Dennis Tuuri

the hills of the earth. The strength of the hills is his also. The sea is his, and he made it, and his hands form the dry land. Oh, come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our maker. For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. Today, if you will hear his voice, harden not your heart as in the provocation, and is in the day of temptation in the wilderness, when your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work.

40 years long was I grieved with this generation. and said, “It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways. Unto whom I swear in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest.” Seeing that you have obediently come forward to the call to worship by our creator, let us make confession of sins before him. Please join with me in the prayer of confession. And I, poor sinner, confess before God the Almighty, that I have sinned grievously through the transgression of his law.

But I have done much that I should not have done and have left undone much that I should have done through unbelief and distrust towards God. And that I am lacking in love towards my fellow members and toward my neighbors. God knoweth how great is my guilt and I repent. Oh God, be gracious unto me a poor sinner and be merciful for my sins are many. Amen. This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.

Now, as many as there be of you who despair of themselves and their sins and trust that their debts are completely forgiven to them through the merit of Christ alone, who resolve more and more to desist from sins and to serve the Lord in true holiness and righteousness, to those as they believe in the Son of Living God, I proclaim at God’s command that they are released in heaven from all their sins as he hath promised in his holy gospel through the perfect satisfaction of the most holy passion and death of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen. But as many as there be among you who will take pleasure in their sins and shame or persist in sins against their conscience, to such I declare by the command of God that his wrath and judgment abideth upon them, all their sins being retained in heaven, and they can never be delivered from eternal damnation except they repent. He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him.

We are not such as have that wrath abiding upon us. We are cleansed from sins through the blood of our covenant mediator, and we should sing praises now to him for his great acts of deliverance. Please open our mouths in full endeavor to sing praises to our creator, Redeemer and Sovereign. Oh, give thanks unto the Lord for he is good. Oh, give thanks unto the God of gods. Oh, give thanks to the Lord of lords.

Lord to him who alone doeth great wonders. To him that by wisdom made the heavens. To him that stretched out the earth above the waters. To him that made great lights. The sun to rule by day. The moon and stars to rule by night. to him that smote Egypt in their firstborn and brought out Israel from among them with a strong hand and with a stretched out arm to him which divided the Red Sea into parts and made Israel to pass through the midst of it but overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea.

To him which led his people through the wilderness. To him which smote great kings and slew famous kings. Sihon, king of the Amorites, and Og, the king of Bashan and gave their land for heritage, even inherited unto Israel his servant. Who remembered us in our low estate and hath redeemed us from our enemies who giveth food to all flesh. Oh, give thanks unto the God of heaven. It’s found in Isaiah 42:5-13.

Thus saith God the Lord he that created the heavens and stretched them out he that spread forth the earth and that which cometh out of it he that giveth breath unto the people upon it and spirit to them that walk therein I the Lord have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles, to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.

I am the Lord, that is my name, and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images. And behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare, before they spring forth I tell you of them. Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that is therein, the isles and the inhabitants thereof. Let the wilderness and the cities thereof lift up their voice.

The villages that Kedar doth inhabit. Let the inhabitants of the rock sing. Let them shout from the top of the mountains. Let them give glory unto the Lord and declare his praise, the islands. The Lord shall go forth as a mighty man. He shall stir up jealousy like a man of war. He shall cry, yay, roar. He shall prevail against his enemies. Exodus 15. He says, “In like manner, the victorious church celebrates her true Sabbath of rest by singing the same song of Moses and of the lamb, only in language that expresses the fullest meaning of the Sabbath songs in the temple.” And so Ede saw this direct correlation of that coming to fruition in the work of Jesus Christ.

And so there’s a new song which Moses saw in shadows as it were in his two songs of covenant witness and of redemption and deliverance of the people by God. So in the New Testament we have that as the pattern. Then we understand it in a fuller sense. And so we have the song of Moses and the song of the lamb in Revelation 15.

Today we’re going to talk about another designation category of psalms or songs rather.

Remember we said last week that from the book of Ephesians and Colossians we have the double mention of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. And while we don’t want to stretch that too far or push that too far, it does give us—the church has believed in, in most of the history of the church, some designations of songs that are somewhat different one from another. It’s my belief that if they’re all referring to the same thing, they would have said that.

