Reading & Praying with the Psalms – Lent 2025

Summary

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The Psalms were arranged after Israel came back from captivity, so many of them wrestle with questions of suffering. Knowing the context of the Psalms can help us to make rich use of them in prayer. 

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Reflective Study Guide Questions

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“[T]he law of the Lord is his joy; and on his law he meditates day and night,”

Ps. 1:2

1. The Psalter was arranged when Israel came back from exile, at a time when Israel was wrestling with questions of how they came to be disenfranchised and cast out. They did not feel like God’s Chosen people anymore. In what ways have you experienced feelings like this in your life?

2. Book 3 of the Psalms contains reflections on darkness and suffering. Many of these Psalms ask questions about why people suffer and why God allows bad things to happen. When have you wrestled with questions about suffering like this in your life? 

3. Book 4 of the Psalms asks the next logical question after wrestling with darkness and suffering: where is God? When you are wrestling with darkness and suffering in your life, how can you work on reaching out to God? 

4.  The Psalms are good fodder for prayer in many ways, and knowing their context can help our prayer. How can you make use of the Psalms to bring more depth to your prayer life?

Text: Reading & Praying with the Psalms

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Well hello everybody, my name is Scott Powell and I want to welcome you back to the Pray More Lenten Retreat. Today, I want to talk about the Psalms. I want to talk about what it means to read them and what it means to pray them well. So before we do that, let’s open in a prayer ourselves.

Opening Prayer

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Jesus, thank you for the gift of this day. Thank you for this retreat. Thank you for all the retreatants that are watching or listening, uh, from wherever they are around the country or the world. We pray that you would bless this talk, bless our time together. Help us understand what it means to pray with the Psalms. What it means to carry on this great tradition that has been given to us as a church. We pray that you would, uh, bless this talk, bless our time together. 

And we pray for the intercession of your mother as we pray together, Hail Mary. Full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Psalms

All right, so I want to talk about the psalms. The psalms are something that I’m sure you’re familiar with. You pray them during mass. If you’ve been to a mass at all, you have sung or prayed the psalms before.

Maybe some of you pray the church’s liturgy of the hours. They show up all the, all over the place. Or maybe you’ve just sat down with a Bible and, and you know, Push through some psalms. The psalms are weird though, and here’s the struggle I’ve always sort of had with the psalms. They, they’re deceiving almost, because they seem really simple.

They seem almost bite sized. You know, you can just open up a bible, you can pull it open to a psalm, and you can just read it. And be like, oh, cool. Um, here’s a psalm. In thee, O Lord, I take refuge. Let me never be put to shame. Cool. I don’t want to be put to shame. There’s the psalm. God’s kind of put it there for me.

Bing bang boom. I’m done. Right? That’s not exactly doing justice to the psalms. So, here’s the thing. They’re deceiving. They look like they’re these little simple bite sized kind of just pieces of wisdom or ways that we cry out to God. But there’s actually so much more going on here. They’re not terribly complicated.

They’re not like, you know, an apocalypse or a, you know, a complicated prophecy or one of St. Paul’s letters. They’re fairly straightforward, but at the same time, I think a lot of us don’t exactly know what to do with them. Like, yeah, we can kind of pull them open. We can pray a psalm or two. We sing them at mass, but I don’t know if we know kind of where to put them. We don’t have a category for them. And that’s kind of what I want to talk about today. I want to propose to you a way of looking at the psalms.

So first of all, what are the psalms? The word psalm itself, the word psalmoi, literally in Greek means song. So the psalms are literally just the songs. That’s actually what it means. Which is why the most proper thing to do with the psalms are to sing them. Which is why that’s often what we do with the responsorial psalms at mass. They’re most properly sung. It also means that the most proper place of the Psalms, yes, they’re appropriate in our prayer life and our personal reading for sure, but the most proper place for them is actually in the liturgy and that’s where we use them most.

The Psalter 

So here’s the thing with the Psalms, the Psalms, these songs, which are really Israel’s Hymn book. It’s the both the hymn book for Ancient Israel, the people whom Jesus comes from, but also us, Christians, the church, right? It’s our hymn. It’s our hymnal. But here’s the thing about it. They were written there.

There’s so many different psalms. There’s 150 psalms in what’s called the Psalter. The pslater is just the word that we give to all of them together, packaged. And in the Psalter, there’s 150 Psalms. Those Psalms were written by a whole bunch of different people over the course of many years and many moments throughout the course of Salvation history. Many of them are attributed to David. About 73 of them. That’s a lot of Psalms. Some are attributed to Solomon. There’s one, I think, to Moses. Some aren’t sure. 

