Daily Psalms - Classical Psalms Every Day

Psalm 74: How Long The sanctuary is in ruins. Someone has taken axes to the carved work — the beautiful, painstaking craftsmanship of generations — and set fire to what remained. "There is no more any prophet," the psalmist says, and the silence of heaven is almost worse than the noise of the enemy. How long? he asks, and the question hangs unanswered. But then, in the middle of his lament, he doe...

Psalm 73: Until I Went Into the Sanctuary Asaph begins with a confession so honest it is almost embarrassing: he was jealous of the wrong people. Not of the righteous, not of the wise — of the wicked. Because the wicked, he noticed, seem to sail through life on the smoothest seas, their bodies fat, their deaths painless, their mouths running at the heavens without consequence. Meanwhile he, keepin...

Psalm 72: The King We Keep Waiting For David, in what is marked as his last recorded prayer, asks God to give his son Solomon the one thing a king cannot manufacture: righteous judgment toward the poor. It is a strange wish list from a dying father — not wealth, not military success, not glory — but that his son might come down "like rain upon the mown grass," refreshing what the world has cut sho...

Psalm 71: The Long Faithfulness There is a particular kind of prayer that only an old person can pray, and this is one of them. The psalmist looks back across an entire life — from the womb, where God held him up; through youth, where God was already his trust; to old age, where he now stands, grey-headed, watching his strength fail. And his chief petition is not rescue but continuity: "Cast me no...

Psalm 70: Make Haste There is a kind of prayer that does not have the strength for long sentences, and this tiny psalm knows it. "Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O Lord." Two words repeat all through it — make haste — the breathless petition of someone who has run out of time and diplomacy. David does not construct a theological argument; he does not compose elegant parall...

Psalm 69: When the Waters Come In "Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul." Some prayers do not bother with preamble. David is drowning, and he knows it — sunk in deep mire, throat dried from crying, eyes failing while he waits. He is not even sure he is innocent; he confesses his foolishness in the same breath as his lament. But he refuses to pretend, and that is the gift of this...

Psalm 68: The God Who Marches Reading this psalm is a little like standing in a parade as the procession passes — you cannot quite catch every banner, but you can feel the ground shake. David imagines God on the move, and the imagery tumbles over itself: enemies scattered like smoke, wax melting before fire, a father to the fatherless, a judge of widows, a God who setteth the solitary in families...

Psalm 67: Blessed to Be a Window Here is one of the shortest psalms in the book, and also one of the most generous. "God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his face to shine upon us." A familiar line — until you notice the word that follows. " That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations." The psalmist does not ask for blessing as a private possession. He ask...

Psalm 66: Come and See, Come and Hear This psalm has a structure you could almost diagram — it moves in concentric circles, from the widest possible view to the most intimate. It begins with all ye lands making a joyful noise, and ends with one man, alone, telling what God has done for his soul. "Come and see," the psalmist calls at first, pointing to the Red Sea made dry, the flood crossed on foo...

Psalm 65: The Crown Upon the Year This is one of the great agricultural psalms, and you cannot read it slowly without smelling damp earth. God, David tells us, visits the earth. He doesn't merely sustain it from a distance; he comes down with a watering can. He waters the ridges. He settles the furrows. He softens the soil with showers. The verbs are tender, almost domestic — the sort of attention...

Psalm 64: The Arrow That Returns Words, David tells us, can be weapons — and not the obvious kind. He is not afraid of swords here; he is afraid of tongues whetted like swords, of bitter words shot from secret places by men who have made a craft of slander. There is a particular cruelty in arrows you cannot see coming, and the wicked of this psalm are connoisseurs of the unseen wound. They congrat...

Psalm 63: Thirst as a Form of Worship David writes this in the actual wilderness — not the metaphorical kind we like to use in sermons, but the kind with sand in your sandals and no water for miles. And the first thing he does, parched, is praise. "My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is." Notice the daring: he does not pray for water. He...

