The Christian Use of the Psalter

by A. R. Whitham

I come—that I should fulfil Thy will, O my God.
(xl. 9, 10.)

"By which will we have been sanctified, through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Heb. x. 10). For the Passion is the supreme oblation of the freewill of man, the re-direction into the right attitude of that high faculty by which man had sinned and fallen originally, the consecration of it to its true end, voluntary obedience to God. "Not My will, but Thine be done"; that Christ as man should bring the human will perfectly into conformity with the will of God is what "in the volume of the book"—i.e. in the writings of all the line of prophets—was written of Him; for this "the body was prepared" for Him in the pure flesh of the Virgin-mother; for this His "ears were opened," that as child and youth and man He might perfectly hear and obey the word of the Father.

But the 15th verse of the 40th Psalm suggests an obvious difficulty in the application of the Psalms as a whole to Christ personally:

My sins have taken such hold upon me that I am not
able to look up:
Yea, they are more in number than the hairs of my head,
and my heart hath failed me.

How can we ascribe these words, or any of the confessions of sin in the Psalter, to the sinless Lamb of God? Are not these at least all our own? And yet He Himself must on earth have repeated them. In their original meaning they referred either to personal or national guilt. In either sense the recitation of them, at first sight, would seem to be alien and external to His pure conscience. But do they not take a deeper and more solemn tone when we consider them in the light of the prophet's great description of the Atoning Sufferer, "The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all" (Is. liii. 6), or of S. Paul's statement, "Him Who knew no sin, He made to be sin on our behalf" (2 Cor. v. 21)? Such words as these contain more than the mere bearing of the punishment of sin; they imply some inward connection between the Sufferer and the sin. Indeed, rightly understood, they help to remove the difficulty that many have felt as to the apparent injustice or unreality of a vicarious Atonement. Christ was not merely a Victim suffering for human sin; He was man's Creator taking that sin upon Himself. Thus these expressions of penitence in the Psalter may be regarded as the voice of the sympathetic love of the Sin-bearer, the love which stands by the sinner's side, and feels with him so intimately that it makes its own what is not its own but utterly alien and hateful, makes it its own that it may burn it up in the flame of love. So in these Psalms we may hear the Son of Man confessing and making reparation for all the age-long sin of man; speaking of it as if it were His own sin, so closely has He made Himself one with us in our extremest need.

Cardinal Newman, in one of the most eloquent of his sermons, "The Mental Sufferings of our Lord in His Passion," has developed this thought in language whose daring is only justified by its devotion. It is a description of Christ kneeling alone in Gethsemane:

His very memory is laden with every sin which has been committed since the Fall, in all regions of the earth, with the pride of the old giants, and the lusts of the five cities, and the obduracy of Egypt, and the ambition of Babel, and the unthankfulness and scorn of Israel. Of the living and the dead and of the as yet unborn, of the lost and of the saved, of Thy people and of strangers, of sinners and of saints, all sins are there.... It is the long history of a world, and God alone can bear the load of it.... They are upon Him, they are all but His own. He cries to His Father as if He were the criminal, not the victim. His agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He is doing penance, He is making confession, He is exercising contrition with a reality and a virtue infinitely greater than that of all saints and penitents together; for He is the one Victim for us all, the sole satisfaction, the real penitent, all but the real sinner.[[1]]

Connected closely with these confessions of sin, these outcries of suffering and expiation, with the Miserere and the De Profundis, are those solemn declarations of God's wrath upon the impenitent sinner which have already been alluded to in a previous lecture. Viewed as the utterances of the Son of Man such Psalms are more rightly to be called judicial than denunciatory. It is He to Whom all judgment has been committed by the Father, He Whose coming into the world was inevitably "for judgment," Who seems here to be delivering sentence. He is taking up and confirming the fragmentary utterances of older days, in which the human conscience, imperfectly perhaps, and not without some mixture of personal feeling, yet on the whole rightly, had cried out against falsehood and wrong, and appealed to the wrath of God. The words of such a Psalm even as the 109th might have been used by Him Who twice scourged the buyers and sellers out of the Temple, and Who denounced in words that burn like fire through the centuries the cruelty and hypocrisy of scribes and Pharisees; Who Himself in mercy warned us of the outer darkness and the unquenched flame.

But the Psalms not only illustrate the Passion of Christ in its mercy and judgment; they also supply words befitting His Resurrection and Triumph. It may be true that there is no clear or continuous line of prophecy in the Old Testament concerning the life after death. But it is at least equally true that the belief is there, grasped in moments of intuition by the saints of Israel, disappearing for a time like a buried river, but coming ever and anon again to the surface. So in the Psalms there are certainly evidences of the undying hope of the faithful that truth and justice must one day visibly triumph, and that man, in proportion as he is true to these things and therefore true to God, Whose nature they are, and true to himself, as made in God's image—man must also be immortal. He will not go down into silence; an endless future opens before him, as yet unfathomed and unknown, but certain. So in the Psalms which the Christian instinct, illuminated by the Spirit of Pentecost, seized upon in its first words of witness (Acts ii. 25-8) as prophetic of Christ, we have the assurance:

I have set God always before me:
For He is on my right hand, therefore I shall not fall.
Wherefore my heart was glad, and my glory rejoiced:
My flesh also shall rest in hope.
For why? Thou shalt not leave my soul in hell:[[2]]
Neither shalt Thou suffer Thy Holy[[3]] One to see corruption.
(Ps. xvi. 9-11.)