There is a resurgence of singing the Psalms today. But why is Psalm singing so rare in today’s church? Should we be singing imprecatory Psalms? How should churches and families best use the Psalms in their singing? Join us with Scott Aniol to answer these questions and discuss his new book on singing the Psalms, “Musing on God’s Music: Forming Hearts of Praise with the Psalms.” Look for it in 2023. Aniol writes, “C. H. Spurgeon was not wrong when he bemoaned, “It is to be feared that the Psalms are by no means so prized as in earlier ages of the church.”   Here is the link to the recommended resource: https://psalms.seedbed.com/

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life Exists to Proclaim the Sufficiently of Scripture, and today we're going to talk about the Psalms, the sufficiency of the Psalms for the blessing of God's people. And we have Scott Anial with us. Scott, hey. Hey, good to be with you.

Good deal. Scott is the executive vice president and editor in chief at G3 ministries and he's finished with a book that'll be published this fall, later at the fall, before the end of the year. Is that? Probably not before the end of the year, probably next year, but hopefully soon. Hey, so anyway, I've got a preview of that book.

It's a great book, and I'm really, really excited about it coming out. Musing on God's music, forming hearts of praise with the Psalms. So that's the book. Yeah. There's a lot of great stuff in it.

So, Scott, everybody recognizes there's a resurgence of psalm singing in the church today. And I don't know what all has been driving it. I suspect it's really the resurgence of Reformed theology, a recognition of the Puritans and the Reformers and modern churches which have embraced the idea that scripture is not only sufficient, but that worship should be regulated by the Word of God. So I think you have these two streams, these forces that have been impinging on the church, this efficiency of scripture and the regulative principle. That's what I think has been happening.

Is that, well, how would you, how would you talk about it? Yeah, I think, I think that definitely is a, is a central part of it. For sure reform theology, regulative principle, all of those sorts of things. I think perhaps another reason for the resurgence is it was really tied into that as especially younger generations are coming up with more Reformed theology and all that that entails, they're recognizing the insufficiency of a lot of what's happening in sort of contemporary music and worship to really sustain serious biblical theology and Christianity. So that's causing us in some ways to look back to the hymns of the past.

In some ways, it's causing us to write new hymns that are of the depth of the traditional hymns of the past, but then I think one of the results also is recognizing God has given us a hymn book. And these are wonderful 150 Psalms that ought to set a model for what we're singing in our churches today. So all of that combined, I think, is contributing in many ways to the resurgence of interest in psalm singing today. You know, it's interesting, just going back to, you mentioned a new wave of hymns, hymn writers, lots of new hymn writers. My view of that is that there was a helpful reaction to some of the shallower songs, maybe of the 70s and 80s, and a desire to write songs that were rich theologically.

I think there's been a turn for the church to desire real sound doctrine. And so you've got a whole wave of new hymn writers. You've sent me many, I've asked you many times over the years, you know, what are some of the best new hymn writers around and you've been very helpful. So there's, I think you have both of these things happening. Yes.

So it's a blessing. Yep, absolutely. Yeah, it is. And I really delight in many of the new hymns that are being written, and we use them in our church. So you wrote this book on singing the Psalms.

So why did you write it? Yeah. So I wanted to help to contribute to this resurgence, but I did see what I felt was a need in this area. A lot of great preaching and books that are helping to refocus our attention to the Psalms. They're very good and they're emphasizing, you know, this is inspired Scripture, we ought to sing it.

They're emphasizing things like the sufficiency of the Word and the regulatory principle of worship, and that ought to lead us to singing. But I really felt like there were a couple, perhaps, root causes for the fact that we've stopped singing Psalms in the church over the last, you know, 100, 150 years that I didn't feel like were always necessarily addressed. And so I wanted to, again, contribute and build on the excellent work of what some others were doing, but to particularly address what I feel are two of the significant reasons that we don't sing Psalms anymore that I felt like I could uniquely speak into. And one of those, there's another resurgence that's happening that I think is a good thing, is coming back to studying the book of Psalms itself. These 150 Psalms, what are they?

