The following is a monthly article written by Rev Kenneth Stewart to the Stornoway RPCS congregation…
Dear congregation,
I hope it is as edifying for you as it is for me to be singing the psalms in the worship of God. For myself, it is a particular privilege to be able to sing them in a congregation where they are ably led, by several precentors, and heartily sung – two qualities belonging to our sung praise which are being enhanced, with our gratitude, by the work of John-Ross in the psalm class.
Professor R A Finlayson, much appreciated and respected as a preacher and as a teacher of theology in what was the Free Church College in the mid-20th century, was a powerful advocate of exclusive psalm singing in worship. Incidentally, and as this extract will show, he also appreciated songs other than the psalms out with the context of worship.
I don’t know where I came across this extract (if any of you recognise it, let me know!) but it is from an address given to the Women’s Foreign Missions Association in May 1965. Somehow, it came to be stored on my computer! I’m fairly sure, from the form of the extract, that it is extracted from the spoken than the written word. In light of that, I have made one or two slight adjustments none of which affect the sense of what was said – which is as follows:
‘Some years ago, I was on a visit to the Hebrides at a communion season and I met there a Harris lady, an elderly lady, who interested me greatly because she had very definite bardic gifts. I had read a song of hers, years before, that had deeply touched me. It was on the love of God. In the song, she traced the everlasting love of God as an undercurrent through the Old Testament until it surfaced at Calvary where the well was opened for sin and for uncleanness.
Her minister was with her and, without prompting from me, he asked her if she would sing that song for me. She hesitated and then began. I was profoundly moved at this experience, to hear that woman sing her own psalm – the tenderness, the pathos, the deep meaning that every word in it had for her. My mind went back to this: What must it have been to have heard Jesus Christ sing His own psalms? For they were His; they were inspired by His Spirit; they were charged with His deepest and profoundest experiences, and He sang them.
He went to the synagogue where the singing was entirely of the psalms unaccompanied with musical instruments. I imagine the congregation sang (as we often sing) feeling little of what they sang, but to Him these psalms were always a profound experience that He was passing through and they shed light, illuminating light, on the path He was treading. And even at that last Passover we read that they sang a hymn, and the hymn was, no doubt, the Great Hallel, sung after each Passover, Psalms 113 – 118. And the Lord sang the Great Hallel as it was never sung before because He was the firstborn for whom there was to be no ‘passing over’, the firstborn in the new family of God.
When, during the ages, the Passover was observed, the Paschal lamb stayed the execution of the avenging sword, but now there was to be no stay of execution. He came knowing that He was the last lamb for the last sacrifice, that He must meet the avenging sword Himself and yet He sang with profound understanding of what He was passing through.
Now, friends, these are some of the most stirring things about these Psalms – that they have been sung by the Lord Jesus; that they are inspired by His own Spirit; that He sang them with a perfect understanding of their significance and meaning for Himself, and that He sang them with an understanding that illumined the path He was treading.
The psalmists may not always have understood fully the implications of what they wrote and what they sang. Sometimes, it was a witness to the living God in their own experience, and in that witness, they met with suffering, tribulation, and sorrow. It was in the depth of their own suffering that they made contact with the deeper suffering of their Messiah. They were caught in the vortex of His unparalleled sorrow and what began as a personal complaint, expressive of their own lot, ended as a glorious outburst of wonder at the greater sufferings of their Messiah.
David, the sweet singer of Israel, often sang of great David’s greater Son, the Lord of Glory, but with the Son Himself, it was different: He recognized Himself in the portraiture of these psalms. As in a mirror He beheld His own visage, marred often, scarred often. He recognised Himself in His mission, in His suffering and in His eventual trial. He used the psalms in His sufferings to comfort His own heart, and in His resurrection to enlighten the mind of His troubled disciples.
The Psalms are thus, in a real sense, the autobiography of Jesus, written by inspiration of His Spirit, unfolding the deep, deep experiences of His soul, the deepest thoughts of His heart, as He took the path of humiliation, of self-emptying and self-sacrifice for us men and women and for our salvation.
In them, He recognized His own relationship to God of which He never ceased to be conscious. When the Pharisees put forward their own conception of the Messiah as the Son of David, of David’s line and of David’s royal house, Christ directed them to Psalm 110, showing from that psalm that David spoke of the Messiah as David’s Lord. Although He was of David’s line and of David’s royal house, He was also David’s Lord whom Jehovah had exalted. “The Lord said unto my Lord”, said David, “sit thou at my right hand”. It revealed to Him that the Sonship of the Messiah belonged to Eternity’s past and that He carried that train of glory with Him when He entered time, when He stooped to the frailty of our nature and when He drank of the brook in the way and lifted up His head in triumph. Then He recognized that His exalted dignity as the Son of God was the foundation of His royal priesthood.’
Such an extract could only have come from the soul of a man who both understood and loved the psalms. The more we do so, the less we think of offering God anything less in our worship.
Your minister
