Mark Hamilton, PhD - Associate Dean, Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology

When we teach the Psalms in the University, we usually begin by trying to categorize them.  Almost a century ago, Hermann Gunkel classified them as hymns, laments, wisdom psalms, royal psalms, and whatnot.  Each box had several sub-compartments, but it all seemed quite neat and tidy.  There were clear categories, and you could figure out which box any given psalm belonged in. Perhaps for an introductory study, the tidiness is necessary so that students can get a sense of differences and not be bewildered by the complexity all at once.

However, when you get past the basic classifications and look at the texts more closely, especially at hymns and laments, you notice that they are not opposites at all, but in fact closely related.  Israel cries out to God in order to move to praise.  Israel praises God for responding to their cry for help.  Always, these psalms assume that God is an active and loyal God (or at least should be) and thus that their prayers are somehow efficacious.

An interesting example of the interrelationship of praise and lament comes in Psalms 16 and 17.  Psalm 16 is a sort of loyalty oath in which the singer promises to avoid worshiping angels or gods or demons (“the holy ones in the earth”) and, instead, trust in God.  The oath is one version of a hymn of praise, and it concludes in verses 7-10 with straight-up hymnic language: “I will bless the Lord”; “my heart rejoices, and my liver [correcting the Masoretic Text’s “my glory,” which makes no sense — the difference is just the vowels, not the Hebrew consonants, but that’s another story!] celebrates”; and “because you have not forsaken me,” among other things.  The psalmist has turned away from idolatry, which presents a powerful temptation to her or him and all other worshipers of God, and in doing so has found security and peace of mind.

Psalm 17, meanwhile, is a more normal lament or complaint.  it calls on God to hear the psalmist’s  just prayer and to test him or her to see if the inner person matches the outer words.  Because the psalmist is “righteous,” i.e., faithful to the demands of God for an ethical and creative life, he or she expects God’s help.  The help is not a reward or a sort of quid pro quo.  It is simply a reality that expresses the psalmist’s deep relationship to God.  A sovereign who cares about the behavior of human beings will want to be in close communication with men and women who share such views and act upon them.  Otherwise, God would be a careless ruler at best, and at worst a tyrant with very mixed-up values.

The assumption of this and many other psalms is that God has no obligation to help arrogant, smug, self-absorbed people who proceed as though God does not matter.  That is, God is not fooled by empty words, no matter how pious they sound.  So much for cheap grace!  But God does have, the psalmist thinks, a moral obligation to hear the cry of the genuinely suffering who entrust their lives to the sovereign of the universe.  In other words, divine sovereignty creates moral obligations rather than allowing God to escape them.

This last point seems very important to me.  Some Christians have construed God’s sovereignty to mean that God can do whatever God wants and that we should just be glad that what God wants is nice for us.  Such a view, however, seems very ill-considered.  Just as my little dose of power entails responsibilities and duties — because power is simply an expression of commitments and relationships — so too does God’s infinite power imply infinite duties and responsibilities.  For human beings, these responsibilities get expressed as relationships of fidelity and trust, of mutual blessing.  For us to “bless” God is to honor, respect, adore, and obey God.  For God, to “bless” us is to offer protection, moral guidance, and at the last (as the New Testament puts it) ultimate vindication expressed in resurrection.  The psalmist does not, of course, work all that out, but he or she does assume this sort of moral commitment on God’s part.

Perhaps we are uncomfortable with this view of our relationship with God because we are uncomfortable with valuing the pursuit of righteousness.  It may not be God’s sovereignty at stake but our own desire for cheap grace that obligates us as little as possible.

And so the psalmist asks God to provide security and hope (Ps 17:7-8).  In other words, we ask God to create for us a world in which our commitment to justice (righteousness) is not just an interior state or the actions of individuals, but a systemic reality.  That makes for a prayer worth praying — faithfully.