For thousands of years, the book of Psalms has been a prayer book for the faithful. Which makes me sheepish to admit that I don’t enjoy many of the psalms. Some I love. Who doesn’t love Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd . . . . “) or 51 (“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love according to your abundant mercy . . . .”) or 84 (“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!”) or 150 (“Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.”)? The psalms of introspection give voice to the deepest yearnings of our heart to draw near to the Lord. The psalms of praise give voice to those moments of exultation when we are in awe of the beauty of God’s creation and his steadfast love toward people.
But there are many psalms of a different nature that seem to contradict the Second Great Commandment. Some of them simply complain about others, and those are bad enough. But some go further and ask God to curse, destroy, or punish his children. This week’s reading in Come, Follow Me includes Psalm 69, which contains some of the most violent language imaginable: “Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see . . . . Pour out your indignation upon them, and let your burning anger overtake them. May their camp be a desolation; let no one live in their tents . . . . Let them be blotted out of the book of the living.” Is that a prayer that a follower of Jesus should offer?
Prayers of complaint and vengeance make up about a third of the psalms, and they don’t do much for me. In fact, they repel me. They seem at odds with the command of Jesus that we are to relate to others—even our enemies—in ways that are marked by love, mercy, forgiveness, humility, and service. What happened to “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Luke 6: 27–28, NRSV)?
What are we to do with these psalms? Ignore them and pretend they don’t exist? Surely they can’t be part of a canon whose purpose is to bring us to Christ and imitate his life, can they?
As is so often the case, the problem isn’t with the scriptures, but with my understanding. With the help of those trained in the close reading of scripture, two insights have helped me to see that the psalms that repel me are actually an integral and redemptive part of the canon that help us participate in Jesus’ work of at-one-ment. Strike them from the whole book of Psalms, and I will be missing something transformative. And therein lies a profound lesson about the cost of discipleship. It’s not about finding a path that “works for me,” that always appeals to my tastes. The covenant path takes us on a journey already marked by those who have preceded us, who have learned from their own experience how best to experience the steadfast love of God and seek the well-being of his children.
The first insight comes from Ellen Davis of Duke Divinity School. In her classic book, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament (2001), Davis points out that the psalms that are so off-putting to me reflect an honesty and intimacy with God that should be part of a vibrant prayer life in which we bring to God our fears, our anxieties, every part of our fallen selves. “Crying out to God, screaming to God in the darkness,” Davis argues, “there is room for that in the life of faithful prayer.”
The psalms contain a full expression of our fallen humanity, and when we pray all of them, we are not always dressed in our Sunday best, with arms crossed and heads bowed. Such prayers are informed by a faith that “the God who made heaven and earth should care that I am hurting.” According to Davis, that is “a style of prayer without parallel in the ancient world.” Davis points out that the pleas for vengeance that trouble me are not answered by God’s pouring out destruction. Instead, they work a subtle but profound change in the psalmist. “Even while we are still in our anger,” Davis notes, “the cursing psalms are the vehicle whereby we yield to God our own claim to vengeance, and that is the crucial first step to the healing of the entire community.” That first step involves change, not of the psalmist’s circumstances—the Lord doesn’t do vengeance—but of “the psalmist’s experience of suffering.” “And perhaps that has changed,” Davis suggests, “only because she has dared to break the isolation of silence and knows that God has heard.” In other words, the psalms exhibit the power of prayer C. S. Lewis thought its highest value. Prayer doesn’t change God, Lewis taught. It changes us.
More important still, the psalms are prayers that have helped form the spiritual lives of millions of earnest followers of the Lord. They are a prayer book that was used by the children of Israel, the New Testament church, Jesus himself, and his followers for more than two millennia. Using these prayers in our own devotions is not only an act of solidarity with those who have gone before us, but it’s a humble acknowledgment that we need help in our spiritual formation. Just as they have done for disciples of Jesus over the years, the psalms teach us how to pray and what to pray for. To think that we can create a prayer life without their benefit is an act of hubris.
This insight works at cross-purposes with a reluctance among some to use set prayers in our devotionals instead of using only spontaneous expressions. Even though set prayers are used for blessing the sacrament and for temple dedications, there is a common criticism among our people that they are the “vain repetitions” Jesus warned against. Certainly, they can be vain, as can be any prayer not thoughtfully offered. But, as N. T. Wright notes, when his disciples asked Jesus how to pray, he didn’t merely encourage sincerity; he gave them words to say. Henry B. Eyring has called the Lord’s Prayer, which Jesus taught us to pray, “a perfect example of what we should ask Heavenly Father for.”
Prayer is about much more than asking God for the blessings we desire. The greater work of prayer may be that it forms us spiritually. As Brian Zahnd explains, “The primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what you want him to do—but to be properly formed.” And using set prayers like the psalms can help form us in ways that we might not have chosen if left to our own devices. In her book, Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren tells how the fixed prayers in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer gave her words to pray when grief had left her speechless.
Using the prayers that followers of Jesus have prayed over the years, like the psalms, in addition to our own spontaneous expressions, helps train us how to think, desire, and love as have his disciples through the years. When we rely solely on spontaneous prayer, we can become captive to our own limited concerns. Praying the psalms and other liturgical prayers will reshape our hearts and minds in ways that will stretch us.
In the final period of his apostolic ministry, after he had miraculously survived a serious brush with death, President Jeffrey R. Holland believed that his time on earth had been extended so that he could teach that we need to find ways to improve the quality of our prayer life. Speaking to his fellow General Authorities gathered for the October 2024 general conference, he said with remarkable candor, “We can’t pray as we’ve always prayed because nothing that we are going to do from here to the end is going to be what has always been done. So we can’t be who we’ve always been or pray how we’ve always prayed.”1 A year later, he implored all of us, “However much you’ve prayed, pray more. However many places you’ve prayed, pray in more places. However many times during the day you pray, pray more times in the day.”
One way we can respond to that apostolic charge might be to allow the psalms—all of them—to become a part of our prayer life so that they can do in us what they have done for so many for so long.
Thomas B. Griffith is a former judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and a graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of Virginia School of Law. He previously served as Senate Legal Counsel of the United States and as general counsel at BYU. Today, he is a fellow at BYU’s Wheatley Institute and remains active in constitutional scholarship, civic engagement, and rule-of-law initiatives.
Art by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836–1902) and Michel Simonidy (1870–1933).
The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.
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Used with permission.
WOW, this article is eye opening. I’m reading the Psalms again right now and this view really hits home.
Thank you for this lovely and insightful article