But there are different sorts of songs. We talked about hymns, which are God-centered songs of praise last week and today we’re going to talk about psalms specifically. And then the third designation was spiritual songs. And we have three primary songs in our service that model these three categories. Our three songs that I select every week for us to sing. The three primary songs are the opening praise and then the response to the responsive psalm itself which is a psalm.

Normally we try to—I try to find music so we can actually sing the psalm that we’ve recited responsively or antipolly. We can then sing that psalm as well or at least another psalm that is in the same order as that psalm. And then finally, the third primary song of the day is the closing one, which is the song of consecration, a spiritual song in terms of edifying and exhorting each other to faithfulness to what we’ve heard in the preached word.

And so that follows the same basic pattern. Now, today, all of those songs happen to be psalms as well as songs. And so, our opening hymn of praise was Psalm 118. And our response to the Psalm 136 was a portion of Psalm 136 put to metrical version. And so he’s saying that and then our closing psalm song rather the song of consecration at the end of the first half of our worship service today is from Psalm 51.

I don’t think it actually shows that in your order of service but it is Psalm 51 again put into a metrical version. Now we have three other songs that we sing during our order of worship. The prayer for illumination which is not a psalm and then we have an offertory and again today for the offertory we’re using Psalm 76. And so the psalm itself fills lots of these requirements and you could do hymns, spiritual songs of edification and the exhortation to consecration as well as didactic psalms all from the psalter itself.

Finally, we end with the doxology and while the words are not from the psalter, the tune is the Old Hundredth written by Louis Bourgeois who helped Calvin with the Genevan psalter, a man of no mean feats. He was quite an accomplished musician and he is the one who composed what is known in terms of the tune as the Old Hundredth. I don’t know if you know that or not, but songs have tunes and tunes have names and if you look at most of the songs we sing today, for instance, you’ll see a name of the tune.

For instance, in the offertory, the name of the tune we’re singing is Regent Square and then after that there’s a metrical reading on it that tells you the meter of the song. So, and in the psalter, that comes from the psalter as well because the psalter has names of certain songs in some of the psalms as well. And so that comes from that.

Okay, so today we’re going from the hymn of praise to the psalm itself which is sung in response really to the responsive reading in the psalms.

Now while it’s not essentially part of today’s topic I did want to mention here in terms of looking at the psalms themselves the concept of comprehensive psalmody and this was another important part of the reformation. They would sing oh remember I said that one of the reasons why they got into a mode of exclusive psalm singing, portions of the reformation the Reformed churches was because they had a whole set of 150 psalms that they dated all at once.

Why did they do that? They did that because they didn’t want to get into the idea of picking and choosing which psalms we want to translate and then leaving out some psalms that are somewhat distasteful to us. And so comprehensive psalmody refers to singing all 150 psalms eventually going through the entire psalter singing them reciting them and then preaching on them as well in many cases in the reformers.

This is quite important because there are, as we know, imprecatory psalms, psalms that call for God’s wrath on certain people and today’s church for instance never sings those psalms and as a result you sort of pick and choose the revelation of God and which portions of the scriptures reveal the characteristics about him that you seem to like or approve of. And of course that’s a great sin. And so we’re committed here at this church to comprehensive psalmody.

Now many of you may not know this but I have for the last 5 years kept a test of the psalms that we have done responsively. And every week I cross off the ones we do that week. And so this week I crossed off Psalm 136 from my list. And that’s because we want to eventually move through that entire psalter. And we’re trying not to—I’m trying not to repeat any of those psalms until we get through the entire 150 psalms responsively spoken here at church.

Originally when I began preaching and teaching here at Reformation Covenant Church during the communion services. Those of you who are here at the time remember that I actually started by preaching through the psalter and I was eventually thinking of going through all 150 psalms. We changed that plan but originally that plan was based upon this whole idea again of comprehensive psalmody. And so another problem we had in terms of trying to get through the whole 150 psalms in some kind of reasonable period of time before all of us die and pass on.

If you know the rate at which I preach sometimes—another problem we encountered was that we don’t know a lot of the tunes that would accompany some of these songs. And since what we’re doing here on Sunday is really a performance of worship to God, we believe that we should offer up to God our very best. And so we don’t want to be singing songs in a halting fashion or songs we just don’t know. We don’t want to learn songs during our worship to God.

