Today I read through Christopher Ash’s (2024) introductory chapter in his four-volume commentary on the Psalter.

Among other things in that chapter, Ash lists eight blessings connected to a disciplined incorporation of the OT Psalms in corporate worship and personal devotion. Here I paraphrase them:

1. Singing psalms is a means of grace for being filled with the Holy Spirit, according to Eph 5.18–21 (1:11–15).
   • I wrote a paper on this passage in seminary arguing, in agreement with Ash, that the participles in Eph 5:19–21 should be understand as indicating the “means” of being filled with the Spirit. Hence the Reformed doctrine of the “means of grace.”
2. Singing psalms is a means of grace for spiritual fellowship and corporate edification (1:15).
3. Clarifying #1 and #2, singing psalms is a means by which the good news about Jesus Christ takes hold in our hearts and relationships, according to Col 3.16 (1:15–16).
4. Singing and studying psalms are means of grace for personal sanctification (1:16–17).
5. From the Psalter we learn how to pray to and praise God (1:17–20).

“[T]he Lord’s Prayer is the tip of a great Bible iceberg of how God teaches and trains us to pray, of which the Psalms form perhaps the most significant part” (1:17).

6. The Psalter touches on all the major themes and messages of the Scriptures (1:19–20).
7. Imitating the psalmists safeguards us from idiosyncratic piety and crass individualism (1:20–21).
8. The Psalter informs all aspects of human life (1:21–26).

Below are a few gems from Ash’s discussion of #8 above.

“[T]he Psalms both express and also reshape the feelings, affections, and desires of all human life” (1:21).

“The Psalms express all the vicissitudes, the sweeping emotions, the affections, and the longings of the human heart. But they do more than simply express these things; they reshape them” (1:23).

“[T]he Psalms set before us the life of faith as it was lived flawlessly by Jesus” (1:24).

[T]he Psalms played a part in teaching and training Jesus, during his days on earth, to bear the cross” (1:26).

“[T]he Psalms do not manipulate our feelings, as a mood-inducing drug might do; they do not give us a ‘high.’ What they do is change our feelings by helping us grasp the facts. They take the word of God spoken ‘down’ to us and enable us to respond in a way that is in line with these truths” (1:26).

“The Psalms show us how to develop strong and godly affections—and indeed, fierce and healthy aversions as well. They train us to avoid both the unpredictable reefs of error and the deserts of a dusty orthodoxy. For the Psalms perfectly combine thought and feeling, theology and prayer, longings and realism, the subjective and the objective” (1:26).

This last quote is especially apropos of my recent complaint against Vos’s (2001, 140) undervaluation of the Psalter’s prophetic, revelatory character.

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.