As I am translating and thinking through Psalm 78 for a sermon and presentation later in the summer, I’ve been struck by the peculiarity of this psalm. One thought coming to the fore of my thinking is its “prophetic” quality. In a round-table study for adult Sunday School at Faith Presbyterian Church, we put our finger on the way that Matthew labels Asaph “the prophet” (Matt 13.35). We discussed the prophetic dynamic of the Psalter, recording both the inspired responses of God’s people and God’s words to the people through those very responses.

Our conclusions contradict an older distinction between “objective” (divine) revelation and “subjective” (human) response. That distinction is found even among one of my favorite theologians, writing at the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, Geerhardus Vos (2001):

Unlike prophecy, the nature of the Psalter is subjective. It is inspired, subjective response to objective revelation. Only at times is this distinction obliterated, especially when the psalmist takes his stand in the future. (140)

Of course, Vos is a supernaturalist when it comes to the doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures. (And n.b., this quoted text is also taken from some posthumously published notes, not a polished text.) But even he slips into an objective-subjective distinction that separates prophecy and worship within the Scriptures. He wants the Psalter to be “inspired,” but he also sees it as different from God’s work through prophets like Isaiah.

That distinction, however, cannot be held in light of Matthew’s claim that Jesus’s speaking in parables was a fulfillment of the “prophecy of Isaiah” (Matt 13:10–17) and also a fulfillment of “what was spoken through the prophet” in Psalm 78 (Matt 13:34–35). Jesus’s speaking in parables was an intensified, climactic version of the activity of both court prophets and worship-leaders in Israel. All the Scriptures are prophetic. The subjective-objective distinction, as Vos and others have used it in this case, distorts the character of the Psalter and—I save this for another time—could yield a misconception of Jesus’s parables.

What our round-table was noticing in Matthew’s attitude toward Psalm 78—and not only Matthew, and not only Psalm 78—is summarized well by Christopher Ash (2024):

The Psalms are not simply the words of human beings; they are words spoken from God. They have the character of prophecy.… Prophetic speech is made up of the words of God, who cannot lie. Therefore the Psalms are not simply a record of pious people responding to God, sometimes well, sometimes in error. God, by his Spirit, shaped and guided them to speak and write as they did. (1:119–20)

Bibliography

Ash, Christopher. 2024. The Psalms: A Christ-Centered Commentary. 4 vols. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

Vos, Geerhardus. 2001. The Eschatology of the Old Testament. Edited by James T. Dennison Jr. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R.