We want to get together on occasion, learn new songs and tunes that we can put some of those psalms to. And in that way, when we come before God to praise him and worship him, we can do it wholeheartedly and it’s the best that we have. Now, the medieval church chanted the psalms and we don’t know how to do that either. And hopefully one day we’ll get together a series of Sunday evenings or something and learn to chant and begin to chant some of these psalms as well.

I guess what I’m giving you here is a series of reasons why we actually recite the psalms responsively. It is not the best way to do it, I guess, is what I’m trying to tell you. The psalms were written to be sung and we are reciting them. And it is good that we have the antipolar nature in that recitation of the psalm which we’re going to talk about in a couple of minutes. But eventually we want to get to the place where we can sing those psalms.

But failing that we are instead reciting those psalms antipolly and going through all 150 of the psalms. We have done for your own information we have now done 83 of the 150 psalms. We have 67 left. So we’re over halfway through. We will make it in most of our lifetimes.

Okay. Now, so I guess one thing you get from this picture is I go to a lot of work to try to go through the altar comprehensively and to make sure that the psalms form a major portion of our worship, not just in the psalm part itself of our service, but also trying to find psalms that fit hymns of praise, offertory, etc.

Question is why do I take all this trouble? Why do we do this? Why sing the psalms or recite them at all in our worship services? Now, much of what I said last week relative to the reformers and why they emphasized the Psalms and in some cases exclusively should help to answer that. Remember I mentioned that Calvin said that since we’re commanded to sing praises and supplications and exhortive songs to here in our worship services, we should make use of the very best of these songs.

That means the inspired psalter. So, that’s certainly part of the reason. Obviously, we do indeed sing hymns at this church aside from the psalms and we think that’s appropriate based on some of the remarks I made last week. But Calvin’s statements are good to remind us of one of the reasons we sing psalms.

I guess this morning we want to talk about three sets of reasons why we sing psalms. The first set of reasons based upon the command of God. God tells us to sing psalms in worship. The second reason we’ll consider is the tradition of the church. The historic church has sung psalms in its worship services. And the third set of reasons will be the pattern that the psalms set for our lives.

Okay. Why do we sing psalms? Why do we take all this trouble to sing psalms in our worship services? First, because God commands us to. And again, you understand what Calvin was saying, there is an implicit command in scripture to sing the psalms because God commands us to worship.

That’s why we’re here today. He has called us. We want to obey. And if we’re going to worship, then we should worship God the best way we can. And that would certainly include using his psalms that he’s given and inspired various writers of the psalter to produce for worship under the old covenant system. And so we have an implicit reason here. If we’re supposed to worship and we’ve got songs that were written for worship, we should use the psalms.

So there’s an implicit command to do that. But additionally, there’s some explicit commands in scripture as well. 1 Chronicles 16:9 says, “Sing unto him, sing psalms unto him, talking of all his wondrous works.” Psalm 95:2, “Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving.” So we’re commanded to come before his presence, giving thanks to him. And we’re also commanded to make a joyful noise unto him with psalms.

Additionally, in Psalm 105:2, sing unto him, sing psalms unto him, talking of all his wondrous works. And so, it’s important to recognize that we sing psalms because God tells us to sing psalms. These are standing commands. They weren’t just given to a particular individual. They were to be in place for the old covenant church. We believe in this church in theonomy. We believe that God’s law has abiding validity to us unless he changes it.

So, unless we find an explicit command in the New Testament saying, “Don’t sing psalms anymore,” we’ve got to take these commands as commands to us in our worship services. And so it is theonomic to sing psalms in worship. It is an affirmation of our praise for God’s law and our obedience to it to sing psalms. We don’t need explicit statements in the New Testament exhorting us to sing psalms. Although, as we said last week and again in our introduction, we do have them.

In Ephesians 5:19, he tells us to sing spiritual psalms, hymns, and psalms. And while psalms there may not refer specifically to the psalter, those would be obviously understood by the audience originally. Colossians 3:16 says the same thing. Teach and admonish one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. And so we actually have explicit New Testament commands as well. Additionally, Paul in 1 Corinthians 14:26 describes the worship services of the New Testament church in a commending fashion, I believe.

