The Bible Jesus Read: Why the Old Testament Matters by Philip Yancey

Author:Philip Yancey [Yancey, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2010-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

Psalm 74’s lament on the violation of sacred space—“Every cave in the land is a place where violence has made its home”—has become for me a prayer for the victims and perpetrators of domestic violence. Watching television footage of the Los Angeles riots of early 1992 gave me a new context for the words of Psalm 55 that I encountered the next morning in the monastic choir: “I see nothing but violence and strife in the city.” Hearing Psalm 79 (“They have poured out blood like water in Jerusalem / there is no one left to bury the dead”) as I read of civil war in the Balkans forces me to reflect on the evil that tribalism and violence, often justified by religion, continue to inflict on our world.

But the relentless realism of the psalms is not depressing in the way that television news can be, although many of the same events are reported: massacres, injustices to those who have no one to defend them, people tried in public by malicious tongues. As a book of praises, meant to be sung, the Psalter contains a hope that “human interest” stories tacked onto the end of a news broadcast cannot provide. The psalms mirror our world but do not allow us to become voyeurs. In a nation unwilling to look at its own violence, they force us to recognize our part in it. They make us re-examine our values.

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