Matthew Vogan
Some claim that the Psalms of Scripture are not sufficient for the praise of God in public worship. They assert that the Lord Jesus Christ ought to be mentioned as explicitly as possible in our praise. With this weak objection, they open the door to uninspired hymns. A deeper appreciation of the Psalms should, however, convince us that the Lord Jesus Christ could hardly be more in the Psalms than He is. “All things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning Me” (Lk 24:44). The Psalms are indeed full of Christ but, as we shall endeavour to discover, this goes even beyond pointing forward to Christ.
In his valuable book, Christ’s Presence in the Gospel History (more recently published as The Abiding Presence), Hugh Martin shows that the Gospels are not merely a historical record but a means of communion with a living Christ. He observes that no ordinary biography, or even autobiography, concludes with the promise, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Mt 28:20).
The Gospels must be approached with this promise of His presence. “Take the Gospel record in your hands,” Martin says, “and you have the means of causing you to realise Christ’s presence. The biography then is not dead, the living One lives in it. The presence is not mysterious and vague; for He is present as in the mirror of the biography, and according to the well defined and reflected glory there. The biography is more than biography now, it is – the life of Jesus.” Through the work of the Holy Spirit in the inspiration of Scripture and in the indwelling and illumination of the believer, there is a certain knowledge and true experience of Christ through the infallible Word and living presence.
In the Psalms, we have precisely the same thing. E S McKittrick states that “the Person of Christ is fully presented in the Psalter, as well as His work. Indeed, it has been asserted, and not without reason, that out of the Psalms one could compile a biography of Jesus.” McKittrick goes on to show that the full range of matters and events associated with the Person and work of Christ are to be found within the Psalms. The Psalms not only unfold the life of Christ; they give us in many instances the very words and thoughts of the Saviour. McKittrick writes: “In these revelations of Jesus in the Psalter, there is this advantage over all others: He speaks mainly in the first person, and tells us His own feelings while working and suffering and dying for our redemption. And these revelations are chiefly in the past tense, as if to indicate that they were intended more for the gospel age than for that in which they were written.”
We are therefore reading and singing of fulfilments, not merely predictions. It is notable that the Psalms have a prominent and frequent emphasis upon the current position of the Saviour, His mediatorial kingship and His sitting at the right hand of God in heaven. These features of Christ’s work are indeed very scarce in collections of uninspired hymns.
R J George also expressed helpfully the fullness of Christ in the Psalms: “Christ is the speaker in many of them. . . . Christ alone is the subject of many of them. . . . The truth is that no book of the Bible reveals Christ with such fullness as the Book of Psalms, not excepting the Gospel according to John or the Epistle to the Hebrews”. Henry Cooke writes: “Truly, I believe, there is one view of Christ – and that not the least important to the tried and troubled believer – that can be discovered only in the Book of Psalms; I mean His inward life. . . . The Spirit who ‘searcheth the deep things of God’ has, in the Psalms, laid open the inmost thoughts, sorrows and conflicts of our Lord. The Evangelists faithfully and intelligently depict the sinless Man; the Psalms alone lay open the heart of ‘the Man of sorrows’.” When we consider them from this perspective, we might easily be constrained to say that the Gospels are the biography of Christ, but the Psalms His autobiography.
We may go still further, since in singing the Psalms we are taking these very words upon our lips together. Scripture tells us that Christ is specially present and directly participating when the Church is singing praise: “In the midst of the church will I sing praise unto Thee” (Heb 2:12, quoting from Psalm 22). We have the living presence of Christ as we sing His own words concerning Himself in the Psalms. Christ indwells His people and enters into special communion with them through His Word. We must offer our praise in and through Him (Heb 13:15). Calvin comments upon the foregoing verse: “It thus appears that our Lord is the leader of our songs and chief composer of our hymns”.
In The Abiding Presence, Martin highlights examples from the days of Christ’s time on earth that can be considered in the light of the promised reality of Christ’s continued presence with His people. He writes of “The Temptation, and its perpetual Triumph” and “The Synagogue and its perpetual Sermon”. We could add another example: “The Last Supper, and its perpetual Praise” (Mk 14:26). Christ sang a psalm in the midst of His brethren, as a part of the Supper that was being instituted in the world to be observed “till He come”. He has promised to be with His people “alway, even to the end of the world” (Mt 28:20) and He will be specially present in their singing of His Psalms.
Hugh Martin gave a speech to the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland defending the exclusive use of the Psalms in praise. In this he emphasises that Christ “is spiritually present with His people in their worship in the sanctuary. But were He bodily present as in the synagogue of Nazareth, when there was given to Him the book of the prophet Isaiah, would you give Him any other book of song than the book of the Psalms of David? . . . Would you give Him other than His own Psalms to lead you in singing – His own Psalms, in that they are composed by Himself; and His own Psalms, in that His soul sang them, with grace in His heart unto the Lord, in the days of His flesh? You maintain communion with Him, and He with you, when, in the praises of the sanctuary, you sing His Psalms.” No wonder that the spiritual singing of praise is frequently spoken of as a duty that resembles the exercises of the saints in heaven in their immediate enjoyment of communion with Christ.