And he says, “How is it then, brethren, when you come together? Every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying. Some people think that in this that since one person would have a psalm here that what it’s talking about is the idea of the cantor the one who would speak the portion of the psalm that the congregation would respond to.

I don’t know but in any event from these three passages in Ephesians, Colossians and 1 Corinthians 14, we have explicit statements again from God to sing psalms both in our private meditative life and our devotional life and our families but also in corporate worship. And so we’re commanded and if that—you know, it really that’s all we need, right? All we need is the command word of God to us and we say, “Yeah, we’ll obey that.” And that’s okay.

And that’s all we really need to do this morning to justify the use of psalms. But I want to take us to a couple more reasons and give you a more full appreciation for why God commands us. Remember, we said last week that if you simply stop with obedience to the commandments, you’ve kind of missed the point because God wants us to obey his word that we might delight in him who gives that word to us. And so, I want to cause us to not just obediently sing psalms in this church but to delightedly sing God’s psalms back to him and so we go to the second reason the tradition of the church.

Now you know obviously one of the great principles of the reformation was sola scriptura and we don’t let the tradition of the church become a normative pattern for us we don’t let it tell us what to do if the scriptures tell us clearly that we’re to do something different we have one source of authority as Protestant and as Reformed people that source of authority is the word of God.

Having said that, it is of course ludicrous to think that a group of men and women in 1989 in America who are essentially pretty naive in terms of an understanding of the faith and its application over the centuries. It is pretty egotistical to think that we are now going to understand everything and the church has not understood anything for the last 2,000 years. Unfortunately, a good portion of the church in America thinks just that about certain eschatological opinions which is really a sign of our self-centeredness and our puffed-upness and our immaturity as a church.

Having said that, it is important to look at how the church has worshiped and what the role of the Psalms has been in the church. And we find, of course, the Psalms used in the Christian church for 2,000 years. And it is a remarkable story, one that can only be touched upon briefly here this morning. There are books written about this subject, the use of the Psalms by Christians over the last 2,000 years, both in corporate worship and then in their own other personal and devotional lives.

But I want to just go over a little bit of that history for you to touch briefly upon some of this. Before I do this, I wanted to just mention something I said last week during our communion service. Again, remember I said that a good hymnal is a great source for devotional and also theological reading in your devotion time and in your study time at home to read through those songs. One example to help kind of reinforce that to you, Augustus Toplady was a great theologian several centuries ago.

One or two centuries ago. And all I knew about Augustus Toplady was he had written some great hymns that I love to sing. And so when Sprinkle Publications reprinted his works and they had available the complete works of Augustus Toplady, I went ahead and ordered them and several people in the church I think purchased copies from me as well. But I was a little surprised to find the book when I got it this thick was not primarily songs.

There were poems in the back that he had written. But you see, I thought Augustus Toplady was just a poet, you know, a songwriter, not realizing the depth of the man’s theological understanding. And I venture to say probably 95% of you didn’t realize that either. So I don’t feel too bad sharing that with you. The point is this. Many of the best hymns that we have were not produced by professional hymn writers.

They were produced by great theologians who understood the word of God and understood how to express that word of God in singing. And so when you go through the good hymnal, you will find a tremendous amount of theology in it because that’s why these have withstood the test of time in the church because these men knew their Bible and so it’s good for that purpose. Having said that of course, the hymnals are a great source of theology and devotional material for us.

How much more so the psalter—the 150 songs that God has inspired to be used in worship both personal and corporate. A hymnal is a great source of theology and devotion how much more so the complete 150 psalms that God has given to us and there’s been much research done in the last couple hundred years. Remember I mentioned that in the reformation Bezae began working with the Hebrew text of the psalms.

It had been ignored for a thousand years in the church. See, so there’s much scholarship that began during the period of reformation and now continues forward in terms of how the psalms were written. Actually, we’re beginning to discover that there’s lots of work done in terms of correlating the psalms to historical incidents in the life of Israel for which they’re written. And that helps us to understand what they mean and to sing them with understanding as well as with our voices.