You know, we’re not sure who wrote them. But they span a huge spectrum of the time period of salvation history. But the way that they come to us, the arrangement that they’re actually given in our Bibles, that comes, a lot of people believe, post exile.

So if you remember the story of Israel from the Old Testament, God, after the time of the Exodus, when he led his people out of slavery and captivity in Egypt, across the Red Sea, into the Promised Land, he eventually built them into a people, into a kingdom, a light to the world is what they intended to be.

And much of the story of the Old Testament is how God’s people fail at being the light to the world. They fail at being the sort of visible icon of God’s goodness into the world, and instead they become steeped in sin, in idolatry, and all sorts of the corruption that all of us fall into, right? That’s the story of the Old Testament, it should be pretty familiar to most of us. And because of that, and because of a failure to live up to this great vocation of what it meant to be Israel, God allowed his people, his chosen people, to go back into exile in about the 500s. The city of Jerusalem was destroyed, it was wiped out. The temple was obliterated.

The presence of God was lost from this building where it dwelt with us. And Israel went into captivity in a place called Babylon. And they were there for about 70 years and eventually allowed to come back to what we call the Holy Land and resettle. They rebuilt the temple, they rebuilt Jerusalem, and they tried to get life back to normal.

That’s sort of the state of affairs by the time that Jesus is born. They’re still waiting for God to sort of show up in its fullness. We, we’ve rebuilt the temple, we’re kind of trying to put the kingdom back together, but it seems like something’s not right. There’s foreign, foreign, there’s foreign powers reigning over us, occupying forces throughout the Holy Land. Something’s not right. The presence of God hasn’t returned to the temple. All of these things.

The Psalms were put together, again, not composed, but they were arranged in the Psalter as we have it, we believe, in that time after the Israelites had come back from exile. And part of what they were trying to figure out as they were putting these Psalms together to form Israel’s hymnal, hymn book, was How the heck did we get here?

How did we go from being God’s chosen people, his firstborn son, his “segula”, his special possession, to being disenfranchised and cast out and exiled and losing everything? We’ve lost the king, we’ve lost the temple, we’ve lost sacrifice and worship, and we don’t feel like the chosen people anymore. How did that happen?

How did we get here? And a lot of, I think, why the Psalms are the way that they are and arrange the way that they are, is to deal with that question, to look back and to say, where have we come from? How did we get here? And what do we do about that? What does it say about God? What might God do for us in the future?

One of the things we know about the Psalter, the arrangement of the Psalms is that the Psalms themselves are divided into five books. And this isn’t just like, you know, some thing of modernity. You can actually look in your Bibles and it actually says right before Psalm one, it says book one, right before Psalm number 42, it’ll say book. Two before Psalm 73, book three for Psalm 90 book four and before Psalm 107 it says book five.

So it actually arranges itself in terms of five books. Why? Well, if you’re an ancient Israelite, if you’re an ancient Jewish person and you’re thinking of five books, Well, you’re automatically going to be thinking about the Torah, God’s word.

We sometimes call it the Pentateuch. The first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, were the foundation for all of the Hebrew scriptures, all of the Christian scriptures too. They’re the foundational books and that word Torah actually comes from a Hebrew root and it means to instruct.

So sometimes people think of the Torah, you’ve probably heard that word. Sometimes people think of Torah as law. And yeah, sometimes we translate Torah as law, and that’s perfectly fine. But sometimes when we hear the word law, I think those of us in my part of the world have a particular thing that comes to mind.

You know, we think of things that are legislated. We think of speed limits, right? We think of things that sometimes are even arbitrary. That’s not what we mean by law. Law, I mean, the word yara is actually a verb. That’s where this comes from. And it means to direct, to instruct. It means literally to point your finger in a direction and say, you ought to go that way.

That’s what Torah is. It’s God’s instruction. Yes, there are laws that show up, but it’s more than just litigious. It’s showing us where we ought to go and what it means to be a human. So when you see the Psalms, then, arranged in terms of five books, any good Jewish person is going to be thinking of, wow, this is a new Torah or rather maybe not a new Torah, but this is the whole of God’s instruction for his people in song form in the form of verse.

It’s a really beautiful way to look at the Psalms. They are in a certain sense, all of salvation history in the form of song. They’re singing through the story of what God has done for his people. It’s again, there’s many ways to look at the Psalms. There’s many ways to sort of read them together. This is one that I think is really compelling though.

