a drama of differing perspectives like Job?) as Solomon seeks to find satisfaction in one area of life after another: all without success, because he’s thinking only `under the sun`.
Just the book’s closing verse offers more by raising the issue of God’s judgment. For if our deepest intuition tells us there’s a God, then surely that God is interested in what we do; in other words, there’s a judgment. But if there is a judgment, that itself provides real meaning to our activities now; for a judgment surely implies some process of reward, or its alternative. Death cannot be the final curtain – and then meaningfulness floods back from the prospect of an afterlife, like sunlight flooding in when the corner of a curtain is lifted in a darkened room…..
Let’s tread softly, then: underlying these books is the story of a man given the keys to the universe, but who then failed hugely because, without the Spirit’s power in the way we have Him today, he couldn’t live by them. We need the Spirit so much. Is this another of the ways in which the old testament shows us we can’t make it on our own: our `schoolmaster to bring us to Christ’?
There’s so much worth reading in these books!
JOB
That leaves one more amazing book from among the Writings: the book of JOB. Is it in some form prehistoric? (It’s set near the Jordan, but Israel doesn’t feature; Job lives 140 years after the book’s over (42:16), like the patriarchs before the flood; and could that even be dinosaurs in 40:15-41:34!?) If so, it’s remarkable that the desperate problem of suffering is the topic that comes down to us here from the depths of prehistory: `My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?`
It’s not an easy book (again the series in https://petelowmanresources.com/category/bible-introductions-2/job-to-song-of-songs/ may help.) But there’s so much in Job that we need for a rounded spirituality. Someone exposed to this mighty book and to the titanic, conflicted questionings and anguish of Job, and the unwise comments of his friends, is ready to be biblical, loving, and when necessary silent, rather than superficial, when faced with others’ suffering; even as we seek to grasp what specifically is God’s revelation for Job’s need and growth into faith, at that moment finally when it’s right for it to come. Equally remarkable is the way that, in Job’s agony, prophetic insights suddenly gleam out, in ways astonishing to find so early in the Bible – eg Job’s awareness of the `redeemer` and the `advocate on high` that we need (look at 9:33, 17:3, 16:19-21, 19:25-27, and Elihu in 33:23-28)…. glimpses of Jesus and the cross that fade in and out as his agony zigzags towards its healing, like the sun coming out from behind tempestuous clouds, then immediately obscured as the thunderclouds of despair roll back in…
And it’s also about true worship, about our need for humility when we question God’s indescribable greatness, something our scientific mindset perishes if it forgets; a trusting humility about how little we really know. (Just one example, only one, is the big-picture, cosmic, spiritual-warfare aspect of what goes on in believers’ lives; chapter 1 reveals that Satan is playing a key role in what happens to Job; yet even at the end of the book Job is totally unaware of this.) We 21st century people need to drink deeply of God’s forceful revelation as the book moves toward a close, in 38:1-18: `Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?`
And there’s much more. Again I hope the Job series over in petelowmanresources.com may help.
There’s just so much uniquely worth reading in these books!
PS: If you’re teaching this course, and if there’s time, it may be helpful to close with something of a different flavour, by jumping ahead to our final session’s highlight: ISAIAH and his glorious prophecy. Glorious and indispensable – where else in the old testament can we see the majesty of the living God as we do in Isaiah 6 or 40:6-18,22-31? How better to understand our rescue through the cross than via the astonishing prophecy of Isaiah 53? What more striking picture could there be of what the Spirit does than Isaiah 61:1-4? What more joyous celebration of God’s gracious restoration than chapters 11 and 12? What stronger challenge to social righteousness than ch58? More next time…..