And there’s also much work that’s been done in the metrical patterns found in the psalms and the rhythms found in the psalms. And there’s even research ongoing as to the very music that the psalms were intended to be sung to. We may never recover that or we may recover that based upon research that we can now do with computers and other things that the church has not had the option to use in the past.

So there’s a lot of historical and intellectual scholarly work going on that helps us to appreciate that psalter and what it means to us. Now, I want to then look at just how the psalm has been used in the church. Give you a brief overview of some of this material. And again, it’s voluminous, but I want to at least give you a feeling for some of this.

We all know psalms were sung. We probably don’t know how extensively they were sung and used in the Christian church. And hopefully, you’ll get a feel for that as we go through some of this material.

First, of course, the psalms were used devotionally. Augustine wrote the following about his own meditations upon the psalms. Augustine said, “Oh, what accents did I utter unto thee in those psalms? And how was I kindled by them toward thee and on fire to rehearse them if possible through the world against the pride of mankind? How I would that they—and he’s speaking here of the Manicheans. How I would that they had been somewhere near me and without my knowing that they were there would behold my countenance and heard my words when I read the fourth psalm in the time of my rest. And how that psalm wrought upon me when I called the God of my righteousness heard me in tribulation thou enlargest me have mercy upon me oh Lord and hear my prayer.”

So the use of the psalms by Augustine in his devotional use was extremely exhilarating to him and drove him to God. And he was convinced that his enemies if they had seen him in his devotional period using Psalm 4 also would have understood better the nature of God and responded to those psalms. This shouldn’t surprise us with Augustine because the psalter itself played a large role in his conversion as it has done with saints throughout the centuries.

And so the psalms have also been used in terms of bringing men to the faith. Augustine—and I’m quoting now from “The Praises of Israel,” a book that is about 100 years old. Augustine tells us that before that memorable scene in which the voice came to him, “take up and read,” he had just been pouring out his heart in prayer in words taken from the 6th, 13th, and 79th Psalms. And quoting now from those psalms.

“And thou, oh Lord, how long, how long, Lord, will thou be angry forever? Remember not our former iniquities.” And he was adding words at that time which Charles Wesley echoed 1400 years afterwards in a well-known hymn. “Why not now, my God, my God?” So Augustine prior to his conversion was reading the Psalms and crying out in David’s prayer in those psalms, “how long, oh Lord,” and saying, “why not now?” And God brought to him a realization to take up the book and to read and converted him.

The instance of John Wesley’s conversion are generally known. He had himself described the scene at Aldersgate on May 24th, 1738. Quoting from his account now, while one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle of Romans, then he felt his heart strangely warmed and was led to trust in Christ alone for salvation. Many people know that. But what is not generally so well known is that the impression produced by the Pauline epistle had been preceded by a deep impression produced in the afternoon by a Pauline psalm—the 130th.

The anthem at St. Paul’s Cathedral was taken from that psalm. “Oh, out of the depth have I called unto thee, O Lord. For with the Lord is mercy and with him is plenteous redemption.” And Wesley found these psalms we are told to be full of comfort and were also a big part of his own conversion. And so the psalms have been used devotionally. The psalms have been used in terms of bringing saints to the Lord. And the psalms have also been used in daily life and in warfare.

The Huguenots—the third psalm was used by the Huguenots. Those were the French Calvinists of course who suffered so much oppression. The third psalm was used by them in times of their persecutions for stationing their sentinels. When they could worship in safety, they sang Psalm 132. Their war song was Psalm 68. The 39th and 40th verses of the 18th psalm when sung as an anthem in church decided Clovis in the sixth century to undertake that campaign against the Visigoths which probably changed the fortunes of Europe.

The 117th psalm was known by the Puritans as the Dunbar psalm sung by Cromwell and his army after the victory at Dunbar September 3rd, 1650. The 76th psalm was the drum clog psalm in which the covenanters overthrew Claverhouse and his troops. Dr. Kerr says the tune was “the plaintive but lofty martyrs” and this is some of the words they sang at that overthrow of the enemy. “Their arrows of the bow he break thy shield the sword, the war, more glorious thou than hills of praise, more excellent art far.”

And so they sang that in their victory that God had given them over their enemies. The psalms were used by people who were being persecuted for the faith. Of course, throughout the history of the church, the martyrs during the reformation would sing the songs as they were being put to death. The authorities would try gags upon them, but the cord would burn and from out of the smoke, the psalms would again be sung and people hearing the psalms would come to conversion and to faith in Jesus Christ.