The Five Books of Psalms

And those five books are sort of telling a story in books one and two. So the first two books of the Psalter, especially number one. So book number one is Psalm one or two. Some people think that Psalm one is kind of a prologue. We’ll talk about that in a second. So from really Psalm two through Psalm 41, if you read it carefully, All of the Psalms are labeled, or at least most of them, with the exception of three, they’re all called Psalms of David, or Psalms by David, or Psalms for David, or Psalms about David.

David is everywhere. And who is David? David is known as the most famous and the most important of Israel’s kings. And so, really, Book 1 is all about the kingdom. And it’s sort of reflecting, in a certain sense, again, this is one way to read the Psalms, Book 1 is reflecting. Reflecting on the grandeur of the kingdom how God built us into this great people and intended us to be the light to the world And we had kings like David and Solomon and they did all these wonderful beautiful things.

But then as you get into Psalm book number two Two, there’s still a lot of Psalms of David, but if you read it carefully, the Psalms of David kind of begin to peter out and there become, begin to be less of them. And by the time you get to the last Psalm in book two, book, Psalm 72, there’s a little addendum to the very end of it that says “The Psalms of David are ended.” They’re over. Bum, bum, bum. It’s kind of an ominous note. And I think, again, the arrangement of the Psalms are asking us to reflect on how God led his people through this time.

So we saw the greatness of the kingdom, how God built us into the kingdom, and he asked us to be really like a sacramental sign, almost, into the world of God’s kingship, his reign and rule. But again, as time goes on because of our sin, because of human failing, we begin to fail at that, we begin to lose it.

It begins to slip out of Israel’s grasp. And by the end of book two, the kingdom is gone, which leads you into Psalm, into book number three, rather. And book number three, It gets a little dark. It’s Psalm 73 through 89, and Psalm 73 through 89, I think in a certain sense is reflecting on the exile. What does it mean that the kingdom has gone away?

What does it mean that we’ve lost the temple again? All of the Psalms in this part of the pslater aren’t written during that period, but there’s Psalms that make us sort of reflect on darkness. Why do people suffer? Why does God allow bad things to happen? to good people, but also to evil people, right?

Sometimes bad things just happen. And book three really wrestles with that. It has a lot of darkness in it because the reality of human, the human experience has a lot of darkness and it takes that very seriously. And so in a certain sense, it’s reflecting on the period of exile, which takes us into Psalm 90 through 106.

This is book four. And book four really begins to ask the next logical question. So if we had a great kingdom and God called us to this high vocation. And then because of our own sin, we lost that reality and everything kind of fell into this sinful punishing darkness. Now what? What do we do with that?

And a lot of what book four is really, I think, trying to ask is where is God? Where are you, God? And again, this isn’t just dead history of things that happened thousands of years ago. This is the human experience. This is the human question. When we fall into suffering, when bad things happen to us, it leads the human heart to ask this question, God, where are you?

What are you doing? Where are you hiding? And again, if you’re kind of reflecting on the story of salvation after the exile, or really during it, And then coming back into the promised land, remember Israel rebuilt their temple, but God’s presence never came back to it. The sort of sacramental reality of his presence among us never returned, at least until the New Testament.

And so it forces Israel to ask this question, like, God, are you there? Do you hear us? Are you with us? Are you present? Because we don’t see you in the normal signs that we used to, in the trappings of all of these things that used to remind us of who you are. There’s a lot of psalms in Book 4 that reflect on the beauty of God’s presence in creation, and how, actually, no, He is still there, even though we don’t We don’t feel him in the same ways.

We don’t experience him in the ways that we used to. We can look to creation. We can look to the way that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west to see that God is steady just like that. And so it tries to figure out how do we find God when it feels like he’s not there. So many of the Psalms are really difficult.

So many of the Psalms address head on really honestly, the problem of suffering, the problem of questioning, who am I? Where is God? What is this all about? But the presumption, this is where the Psalter is a bit different than sometimes the way that people in our modern world approach these questions. The presumption of the Psalms is always that God is real.

It’s always that God exists. I think sometimes in modernity and our modern times, we suffer or we experience pain or loss, and the temptation is, well, there must not be a God. These things happened. I don’t believe in God anymore. That’s not the presumption of the Bible. The presumption of the Bible is these horrible things happened.

