In this video, Dr. W. Robert Godfrey highlights a few reasons the Psalms can be difficult to understand and also points to a few ways we can better understand the Psalms.
The Psalms are one of the great resources of the Christian community. They’re obviously a very important book in the Bible, but for some people the Psalms can be somewhat difficult and somewhat confusing, and there are a number of reasons for that.
Sometimes the individual Psalms move strangely from being about me to being about us to being about them. So the focus of the Psalm can sometimes be a little confusing.
An individual Psalm can sometimes be very joyful in the beginning, and then suddenly the mood will turn to be distressed or sometimes even angry. And so some people, I can understand, if they try to seriously read the Psalms and follow them, can find them a little confusing.
You can be helped by a good book. I happen to know a good book on the Psalms—Learning to love the Psalms that I wrote. I'm not trying to sell the book, but I think it really is one resource that is helpful in trying to work through some of the more confusing aspects of the Psalter.
Sometimes I feel we should see what we might term confusing as challenging to lead us to continue to reflect on the Psalm. Why does the mood change? Why does the focus change? What is God saying to us in that shift that we need to recognize and learn?
Part of the problem is, of course, in our day and age, we don't spend a lot of time in school studying poetry, and therefore poetry is somewhat foreign to a lot of us. That makes it more difficult.
But as someone said to me recently, what we really need to do is sing the Psalms, and all of a sudden they will begin to connect with our hearts and then with our minds better and better. So keep at it. It’s worth doing.