The bishops ordered at one point that the tongues of the Huguenots—who were, as I mentioned, the French Calvinists who were extremely persecuted. The bishops then finally ordered that the tongues of the Huguenots should be cut out before they were burned and this then became the general practice and that was to avoid having them sing these psalms of praise to God while they were burning in the flames. At orange pieces were torn from the Bible and psalters were forced into the mouths and wounds of the victims saying each fill, “tell your God to come rescue you.”

The heathen cannot stand to hear those psalms of praise being sung by men who are going to their death because it is a witness as to the truth of God and salvation in Christ. When the 57 Protestants of Mo were led off to the dungeons, they lamented using a modern English version from Psalm 79. “Oh God, the heathen have come into thine inheritance. They have defiled thy holy temple. They have laid Jerusalem in ruins.

They have given the bodies of thy servants to the birds of the air for food, the flesh of thy saints, the beasts of the earth.” The 14 of them that were then later led out to execution sang on from the same psalm until their tongues were cut out. And this is what they were singing. “Why should the nations say, ‘Where is their God? Let the avenging of the outpour blood of thy servants be known among the nations before your eyes.

Let the groans of the prisoners come before thee, according to thy great power, preserve those doomed to die.’” And so the psalms have been used by those who were persecuted for the faith.

When armed resistance began, Psalm 68 became the Huguenots’ praise. That praise song read, “Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered, let those who hate him flee before him. As smoke has driven away, so drive them away. As wax melts before fire, let the wicked perish before God.” The psalms have been used throughout history, going into battle for God to strengthen the troops and to have them understand God’s providence in history.

At the battle of Contras, the reformed soldiers knelt and prayed and sang. Roman Catholic cordier observing them cried out that they were afraid and were confessing. But a more experienced officer said it was not so. They were singing, “This is the day that the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. Save us, we beseech thee, O Lord. Oh Lord, we beseech thee. Give us success.” That’s what they were praying.

To know and love the psalms. Quoting now from “Corporate Worship of the Reformed Tradition” by Nichols. To know and love the psalms is the mark of a Protestant. The use of the psalter became a significant issue then in the long nibbling away of the assurances of the edict of Nantes.

And so what happened was the psalms are an important part of the French Reformation and it then became an important part of trying to suppress the reformers—the suppression of the psalms themselves. In 1623 singing of psalms was forbidden in streets and shops. In 1657 it was prohibited at executions. In 1658 anywhere outside temples as Protestant places of worship were then called. In 1659, psalms cannot even be sung privately if audible outside.

And in 1661, the singing of psalms everywhere in French territory became a felony. You see, it’s the word of God, and the word of God has power to bring men to repentance. And it has power to strengthen the troops of God for warfare and to console them in times of persecution. And so, they were finally by the enemies of God made illegal throughout the land of France.

In a more contemporary use, Wilberforce recorded by C.H. Spurgeon. This incident as he was going to a very important meeting at the height of a political crisis in 1819. The great statesman Wilberforce—quoting now—walked from Hyde Park’s corner repeating the 119th psalm with great comfort. So when he went to that great important meeting of great political import, he went there quoting Psalm 119, the law of God being praised and recognizing that God’s law rules overall and so found that a great source of comfort.

The reformers built upon the early church and it’s important to recognize that the psalms were used by that early church extensively. Athanasius in one of his letters asks in detail why the psalms are sung and Athanasius’s answer was not for pleasure but partly to glorify God by diffusion of sound in the singing of psalms and hymns. Thus obeying the precept to love God with all our strength. And secondly, Athanasius wrote, “This musical and vocal accompaniment of the psalms serves the purpose of bringing all our faculties—bodily, rational, intellectual, and spiritual—into loving and harmonious sympathy and concert in the service of God.

So that he who has the mind of Christ may become like a musical instrument and following the motions of the Holy Spirit may obey him both in his members and his affections and be wholly subservient to the will of God.” Athanasius—it’s important to recognize here that as the reformers began to rediscover the psalter and began to move in terms of singing it, one of the reasons for that was that a short booklet by Athanasius on the use of psalms in prayer was republished and that then became very important in fueling the reformation attitude toward the psalter.

