Finding God in the Psalms
A biblical exploration of the Psalms examining how they reveal God's character and address human experience.
To recognize that the Psalms call us to pray and sing at the intersection of the times - of our time and God's time, of the then and the now and the not yet is to understand how those emotions are to be held within the rhythm of a life lived in God's presence.
We have been heavily influenced on the one hand by Epicureanism, in which God or the gods are separated by a great and unbridgeable gulf. And we have been shaped on the other hand by a residual Platonism, in which the material world is a shabby, corrupt place to be endured while we have to and escaped when we can.
That is a fairly devastating combination, which has led many Christians to imagine that 'this world is not my home; I'm just a-passing through'.
The material world matters; our human material bodies matter because the God who made them will remake them, and what we do with them in the present, as Paul insists to the Corinthians, is a genuine anticipation of what they will be in the future (1 Cor. 6.14).
Out of the thousand possible things one might do with one's life, God wants maybe half a dozen to flourish; and for those who walk uprightly, he will not withhold all that is necessary for that rich flourishing to take place.