Psalm 62: Only The word that runs like a stubborn thread through this psalm is the small, sturdy word only . "He only is my rock and my salvation." "My soul, wait thou only upon God." It is a word that does the same work in the soul as a pruning knife does in a vineyard — cutting away every other place we had been thinking of leaning. David has watched men, including powerful ones, and concluded w...

Psalm 61: The Rock That Is Higher Than I There is a particular kind of prayer that begins not in the temple but at the edge of the map. "From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed." David has run out of geography. He has run out of strategies. And the petition that follows is one of the strangest and truest in all the Psalter: "lead me to the rock that is higher t...

Psalm 60: When the Ground Shakes This is a psalm for after the battle has gone badly. The armies have returned, some of them without half their number, and David writes not to complain but to plead. "Thou hast made the earth to tremble; thou hast broken it: heal the breaches thereof; for it shaketh." It is one of the few psalms where the ground itself becomes a character — an old, cracked thing ne...

Psalm 59: The Dogs at Evening They are outside the house. Saul's men. And David, trapped inside, gives them the most precise and devastating description in the Psalter: "they make a noise like a dog, and go round about the city." He says it once, and then — astonishing — he says it again at the end. Twice he calls them dogs. Twice he notes the aimless circling, the empty barking, the hunger that n...

Psalm 58: The Snail and the Judge This is one of the hard psalms, the kind we tend to flinch from at polite dinner parties. David prays that wicked judges — the very men charged with upholding justice — would melt like snails and vanish like untimely births. It is not comfortable, and it is not meant to be. But notice what the psalm is actually insisting on: that somewhere, finally, there is a Jud...

Psalm 57: The Cave and the Chorus David is hiding in a cave. Saul is somewhere outside with an army. And what does he do? He calls for his instruments. "Awake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp: I myself will awake early." The man in the cave wants a concert. It is the sort of thing that sounds like madness until you realize it is the opposite — it is the most sane thing anyone has ever done i...

Psalm 56: The Bottle of Tears David writes this under the worst kind of pressure — the Philistines have him, the very men who have made their living by destroying him. And yet the middle of the psalm gives us one of the strangest, most tender images in all of Scripture. "Put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?" The God of the universe, we are told, keeps a bottle. He collects...

Psalm 55: The Friend Who Became a Stranger Most psalms about enemies are about enemies — foreign armies, wicked rulers, faceless oppressors. This one is about a friend. "It was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company." There it is: the wound that does not come from a sword but from a supper table. David kn...

Psalm 54: Saved by a Name This is a psalm born from betrayal — the Ziphites, David's own countrymen, went to Saul and told him exactly where David was hiding. You can almost hear the breathlessness of the prayer: "Save me, O God, by thy name." Not by thy army, not by thy angel, but by thy name. There is something beautifully primitive about the request, as though the mere speaking of who God is we...

Psalm 53: The View From Heaven Looking Down The fool says in his heart there is no God, and the psalmist does not argue with him. He simply shifts the camera angle. Imagine the view from above: God himself leaning forward, looking down upon the whole muddled race of men to see if there were any — even one — who understood, who sought him. The answer comes back empty. Every one of them has gone bac...

Psalm 52: The Green Olive Tree and the Uprooted Man David has a specific villain in mind here — Doeg the Edomite, a man who traded another man's life for the king's favor — and the portrait he paints is devastating. The tongue like a sharp razor, the love of evil over good, the boasting in mischief as though cruelty were an accomplishment. But the real force of the psalm is in the contrast that fo...

Psalm 51: The Only Sacrifice He Ever Wanted This is the psalm David wrote after the worst thing he ever did, and that is precisely what makes it the most honest prayer in the Bible. He does not explain himself, does not offer context, does not mention Bathsheba by name. He simply says: I have sinned, and my sin is always in front of me, and I cannot get clean on my own. What follows is not groveli...

Psalm 50: The God Who Does Not Need Your Goat Asaph opens the scene like a curtain rising on a cosmic courtroom. God summons the earth, east to west, and the heavens above as witnesses. You brace yourself for the accusation — and then comes one of the most unexpected lines in the Old Testament: "I will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices." The problem was never that the people had stopped sacrific...