Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 25:3 (Fall 2021)
Article: Editorial: Reflections On Reading The Psalter
Author: Stephen J. Wellum

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Editorial: Reflections On Reading The Psalter

Stephen J. Wellum

Stephen J. Wellum is Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and editor of Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. He received his PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and he is the author of numerous essays and articles and the co-author with Peter Gentry of Kingdom through Covenant, 2nd edition (Crossway, 2012, 2018) and God’s Kingdom through God’s Covenants: A Concise Biblical Theology (Crossway, 2015); the co-editor of Progressive Covenantalism (B&H, 2016); the author of God the Son Incarnate: The Doctrine of the Person of Christ (Crossway, 2016) and Christ Alone—The Uniqueness of Jesus as Savior (Zondervan, 2017); and the co-author of Christ from Beginning to End: How the Full Story of Scripture Reveals the Full Glory of Christ (Zondervan, 2018); and the author of The Person of Christ: An Introduction (Crossway, 2021).

Throughout the ages, the Psalter has been a precious book for God’s people. In times of joy and hardship, success and trials, the church has repeatedly turned to the Psalter to learn how to praise, trust, and rejoice in God’s covenant promises centered in Christ Jesus our Lord. As Jim Hamilton nicely reminds us in his recent two volume commentary on the Psalter: “No other body of poetry lyricizes the epic deeds of the living God, celebrating the past, signifying the future, interpreting the present, making God known” (Psalms, vol. 1 [Lexham, 2021], 1). Yet, the Psalter also reveals more than this since it reminds us that God’s great deeds are all centered in the coming of Messiah Jesus, God’s chosen King, the one that the book ultimately anticipates. Hamilton also makes this point when he states: “No other body of poetry has as its principle author God’s chosen king, whose line of descent traces back through Judah to Abraham, and further still to Shem, Noah, and Adam. Nor can any other poetic or literary tradition lay claim to the fact that King David, in writing of his own experience with God in the world,

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simultaneously wrote as a type of the one to come, Jesus, the world’s best and only hope” (1).

However, as precious as the Psalter has been for God’s people, too often it has been read in an atomistic way removed from its redemptive-historical context within the canon of Scripture. For example, individual psalms have been read independent of their place in the Psalter as if each psalm was intended to stand alone and not to be read as part of an entire collection. Or, we have read and applied individual psalms to our lives without first wrestling with their meaning in t...