Why has God given us these Psalms? Because I really believe that one of the key reasons that we don't sing Psalms in our churches many times today is that we don't understand the nature of this book. And a lot of that has to do with Psalm scholarship over the last hundred years. Psalm scholarship has shifted largely by more theologically liberal sorts of authors, but it's even impacted how conservatives read the Psalms, to where we just read each individual Psalm by itself, and usually the emphasis is on genre analysis or analyzing the parallelisms within the psalm, and that's all good, and individual psalms are valuable in and of themselves. But one of the things that's happening in psalm scholars, even among, you know, sort of the, in the academic scholarly world, is a return to looking at how the 150 Psalms were organized by God, right, by men, but carried along by the Holy Spirit of God, 2 Peter chapter 1, into five books with the particular order and a particular purpose behind that order.

And I think a failure to recognize that, we don't, you know, like most people in our pews, don't realize even that there's five books, or that those five books have a progression through them toward a particular end. Most people don't realize that. And so, we don't recognize the deep fundamental power that these Psalms have, these inspired songs for the formation of our souls. And so I wanted to speak into that, to try to help people to understand the flow of the Psalms. A lot of that work is in more scholarly works, it's not at the level of the pew yet, and so I really wanted to write something that a lay person could read to help them understand this progression of Psalms.

Okay, so I want to stop you right here. So I want you to walk through for everybody's benefit. What's in book one, what's in book two? Start with book one. What's a statement about that section?

Yeah, so book one is about the preservation of the Davidic line. Every psalm is by David, and you can walk through them and see the way that the Lord preserved the promises to his anointed one. So that's the first 41 Psalms. Book two of the Psalms broadens its focus. Lots still by David and still a focus on David, but you see a shift in language to the plural, to the nations.

So, it's no longer individually focused on the preservation of David as the anointed one. Now, it's expanding. You can't understand the book of Psalms without understanding the Davidic covenant. God promises to expand the Davidic anointed rule through his son to the nation. So you see this in the second book of the Psalms, and it climaxes with the song of Solomon.

Book three of the Psalms is the darkest of them all. David is absent. There's references to the captivity of Israel, to the destruction of the temple, to the Babylonian exile. And so now the question is, will God preserve His promises to David? We've seen Him preserve His promises in book one.

We see that expanded to the nations through his son Solomon in Book 2, but in the third book there's a question. And if we remember that the Psalms were compiled in their final form, probably just after return from exile, It makes sense. The people are wondering, is God going to be faithful to his promises? And so, Book 3 is really full of laments and of crying out to the Lord, will you fulfill your promises to David? Book 4, then, emphasizes on the fact that ultimately, yes, he will fulfill those promises, but not in David, not in Solomon, not in a mere man, but in David's greater son, the anointed one who is both God and man.

So the focus of book four is on this key phrase, the Lord reigns, Yahweh reigns. You have these enthronement Psalms that focus on the reign of the Lord. And so you begin to get this understanding, okay, yes, God is going to fulfill his promises made in the Davidic Covenant, but it will be through this one who is both Yahweh and David's Son. And finally, then, towards the end of the Book 4, A lot of people don't recognize this as well. Really, this is the first focus on praise in the entire Psalter.

You don't even have the word hallelujah until Psalm 104. So, you're moving through this trust and preservation and really darkness now up through an emphasis on the sovereign reign of the Lord and His anointed, finally to praise. And then when you get to book five, you find the fruition of all of this. You find the fulfillment, progressively through the fifth book, of God's promises to His anointed one, to the Messiah, now come to full fulfillment, really even not full fulfillment for us yet, because it anticipates that day when Jesus will come again, when the anointed will come again in all of his glory, and when truly God's will on earth will be done as it is in heaven. And finally, when you reach those last five Psalms, it just explodes with praise.

There's no more focus on the wicked once you get to the final Psalm. They've all been taken care of, and now we have the full fulfillment of God's promises, really to humanity going all the way back to Genesis chapter 1, promised to David in the Davidic covenant, now coming to full fruition in Jesus Christ the Messiah. So you make a comment, or there's some implications in this book, that you think we only want to sing the happy songs, we only want to sing the encouraging songs, And that's absolutely true. The implication is that we're kind of in balance because we're not engaging in the lament. We're not engaging in the imprecation that you find the just the discouragement that you find in the early Psalms, particularly the attacks?

Well, you said that they're dark. They're absolutely, you know, they're difficult. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we know the Psalms are supposed to be about praise. I mean, that's what the original word, tehillim, you know, that described the book of Psalms means.