Indeed, when Calvin began to preach through the psalms and it is my understanding that the psalms were the only book that Calvin preached on Sundays through. He preached the rest of the week but on Sundays he only used the psalter. When Calvin began to do his great study of the psalms which is one of his great works in terms of his commentaries. He began by studying and reading and contemplating Athanasius’s booklet on the use of psalms in private devotionals and prayers.

And so the early church fathers were linked then to the reformers in their appreciation for the psalms. For hundreds of years rather—talking about the early church days again—the psalter was literally chanted day and night without ceasing throughout the Catholic church in the 4th century. Chrysostom describes how at night quoting now from Chrysostom “all other men are overpowered by natural sleep. David alone is active and congregating the servants of God into seraphic bands turns earth into heaven and men into angels.” So they were chanting the psalms and singing them repeatedly all 24 hours of the day for several hundred years.

Dr. Neill says that from the 6th century to the 16th not only was the whole psalter recited through every week by every ecclesiastic—every member of the ecclesiastical order recited the psalms through every week, the entire psalter—but in addition, Neill tells us that for this 1,000 years, a number of psalms in addition equal in bulk to the 150 psalms was also recited through. In the fifth century, the patriarch of Constantinople refused to ordain any cleric who could not repeat David by heart. And I think that means the whole book of the Psalms by heart. This then became in the seventh century an ordinance by the 8th council of Toledo and so the psalms are very important to the early church.

Theodoret writing of the early church says that while most men knew nothing of the scriptures generally even uneducated people would repeat the psalms by heart in the course of their common life. Jerome writes to Paula in words that have been quoted often. Jerome writing this quoting now “the laborer while he holds the hand of the plow sings alleluia. The tired reaper employs himself in the psalms in the vine dresser while lapping the vines with his curved hook sings something of David.

These are our ballads in this part of the world. These, to use the common expression, are our love songs.” So you see, the psalms have been used for 2,000 years in the Christian church in a very comprehensive way, much more so than today. The psalms were used extensively in personal and in corporate worship. And it’s quite important to recognize then that’s the heritage that’s been given to us and we should walk in it.

I remember when we first began to use the Genevan psalter called derisively by one of the queens “Geneva jigs” for their lively melodies which we really enjoy when we can sing those nice and rapidly. And by the way, Psalm 117 at the end of our communion service is the only jig we sing presently on a regular basis. And it is beginning to lag a bit and I think we all want to make sure we understand that they are to be fairly lively and I’ll try to remind you of that at the end of our communion service again so we can clip right along on it and sing praise to God. You can see why eventually dancing around those jigs began to take place.

But in any event, I remember we first started to sing those over at the Lord’s house and go through them and learn them. What a tremendous enlivening it was to my personal devotional life as well. I found myself at work at the graduate center where I worked at the time singing those psalms repeatedly throughout the day and it sort of formed the tenor. And I think that if we more self-consciously sang a particular group of songs in some of our private meetings together, whether in prayer meetings or in families or whatever, it would have that same effect on our lives that Jerome just wrote about in terms of the peasants of his day and age.

So the tradition of the church is another reason for use of the psalms in our worship services. And if we understand the impact they had in the church for 2,000 years, we understand how we want to move just simply beyond obedience to singing those psalms to recognizing the impact they have in our lives.

But there’s a third reason which while not so obvious yet is very critical I think as to why we sing the psalms in our corporate worship services. That third reason is the pattern that they set for our lives. Now, we’ve touched on this briefly at various times, including this morning a little bit. But before I go further, I want to consider some stylistic devices of the psalter itself. The way they’re written, the style they’re written in, and also inspired of God, of course, as well as some other texts of scripture.

And so, we’re going to first turn to the poetic style of the psalter to look at this use of antipolar. Now, antipolar just means a response back and forth. It’s used in other ways throughout church history and in other churches, but the way we’re using it this morning is essentially a response back and forth. It can be from an individual and then the congregation responds. It can be two separate choirs of the congregation divided into two parts which would sing one part and then respond etc.

