Jesus Christ is great David’s greater son. He is the total fulfillment of all David embodied, and of all God promised to David, as the king of his people. Jesus is not great because his ancestor is David. Rather, David is great because his descendant is Jesus. When we believe in Jesus — when we trust him as our Savior, Lord, and Treasure — that faith, by the power of the Holy Spirit, joins us spiritually to him, so that we are in him. Not only does our sin become his, and he puts it to death on the cross, but also all that is his becomes ours.

The most common type of song in the Psalms is not praise, or even thanks, but lament.

While that may seem strange to us at first, it begins to make more sense when we pause to think about our lives in this fallen age and the kind of prayers we pray. Living in this age, ravaged in various measures by sin, with fears within and fightings without (2 Corinthians 7:5), we are not always poised to offer praise and thanks. Often we find ourselves — if not most often — in the posture of lament, pleading with God to help, to heal, to remedy, to rescue.

The glory of psalms of praise is that God deserves our praise at all times, regardless of our circumstances, whether all feels right in our little worlds or not. The glory in psalms of thanks is that God, our Savior, has acted on our behalf. The glory in laments is that despite our pain and difficulty, and struggle and doubts, we still turn Godward. Our faith is being tested, and in the very act of turning to our Lord, rather than elsewhere, there is hope. In lament is often where we find him to be our greatest Treasure.

When We’re Languishing

As glorious as praise and thanks are, it is fitting in this age that the book of Psalms contains more laments — what Walter Bruggemann calls “psalms of disorientation” — than any other type of psalm, because we are, in truth, so often disoriented.

Take Psalm 6, for instance. Hard circumstances in David’s life (whether related to his son Absalom’s rebellion or not, we do not know) have led him to see his sin, and to cry out to God for rescue. Some consider this to be the first of six “penitential psalms” (Psalms 32, 38, 51, 130, and 143), which focus on repentance. But David also has been sinned against, and gravely. So his pain and confusion in Psalm 6 are great. And in such a whirlwind of disorientation, God doesn’t tell him, and us, to just grit our teeth, put on a smile, and sing a happy song.

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