We know that God wants us to be blessed, that he's promised that, but what we often fail to recognize is that the blessing that God has promised is not a blessing in which we divorce ourselves or run away from the reality of sin and wickedness. Sin and wickedness is all around us. It's the reality of a sin-cursed world. And what the Psalms helps us do is to be blessed through the wickedness in the midst of sin. And we can only do that when we sing all of the Psalms, the laments, the songs of confession, absolutely the songs of trust and praise.

All of it is designed to form and shape our hearts so that we will be truly blessed in and through a sin-cursed world, ultimately able to praise God. And this is where the praise is far deeper than. Praise that has been forged through the struggles and through the sin and through the lament and through the confession is a much richer and deeper praise than just sort of a surface level praise where we ignore the realities of sin and wickedness. And we just try to sort of artificially stimulate ourselves into happiness. No, that's not what God wants.

God wants to form within us a deep, a deeply rooted praise, rooted in who He is and what He has done and the fact that He sustained His anointed one and he will sustain us. He will carry us through the darkness and the trials. Love it. Yeah, we live in a fallen world, and the Psalms acknowledge that. Modern evangelicals typically aren't too affectionate toward the dark side of life.

They really just want a happy, clappy kind of life. Okay, so you have the imprecatory Psalms. Should we be singing Psalms about the dashing of the little ones? Yeah, absolutely. Because these are not, you know, take Psalm 137, for example, which is one of my favorite songs.

It might sound weird because of how it ends, right? But Psalm 137, we read that or we sing that, And we might get the impression, man, this is just somebody just spewing out hatred, you know, something bad happens to him and he's just lashing out. When in reality, a psalm like 137 or all of them, they are carefully composed. It was not something that someone just, you know, vomited out in the midst of a dark time. This was something that the author carefully composed as a way to shape his heart properly by the Word of God in response to God's people being taken off into exile.

So, it has its purpose. What is that purpose? Well, we read that and we shrink back. Like, it's horrible to imagine infants being smashed. But that is exactly what that line is supposed to do to us.

It's supposed to cause us to grieve and be completely disgusted by the sin and the rebellion that is going on around us. It is poetry. It is meant to form a hatred for sin within our hearts. But not only that, it's an expression of trust, because the psalmist doesn't, you know, all of those imprecatory psalms, it's not the psalmist coming up with imprecations just out of their own imagination. Typically, they are quoting or alluding to a promise that God has made.

God has promised He will defeat His enemies. God has promised He will punish sin. When we sing an imprecation, we are saying, Lord, do what you promised to do, and we believe that you will. So, it's not just an expression of unbridled rage. It is an expression of deep confidence that God will do what he has promised that he will do, and we're simply crying out and asking him to fulfill the promise.

Scott, I think I'm perfectly average musically, meaning I love to sing, but I don't have musical training, no particular giftedness, and I have found singing Psalms from a Psalter a challenge. I don't find the melody lines particularly intuitive, so you really have to learn them. I don't find the rhythms very natural. So what do you say about that in terms of congregational singing for an average person musically and what's being done? Yes.

Yeah, So I think that's definitely true. I mean, sometimes you sing some of the metrical Psalms that have been written and you feel like you're Yoda, you know, where the words are inverted and you can't really understand. And that is one of the reasons that I think psalm singing has fallen out of favor. A lot of the older Psalms, they just weren't necessarily well written or they were written to be very close to the original, which of course is a good thing, but not in such a way that they're actually understandable or singable in modern English or even older English. I mean, even men like Isaac Watts complained about this problem in his day.

But thankfully, one of the benefits of the resurgence of psalm singing today is that there are new metrical psalms being written today that are trying to be as faithful as possible to the original, but are also doing so in a way that is singable, you know, for somebody trying to sing in English. And those are becoming more and more prevalent. One of the best examples of this is the Metrical Psalter by Julie and Timothy Tennant, which is probably the best thing that I've seen that's out today. It's my go-to when we sing psalms in our church. It's almost always out of this.

