Blog My Soul

Dr. Stucwisch continues:

Now, then, in addition to being the Word of God—and, really, precisely as the Word of God—the Psalms also become the Church’s words of prayer (and a sacrifice of praise), when they are spoken back to God and confessed before the world as words of faith. Indeed, such “confession” (which, if one considers the Greek word for such confession, means “to say the same thing”) is the very voice of faith and thus the fountain out of which all faithful prayer flows; because, in order to “pray, praise, and give thanks,” as the Catechism and the Second Commandment teach, it is above all necessary that the Word of God be heard and received in its truth and purity, and that Christians do and speak all things in harmony with it. The people of God are thus given to say the same thing that God has said to them: the confession of sin (as in Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143), and the confession of faith (as in Psalms 2, 96, 97, 98, 110, 148–150); in either case to say what is true and right, because it is what God has said. Such confession of the Word of God, and so also the confession of the Psalms, is a priestly-sacrificial service of God’s people—the sacrifice of repentance, of faith, of thanksgiving, and of intercession for others. To confess what God has done and said is the foremost sort of praise and thanksgiving; and it is on the firm foundation of what He has done and said that one petitions Him according to His promise for the future, not only for one’s self, but also for the Church and for the neighbor. In the case of the Psalms, in particular, all of them to some extent or another (some more than others) served the priestly worship of the Temple in the Old Testament; many of them, in fact, originated within that liturgical context, specifically for that purpose (especially Psalms 118–134). They are thus ideally suited for the Church’s priestly-sacrificial use as prayers of praise and petition, because they present the Word of God in a poetic and lyrical form that is most appropriate for and conducive to worship. Yet, for all that, the Psalms do not cease to be the Word of God, always speaking (liturgically) to His people. (more…)