But that’s what we mean by antipolar this back and forth response. One of the purest and most obvious forms of the antipolar nature of the psalter is what we did in Psalm 136. where there is a single refrain that is repeated back antipolly or in response to each statement that’s read throughout Psalm 136, which we just did a couple of minutes ago. But all of the psalter really lends itself to the same basic pattern, although in somewhat different ways.

Obviously what we have here is a picture of God’s statement and then the congregation’s response to it. And so in Psalm 136, an attribute of God would be spoken forth or something that he has done and the people would say, you know, “for his mercy endureth forever.” We would respond by praising him for that fact and what it means about himself. And so the idea behind antipolar is that God speaks and we respond.

We talked about the idea of dialogue or alternation as being a basic pattern in liturgical worship in the scriptures and then also implying it to our particular order of service here. And here in the use of the psalm itself, this part of our service after the hymn of praise, we have the purest form of that, the most obvious form where God speaks, we respond immediately and then at the end of the entire recitation of the antipolar psalm, we respond also in song to what he has told us.

So it’s a picture of God’s statement and then the people’s response to it. and that becomes clear then in this particular part of the service. Now this literary device that we are referring to as antipolar here has been called over the last couple hundred years parallelism in terms of the style of the Hebrew poetry we find in the book of the Psalms. Most scholars in this area owe much to the work of Robert Lowth who lived from 1710 to 1787.

He was a professor of poetry at Oxford and became the bishop of London and he wrote a book in 1753 examining the use the way that the style of the songs and he discusses this Hebrew parallelism or antipolar in three particular forms. The first is synonymous parallelism and I think that’s on your outlines there and I have just one reference given for that and this is where the second phrase that is repeated in the psalm reinforces or simply restates the first phrase.

And so it’s synonymous parallelism. The two phrases are synonymous. Psalm 114:1 says, “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language.” And so the second half of that repeats essentially the first half and is synonymous to it. And that’s God putting forth something and we respond in that way by essentially echoing his own words back to him.

The second mode of parallelism found that Lowth described or categorized in the psalter is antithetical or contrasted parallelism and here the truth is brought out through a method of contrast. Now this is used quite frequently in the proverbs and for those of you who go through the proverbs on a regular basis you will note this. Proverbs 14:1 says for instance that “every wise woman buildeth her house but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands.” So we have parallelism. The second thing reinforces the first statement by use of contrast.

In the psalter itself we have this for instance the very first Psalm 1:6 “for the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous but the way of the ungodly shall perish” and this is known as contrasting parallelism or antithetic. The third is synthetic or constructive parallelism and to a certain extent what Lowth did here is he lumped all the other forms of the psalms into this third category but essentially there’s a connection between the two there is some constructive parallelism going on but that connection can vary. It’s not simple synonymous parallelism.

It’s not contrasting. It may give a reason for the first part of the phrase. It may have cause and effect. It may have a proposition and then a qualification for the proposition. Psalm 2:6 says, “Yet have I set up my king.” And then the response to that is “upon my holy hill of Zion.” And so it qualifies where God set up his king.

Now the simplest forms of this antipolar form of the psalter is found in these things. We can look at one statement, simple response and then you move on to a different statement and this another parallel but suffice it to say and we won’t go through all the examples I have listed here but it becomes much more complex than that in the psalter there are for instance many patterns of three lines in the psalter and again there you can have three all parallel for instance in Psalm 93 we have “the floods have lifted up oh lord the floods have lifted up their voice the floods lift up their waves” so you’ve got a pattern of three there okay and the first three are those—in that case all three are synonymous.

But you can also have those three where you have synonymous and then supplementary. For instance, Psalm 2, “the kings of the earth set themselves. The rulers takes counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed.” The first two are synonymous. The second one tells why they have set themselves.

Now this use of three lines in antipolar—the antipolar writing of the psalms—is important to understand because what it means is that we know this both from the style itself and also from history that in the temple service you would have these alternating choirs and you could have them just alternate back and forth. Or you could have a representative for God, a prophet or a cantor do one part of this and then the congregation do two parts to their side. So you’d have a statement for instance, repetition, repetition. So the cantor would say, “The floods have lifted up, O Lord.” And this side of the congregation would say, “The floods have lifted up their voice.” This side would say, “The floods lift up their waves.” And so that’s another stylistic device for using this antipolar—