It hurts, I don’t feel God anymore. God, why did you do that? Why are you allowing these things? Why do you allow my enemies to prosper over me? What’s the deal? They really, honestly, take God to task. Which is, I think, what we’re all called to do in an honest prayer life. God, I’m confused. God, I’m frustrated. God, I’m mad right now.

And I think it’s important that we be honest with those things. That’s what this psalter gives us permission to do. And I love praying them that way. And that takes us to the last part. Book 5, 107 through 150. And here’s what gets kind of cool. And again, the Psalms are written across the span of history, but they’re compiled in a very particular way.

Add The Psalms To Your Prayers

And in these last, in this last book of Psalms, you see a return of Davidic Psalms. The Psalms of David come back, and there’s this sort of mysterious movement toward a kingship again. Messiah. “Mashiach” is the Hebrew word that means an anointed one, a king. And what the Psalms begin to move us then toward, Is this a reality that someday all of this will return in a way that we never dreamt of before, in a way that is new, that God is actually going to do something new in the world.

He’s going to do something new among his people and in his world and among Israel. Maybe a new Israel will be born. It’s an incredible movement and it ends with this incredible note of hope, you know, between each of these books are what we call doxologies, these psalms of blessing, these little prayers that stitches each of the books together.

At the very end of the book, one is not enough, it flies into this whole series of blessings, this whole litany of praises to God for his goodness, even in the ways that we couldn’t see it in the past. Even when our eyes are blinded to those things, God never disappoints us. He never abandons us. He’s always there.

Even when we can’t see him, even when it doesn’t feel like it. And I think these things are profoundly important to sort of recognize and remember and reflect on in our own prayer life. I think Psalms are the perfect sort of fodder for prayer, um, because they’re hard and there’s Psalms that are confusing and there’s Psalms that are challenging.

That’s why I don’t like looking at the Psalms just to sort of Bible roulette, right? I feel like praying. I’m going to flip my Bible open and I’m going to kind of take as God’s message to me, whatever it happens to say on that page. Yeah, that can work, right? Bible roulette can bear fruit sometimes, and you’re like, Oh, this really has deep meaning for my life today, even though I just flipped open to this page.

And that’s cool, that’s fine. But I love knowing the history of a thing, I love knowing context. That’s what brings my prayer life to life. I love knowing that there’s actually a bigger story that all of these things fit within. This psalm here is really confusing. It’s really dark. It’s really wrestling with this question of evil.

I wonder why. Oh, what book is it in? Where does it fall in the course of this singing through the story of our salvation? Maybe that can make sense, not only of how the psalms work, but how my life works. Maybe I can take some inspiration from the, um, from the, uh, Devotion of the psalmist from the courage of the writer to take on the task at times and say man I am so confused.

Hagah and the Psalms

I don’t understand You know the first lines of the first Psalm begins like this. This is how we’ll close it says. Blessed is the man who walks not in the council of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers. His delight is in the Torah of the Lord. His instruction and on his Torah, his law he meditates day and night.

Meditates day and night. The word in Hebrew for meditate is, so, when we translate meditate, when I hear the word meditate, I think of a mental exercise, an intellectual thing. I can sit very quietly, and I can meditate. That could be, that’s true. That’s fine. But that’s not really what the Hebrew word fully means.

The Hebrew word there is the word “hagah”. H A G A H. And Haga is bigger than just a mental exercise. Haga can be a lot of things. It can mean to meditate, to think about, but it can also mean to laugh. It can mean to cry. It can mean to wail. It can mean to scream. It can mean to dance. It can mean to jump up and down.

Blessed is the man who hagahs on the instruction of the Lord day and night, who takes it seriously with every fiber of his being. It might evoke tears in you one day. It might evoke laughter in you another day. It might evoke pounding your fist on a table the next day, because you’re so frustrated. All of those things are actually, in Hebrew, hagah, because that’s what it means to totally give yourself to the Lord. It’s what it means to give yourself to his scriptures, to his word, to these prayers and the Psalms.

I want the Psalms to give us permission to really haggah. Laugh when you want to laugh. Cry when you want to cry, take God to task challenge him question. Ask these questions, I mean, with a reverence. I mean, God is God and we are not, but if that’s actually true, then it means I can ask God the hard questions. I can bring my frustration, my heartache, my pain, my baggage, my giddiness over things. That’s all of it. I can bring to Him.

The Psalms feel a freedom to do that. They span the range of human emotions, and I think they call us and invite us to do the same. So thanks everybody.

Closing Prayer

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

About Dr. Scott Powell

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