Journal

Psalm 9 - Meaning more than they realised?

Posted on May 13th, 2006, in the morning

I've been reading and meditating on Psalm 9 for the last few weeks as part of my series on Worshipping with the Psalms.

David's enemies are back, but the tone of the psalm is different. Continuing the celebration of God's victory from Psalm 8, David praises the God who hears the cry of the weak. In this mood David calls for God to overcome his and Israel's enemies.

It's interesting to note how much less difficult I find a psalm like Psalm 9 - which appeals for victory on the basis of justice - than previous psalms which made that appeal on the basis of the psalmist's own claim to righteousness. The claim to righteousness is probably still there implicitly (perhaps part of the same concept for the psalmist?), but at the most basic how-many-verses-do-I-want-to-skip level Psalm 9 is an easier read.

As I become more familiar with David's national language in the Psalms, I also increasingly hear an echo of New Testament 'kingdom' language. This is not unproblematic: I think much of what is most shameful in 'Christian' history has resulted from the interpretation of NT kingdom language as directly equivalent to OT national language. Jesus couldn't have been clearer that he didn't have a geographical kingdom in mind (John 18), but given the history of misinterpretation I guess we do need to be careful how we use OT language as NT metaphor.

In the context of indictment against nations, and similarly raising the question of Christian interpretation of OT texts, we also have some interesting verses on justice in Psalm 9:

But the Lord sits enthroned forever,
he has established his throne for judgment.
He judges the world with righteousness;
he judges the peoples with equity.
The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed,
a stronghold in times of trouble.
And those who know your name put their trust in you,
for you, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek you.

Psalm 9.7-10

Although many of these 'justice' verses have more the tone of "hey, we should be the rich," than "hey, the poor have rights," I don't think our contemporary use in support of campaigns like Make Poverty History is untrue to the text.

There is a sense in which these verses speak beyond their original context, deeper even than the original authors may have appreciated. If Caiaphas, to take a clear example from the New Testament, can observe that "one man die for the people," without comprehending the depth of his words (John 11), it is surely also possible that Old Testament authors in their devotion said more than they realised about the reality of God.

Perhaps the most fundamental question underlying these explorations of the Psalms is the validity of interpreting Christian meaning into texts that can at most be said to be anticipating Christ. As such, everything I write in this series is an engagement with that question, but I will also need to come back to it explicitly in future reflections.