Psalms

I love Psalms, and I've been greatly enjoying memorizing some of them over the last couple weeks. Every part of the Bible is amazing, but sometimes it is hard to put specific reasons for this enjoyment into words, and analyze it.

For me, part of the delight in reading the Psalms is pure literary appreciation, which sounds a bit strange when applied to the Bible. However, God created and uses the written medium to allow humans to communicate across space and time, and the fact that when He inspires men to write He inspires them to write well should not be astonishing. The poetry of the Psalms, the word choice, and the different voices of different psalmists are all part of the literary aspect. It must have been fun for the translators, trying to figure out how to put Hebrew poetry into English and retain some of the lyrical qualities while keeping the sense of the original. No surprise that some of our greatest hymns echo the Psalms.

I also enjoy finding places in Psalms that are quoted in other places—either multiple places in Psalms, or in other passages I've memorized from all over the Bible, OT and NT. Sometimes the words are exactly the same, sometimes they differ slightly, and sometimes it is just the idea, but it is always fun to see how Scripture intertwines with itself.

Another reason the Psalms are so beloved by many people is because they give a picture of how we can interact with God, since they are people talking to God, primarily, rather than the other way around. Whenever I read through them a lot or memorize them, I notice some of the phrases carry over to my thinking and prayers, giving me words with which to address God, and a greater understanding of His awesome holiness.

Most important by far is the wonderful theology they contain: all the attributes of God, the precise descriptions of Christ, the incredible insight into human nature, and the interaction with Israel's history, to name just a few aspects of theology involved in the book of Psalms. No matter how often we hear it, we always need to be reminded of the basics of our faith, and Psalms does this over and over.