The Psalm Cosmos

One-hundred-fifty songs are singing one story.

I admit it.

Sometimes I’m in a hurry when I grab my Bible.

And when that’s the case, I usually open it right down the middle.

Any psalm will do, right? They’re all inspired.

There are worse habits, to be sure, than reading psalms at random. Especially if you take the time to pray them.

But this practice approaches psalms as if each were a fragment, merely an individual nugget of wisdom.

Each is packed with wisdom, of course. And even a few verses (a fragment of a fragment!) can stir your spirit:

When I consider your heavens,

the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

which you have set into place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,

the son of man that you care for him?

Psalm 8:3-4

But merely viewing a psalm as a fragment misses something crucial too. The image in Psalm 8 helpfully shows why.

An individual star is a thing of wonder. Take our sun, for example.

A star we know as the sun. Public domain. Accessed at Wikimedia Commons.

And yet a single star is also part of a glorious whole.

Globular Cluster NGC 1850. Public domain. Available at Science.nasa.gov.

So too with the Psalm cosmos.

I’d long assumed that the order of the Bible’s 150 psalms had to matter. In a God-inspired book, how could it not?

But I didn’t really read or treat the Psalms as a whole, and I couldn’t have told you much about why they’re arranged the way they are.

A book by Scott Aniol is helping me to see the fuller picture. It’s called Musing on God’s Music: Forming Hearts of Praise with the Psalms.

Early on, the book presents a crucial connection between Psalms 1 and 2. I’m very familiar with these Psalms but still didn’t realize how deeply their themes relate.

Aniol points out the key to this is the word blessed. In Hebrew it’s ’ashre.

It shows up at the beginning of Psalm 1:

Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked. . .

It appears again at the end of Psalm 2:

Blessed are all who take refuge in Him.

In between lie two psalms that, at a glance, speak to very different topics. Psalm 1 serves as encouragement and warning for an individual believer. Meanwhile, Psalm 2 zooms out to capture a cosmic moral battle encompassing nations.

Yet whether applied to the small scale or the grand, God’s message through the Psalms remains consistent: even in a disastrously sinful world, those who surrender to the Lord can be blessed. This blessing arrives not in the form of an ideal or easy life. Rather, it comes as the experience of God’s presence, peace, and power, in the midst of a world where those are in short supply.

Psalms 1 and 2 also establish why God’s blessed presence isn’t the norm on earth. Right from the jump, Psalm 1 contrasts the blessed man with those it describes as wicked. The word sin is more familiar to us than wickedness, but the point is that opposition to God and His people is all too real.

Why, Psalm 2 asks, do the nations rage? Because people think that God’s ways are oppressive, rather than the source of true blessing:

The kings of the earth set themselves,

and the rulers take counsel together,

against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying,

“Let us burst their bonds apart

and cast their cords away from us.”

Psalm 2:2–3

It’s a bleak picture, but Psalms 1 and 2 also teach us how to resist falling prey to this deception. Another Hebrew word helps point the way, but this connection won’t usually show up in English.

In Psalm 1, the blessed man meditates day and night on Scripture (verse 2). In the Bible, meditation is not associated with breathing techniques or emptying your mind of thoughts. Instead, it means to ponder God’s word deeply, even to murmur it to oneself.

In Musing on God’s Music, Scott Aniol points out how Psalm 2 re-uses this profound word. It opens with this verse:

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?

While few English translations capture it, the word in Psalm 1 that the ESV translates as meditate and the word in Psalm 2 translated as plot are the same word in Hebrew!

Together, Psalms 1 and 2 present the choice that will play out through the following 148 psalms. Will you set your mind on the goodness of God and allow His word to guide and transform you? Will you trust in His gift of divine grace and forgiveness for your sins? Will you ponder and meditate on His truth? If so, no matter what life throws at you, you will experienced His blessed presence.

Or will you set your mind on the false notion that God wants to oppress you? Will you believe the lie that true satisfaction is found in breaking free of the Lord’s “bonds” and “cords” (Psalm 2:3).

This is a choice of extraordinary consequence, as the end of Psalm 1 lays out:

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,

nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;

for the Lord knows the way of the righteous,

but the way of the wicked will perish.

The 150 psalms go on to display the truth packed in this single verse. This is revealed through a crucial shift that takes place over the course of the book of Psalms. It’s a profound shift, and one that isn’t revealed through an individual psalm. You need the whole psalm cosmos to see it!

As Scott Aniol puts it, “The book actually starts pretty dark, and that darkness continues, with occasional glimpses of light, through much of the first 100 psalms.” Although there’s plenty of praise in these early psalms, they frequently include anguish and lament.

It’s not until the final 50 psalms that unrelenting praise really comes into focus. And by then the wicked have seemingly. . .vanished.

This “disappearance” reaffirms what was laid out in Psalm 1: “the way of the wicked will perish.”

They’ve been overcome by a sea of praise. And, moreover, by the one true God who is worthy of that praise.

And by the time we arrive at Psalm 150, praise is all that remains.

Praise the Lord!

Praise God in His sanctuary;

praise Him in His mighty heavens!

Praise Him for His mighty deeds;

praise Him according to His excellent greatness!

Praise Him with trumpet sound;

praise Him with lute and harp!

Praise Him with tambourine and dance;

praise Him with strings and pipe!

Praise Him with sounding cymbals;

praise Him with loud clashing cymbals!

Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!

Praise the Lord!