The scriptural stories and prayers offer no spectators’ vista, no safe seats in the back from which we can quietly slip out just before the show wraps up. Instead, they immerse us in the drama of salvation, improvising with God and our neighbors the plot twists of being human. Our obsession with ourselves, in our modern western world, has sought to subdue story, to make it subservient to self—to self-help and self-actualization. But herein lies the genius of the library of the scriptures, stories that are true, resist our domesticating and dominating impulses. The individual psalms are not ahistorical prayers, each “applicable” or “relevant’ to every experience or feeling. Rather, are a call to receive the gift of salvation, renewal of our selves through recognizing and relinquishing our selves—that which the scriptures call repentance.

Because the stories in the Bible refuse to serve us, they refuse to valorize us as the hero and so we have to assume other roles—we play the villain, the victim, those who don’t see the whole picture. Psalm 41 is a good exercise in reading the Bible well. There will be times that call for us to read it at face value, to read it from the vantage point of the narrator, to echo his prayers, and to receive his word as witness. And there will be times, likely more frequent, that call for us to soberly acknowledge that we are the one’s who have done harm. We have looked on others in malice wishing ill upon them (v. 5). We have hearts that gather slander (v. 6) soaking it in so that we can gleefully spread gossip (v. 6, 8). We have hated those who have placed feasts before us (v. 9).

David ends with a plea for mercy so that he can enact vengeance (v. 10). But God is far too merciful for that. Instead of giving into our demands for retribution, God will send revelation. Jesus reveals both God and humanity fully. Jesus unveils God brimming with beauty and grace and how to be human in a light so fierce. And at the same time how readily we lift up our heels against the one who handed us the bread of his body, broken for us.

Jesus’ integrity upholds him in the crossfire of our treacheries because he draws from the everlasting well of God’s good pleasure (v. 11)—this is my son with whom I am well-pleased (Matthew 3v17). Jesus’ enemies cannot triumph over him (v.11) because he refuses to hate them—forgive them father for they know not what they do (Luke 23v34). Jesus will be kept in the presence of God forever (v. 12) because he is the eternal word of doxology—it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him (Acts 2v24).

To read the story well is to be honest about our part in it. Jesus assumes our role of brokenness and blasphemy so that we can assume his role of blessedness and blessing. This story will not serve us but it will set us free.

Psalm 36 is an exercise in contrast. David lays out two paths, when set side by side, it is clear which one is so much more appealing but we need the light of the more beautiful way to see the utter darkness of the lesser path. He starts with a simple observation, which may strike our modern sensibilities as hopelessly judgmental. He even claims divine origin for the “message in” his “heart” (v. 1). His conclusion, these “wicked” people are so lovestruck by gazing at their own reflections that they cannot see the wasting sickness that is their own sin, their mouths are so full of hatred and slander that they are its as if they are speaking with a mouth full of food, that which flows from their lives is neither wise or good, and on their beds, even their imaginative faculties are spent on self-serving courses of hedonism and idolatry. (vv. 2-4). David offers a thorough, scathing review of the “wicked.” 

Who are the wicked? Well, you have to remember, David doesn’t live in a cosmopolitan society, he’s not a 21st century New Yorker living at the intersection of every culture, ethnicity, and perspective in the world. He lives among a nation with a common ancestry and heritage. His neighbors are supposed to have one solitary devotion: faithfulness to Yahweh, the God of Israel.

What all this means is that David is not looking with judgmental disdain at the ignorant and uninitiated. He is talking about people that should know better. He then moves to a contemplation of the beauty of God. As thorough as the brokenness of his neighbors and compatriots who have rejected the God who formed them as a people, so much more is God brimming with life, love, justice. The human ingenuity towards sinfulness, destructive as it is, is nothing compared with the beauty of God:

 5 Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens,
 your faithfulness to the skies.
6  Your righteousness is like the highest mountains,
your justice like the great deep.
You, Lord, preserve both people and animals.
7  How priceless is your unfailing love, O God!

And while the bed of the wicked is a place for a cartography of selfishness, the table of the Lord is a refuge and feast for all, a river of abundance flowing to every nation:

7b People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
8 They feast on the abundance of your house;
 you give them drink from your river of delights.

And this picture of the Lord is not a glimpse of heaven, a snapshot of the transcendent that we long to immerse ourselves in fully. This gospel that God is beautiful on a scale that dwarfs the depths of of the deep, and the heights of Everest is an invitation to a life animated by God’s vision and vitality. David writes:

9 For with you is the fountain of life;
 in your light we see light.

His love is a fountain, a never-ending artesian spring cultivating an oasis of Eden in the midst of the foolish, the proud, and the wicked. His light illuminates the good, true, and the beautiful that stubbornly breaks the concrete of sin-hardened world. The deep life of God calls to the deep in us, let your fountains be found in him.