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Psalms of Christ
The Messiah in Non-Messianic Psalms
Daniel H. Fletcher
Psalms of Christ
The Messiah in Non-Messianic Psalms
Copyright © 2018 Daniel H. Fletcher. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The Bible text designated JPS 1917 is from The Holy Scriptures (Old Testament), originally published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1917. Electronic text Copyright © 1995-98 by Larry Nelson (Box 1681, Cathedral City, CA 92235). All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Quotations designated KJV are from the 1769 Blayney Edition of the 1611 King James Version of the English Bible. Copyright @ 1988–1997 by the Online Bible Foundation and Woddside Fellowship of Ontario, Canada. Licensed from the Institute for Creation Research. Used by permission.
English translations of the Septuagint are from The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament by Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, 1844, 1851, published by Samuel Bagster and Sons, London, original ASCII edition Copyright © 1988 by FABS International (c/o Bob Lewis, DeFuniak Springs FL 32433). All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Scripture taken from the Modern English Version. Copyright @ 2014 by Military Bible Association. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Quotations designated NET are from The NET Bible, Version 1.0 - Copyright © 1996-2006 Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C.
Quotations designated (NIV) are from THE HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by International Bible Society. All rights reserved worldwide.
Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Quotations designated NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Bible Version, Copyright @ 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
To Hannah, Nathaniel, and Lydia
“Children are a gift from the Lord; they are a reward from him.” (Psalm 127:3)
Preface
Inspiration for this book came from a series of presentations I gave at the Inman Forum for Biblical Preaching at Ohio Valley University, Vienna WV, in the summer of 2015. My dear friend Mike Moss invited me to speak on preaching from the OT. I developed a newfound love and appreciation for the OT as a result of my doctoral studies at Westminster Theological Seminary, where many courses focused on the NT use of the OT. In particular, a class on biblical interpretation during the Second Temple period taught me to wrestle with the complexities of the interpretive environment of the NT writers. While the NT authors share the interpretive methods of Judaism, their starting point for biblical interpretation was that Jesus Christ is the summation and goal of the Jewish Scriptures. I must humbly confess this was the first time that I was introduced to the christological character of the OT, as the NT understands it (e.g., Luke 24:25–27, 44–47; John 5:39–40). I will unpack this throughout this book, but for the moment the point here is that the NT reads the OT from a post-resurrection perspective, finding throughout its pages a comprehensive witness to the redemptive-historical significance of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
As a seminarian, I was excited to explore the exegetical “tools of the trade” of the NT use of the OT: typology, allegory, intertextuality, prophetic fulfillment as “filling up” (plēroō) a passage with christological meaning, adaptation, to name only a few.1 These tools are, in part, the exegetical methods themselves that the NT employs when interpreting the OT in light of the Christ event. To be sure, these methods are not unique to the NT; they are part and parcel of first-century Jewish exegesis. The NT authors simply apply the methods of their time to the interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures in light of the salvific work of Jesus Christ. Even more than my enthusiasm around exegetical technique, I also became convinced that the NT interpretation of the OT is less about method per se, and more about interpretive starting point. Richard Longenecker concludes after a robust examination of the NT use of the OT: “The Jewish context in which the New Testament came to birth, significant though it was, was not what was distinctive or formative in the exegesis of the earliest believers. At the heart of their biblical interpretation was a christology and a christocentric perspective.”2 In other words, the NT understands Israel’s Scriptures in light of the gospel story where the resurrected Lord is the lens for a proper understanding of the OT. To be clear, what we find in the NT is a “backward reading,” beginning with a post-resurrection perspective, and the faith conviction that the ultimate meaning of the OT is found in none other than Jesus Christ. In short, the NT reads the OT through a “Jesus lens.”3 Stated provocatively, the NT does not start with Genesis and work its way to the gospel, but rather the reverse: it begins with the gospel and reads backward to Genesis in light of established conclusions and convictions concerning the gospel of Christ. Therefore, the interpretive starting point for understanding the christological character of the OT is the NT itself.
This brief immersion into the NT use of the OT was a paradigm shift in my understanding of the Bible. Another shift occurred as a result of an elective course on Psalms in my last semester of doctoral coursework. I had always loved Psalms, probably for the same reason many other Christians do: as a storehouse of human emotions that resonates with our emotional and spiritual experiences as we wrestle with the mystery of faith. Psalms is not pop-psychology, but deep spirituality written from faith for faith, whether in the heights of spiritual jubilation or the depths of personal agony. But my affection for Psalms eventually shifted to other concerns as I learned the intricacies of the organization (or “shape”) of the Psalter, its convergence with torah, its end-times trajectory, its inner-biblical exegesis (i.e., how it interprets other parts of the OT), and the messianic import of the “royal psalms.” Coming to grips with the multifaceted theology of Psalms proved to me to be a counterbalance to a personal experience of its emotional expressions.
I write about these two seminary courses and their