And there's even a website, Psalms.seedbed.com, where you can search and they've got tunes and all sorts of things. Their metrical Psalms are faithful to the original, in fact, in some ways more faithful than even some of the older ones that I've seen. And yet they're in English, that's understandable, the word order makes sense, so they're really, really good. And one of the values is there's no music printed in this, actually, although there is online. But what they do is they recommend familiar hymn tunes that most of us know in our congregations that could, you know, two or three that can go with a particular psalm.

So Psalm 78, you can sing to the melody of I sing the mighty power of God, that kind of thing. So it's flexible in that way. You know, congregations are more likely willing to sing a text that they don't know as long as they know the tune. And so if you can put a psalm text in front of them. They've never sung it before, but it's a good text, it's understandable, it's easy to sing, and you're singing it to a melody that they already know.

That's a wonderful way to begin to introduce psalm singing to a congregation. Certainly fast tracks it. Yeah, and we're going to put some links to some of these places. They're all over the place. You can really see the resurgence.

There are so many people that are doing this. Scott, a while back we were talking about chanting the Psalms. You said that's something you did at some point. Tell us about that. And I went out to the internet and I heard some of them and I thought some of these are really, really helpful.

Yes, yeah. Yeah, so this might be a pill to swallow for some congregations. You definitely have to teach. But the value of it is that you can actually take, you know, your Bible, whatever translation you're using, and you can sing what you are reading in the actual words of scripture, right? With a metrical psalm, you know, somebody took it and they put it into a meter and they made it rhyme, so they try to keep as close as possible to the original as they can, but there's going to be some liberties.

With chanting, and again that word, sometimes people hear that and they get nervous. All it is, all it is, is you're singing a very simple melody to the actual words of scripture. And this is how the ancient Israelites sang in the Old Testament, this is how the early church sang. It's basically almost just a little added emotional intensity or musical intensity to even just how we naturally speak when we read a song. We have rhythm when we read a psalm.

We even have pitch. We go up and we go down. We slow at certain places. We speed up at certain places. So, it's not much to just intensify that a little bit with a simple melody, and people can actually sing scripture.

Again, you have to teach it, but as you mentioned, more and more churches are doing this, and there are increasingly more resources available for how to do this. And I found, you know, that we did this in our church in Fort Worth when I was an elder there. And it was not a musical congregation at all. We had some musicians, but majority were not. And it didn't take long to teach them.

A couple Sunday school hours of showing them how to do it, modeling it with the few of the people in our congregation who could sing. And I had our congregation begging me to do this even more than we would do it. They loved to do it. They loved that they were actually singing the Word of God. Not a close paraphrase of the Word of God, but actually a translation of Scripture.

And it was a wonderful, beautiful thing that enabled us to sing Scripture. That's okay. So one last thing. Make some recommendations to families, to churches about how to recover psalm singing. What might be some steps or resources or whatever?

Yeah, I would say first of all, read the Psalms with your family. Read the Psalms in your church. I mean, not only do we not sing the Psalms anymore, we don't read them. So the more that we read them, the more familiar we become with the language of the Psalms, that's going to shape our hearts. And then when we move to start singing them, it's going to be easy because we've already read them together.

So, I know one thing that our family has done with a Psalm like Psalm 100, we'll just read the Psalm out loud as a family every day for a couple months. And by the time you get to the end of those months, we all have it memorized. We've not even worked at it, but it's part of our vocabulary now. Our kids have learned many of the Psalms that way. So memorizing the Psalms, reading the Psalms, it's got to be one of the first steps.

And then just again, It's a wonderful thing that resources are available to us now. Get on a website like Psalms.seedbed.com. This is available in PDF or even a hard copy. Get a good collection of Psalms and just start singing them. Sing them with your family.

Sing them in your church. It's like anything. It's going to take work. Anything worth doing is going to take a little bit of work. And so, start doing it, start working at it, and the more you do something, the more familiar it becomes, the easier it becomes, and just emphasize with your family and emphasize with your church family that we are singing the Word of God, and that has to be valuable because the Word of God is not returned void.

Amen. Fantastic. Okay. Well, that's a wrap. Appreciate it very much.

Thank you. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. And maybe, maybe with more psalm reading and singing, we might become more balanced Christians and engage in all the emotions and situations of the Psalms. We'll see you next time. Hope you can join us next Monday.

Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast. We have thousands of resources on our website, announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us. Go to churchandfamilylife.com. See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.