What Martin has written concerning the presence of Christ in the Gospels may be clearly discerned in the Psalms also. Christ’s “own blessed voice speaketh with me in the lively oracles. His own blessed face looks forth upon me from the now-living picture of His biography. By an arrangement that leaves nothing for imagination to attempt, and therefore no room for imagination to misconceive, nothing for sentimentalism to supply, and therefore no scope for sentimentalism to pervert; by an arrangement that leaves me no discretion whatsoever, but calls on me simply to receive the heavenly revelation that is given, the Lord is Himself with me – not to my fancy, not to my pious sentiment, but with me verily and in very truth.” It must be His own perfect inspired truth, in order that He “should enter into it, identify Himself with it, invest Himself with it, make it vital with His living power and vocal with His own personal voice, make it from age to age the dwelling-place of His presence”. It must have “absolute infallibility, in order that my Lord be in nothing misrepresented to me . . . a mirror on which no staining breath of human imperfection has been permitted to pass”.
We need the perfect self-revelation of Christ in His own words in order truly to have communion with Him. We do not need the misplaced imagination and sentimentalism of uninspired hymn writers when we have communion with the person of Christ directly through His own Word in the Psalms. We can then sing the Psalms “in faith untainted with doubt, in the full assurance of faith, unshackled from the spirit of criticism which man’s word continually provokes, yea demands”. As Henry Cooke expressed it, “The most pious productions of uninspired men are a shallow stream – the Psalms are an unfathomable and shoreless ocean”. Spiritual singing of the Psalms in this way enables us to go beyond “conceptions, notions, ideas concerning Him, however true”. “You deal with Him, and He with you. The true and living Christ, present with you – secretly and subjectively present in you by His Spirit – deals with you. And you in the Spirit deal with the true and living Christ, present with you – ostensibly and objectively present with you – in His own holy Word.”
This is to have the “Word of Christ dwell in you richly, in all wisdom” (Col 3:16). Martin says, “I can understand how the Word of God should dwell in us richly by singing the Word of God – dwelling on it in solemn, meditative, grave, sweet singing of it, till – to use a Scotch phrase – it seeps into the soul and takes its dwelling there, while in warm emotion of faith the worshipper’s spirit in believing song dwells deliberately upon it. Thus it may come to dwell richly in us.” “According to our spirituality of mind and in proportion to the vigour and activity of our faith”, the Psalms “are to us the Galleries of the King, replete and lighted up with living and presently subsisting revelations of our Lord.”
They are greatly mistaken who believe that the Psalms must be set aside on the view that the Lord Jesus Christ ought to be mentioned as explicitly as possible within our praise. When the Psalms are sung, Christ could not be more present in both the content and spiritual reality of the praise. A handful of worshippers singing unaccompanied psalms in an old building might seem contemptible to the carnal assumptions of the world and a worldly church, but there are depths of far greater spiritual reality in the singing than they are able to discern. There are “the goings of the King” within the sanctuary (Ps 68:24). The Saviour Himself is present, engaged and drawn to His people, saying, “Let Me hear thy voice, for sweet is thy voice” (Song 2:14).
Faith goes again and again to the Psalms and finds fresh truth and means of grace there, through fresh views of Christ. Martin himself describes this vitality in the religion of the Psalms of David: “The religion of intense personality and adoring, loving fellowship with God, through a personal and fraternal Mediator, is a religion of inexhaustible resources; of ever-varying experiences; instinct with the charms of fresh, unflagging novelty, and of ceaseless variation; echoing joyfully, in its onward march and history, to the harmonious movement and the continually changing combinations of all honourable affections. Just because of its personality it is so.”
As believers go up from this wilderness leaning upon their Beloved, the Psalms are perfectly suited to be the songs of their pilgrimage (Song 8:5). “The ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs” (Is 35:10).
E S McKitrick, “Christ in the Psalms”, in The Psalms in Worship, John McNaugher, ed, Pittsburgh, 1907.
The Free Presbyterian Magazine, vol 30, p 288.
The True Psalmody, 1861, p 17.
Hugh Martin, The Abiding Presence, Knox Press reprint, pp 25-6,57,60.
Hugh Martin, in The Free Presbyterian Magazine, vol 2, p 27.
The True Psalmody, 1861, pp 17,37.
The Free Presbyterian Magazine, vol 2, p 25.
The Abiding Presence, p 61.
The Abiding Presence, p 177.