Living Stream Ministry

XVI. THE PSALMIST ENTREATING GOD
FOR MORE GRACE AND BLESSING
AND ADVISING ALL THE NATIONS TO PRAISE GOD

In Psalm 67 the psalmist entreats God for more grace and blessing (vv. 1-2, 6-7) and advises all the nations to praise God (vv. 3-5).

A. The Psalmist Entreating God
for More Grace and Blessing

In verses 1 and 2 the psalmist asks God to be gracious to them, to bless them, and to make His face to shine upon them, that His way may be known on earth and His salvation among all the nations. In verses 6 and 7 he declares, "The earth has yielded its increase;/God, our God, blesses us./God blesses us;/And all the ends of the earth will fear Him."

B. The Psalmist Advising
the Nations to Praise God
for His Equitable Judgment and Kind Guidance

In verses 3 through 5 the psalmist advises the nations to praise God for His equitable judgment and kind guidance. In verse 4 he says, "Let the nations rejoice and shout for joy,/For You will judge the peoples equitably/And will guide the nations on the earth."

Since the Bible has sixty-six books, we all need to learn to exercise discernment in reading the Bible. In order to understand the Psalms, we need all the other books. This means that in order to evaluate the Psalms properly, we need to consider such books as Genesis, Leviticus, Matthew, John, and the fourteen Epistles of Paul. If we read the Psalms in the light of what is revealed in Paul’s Epistles, we will realize that the content of the Psalms is below the standard of the teaching of the New Testament.

At this point, I would like to emphasize a matter that I have often mentioned—that the divine revelation in the Bible is progressive. The Psalms are in the middle of this progression, and thus they are below the standard of the New Testament. However, without the earlier books we cannot realize the value of the later books. Suppose you read the entire Old Testament and then study the Epistles of Paul. If you do this, you will realize that the Epistles of Paul are a deep mine full of gold and precious gems. If after studying the writings of Paul for a long period of time you return to the Psalms, you will realize that by comparison the Psalms do not contain many treasures.

This does not mean, however, that there is nothing to treasure in the Psalms. In certain of the psalms we have a wonderful revelation concerning Christ as the centrality and universality of God’s economy. Although the revelation of Christ in the New Testament surpasses that in the Psalms, some aspects of this revelation are unveiled in a particular way in the Psalms. For instance, Psalm 2:7 reveals that Christ was born in His resurrection to be the Son of God, and this verse is quoted in Acts 13:33. This indicates that without Acts 13 we cannot understand Psalm 2 and that without Psalm 2 we do not have the ground to declare, as the New Testament does, that Christ as the only begotten Son of God was born in His resurrection to be the firstborn Son of God. From this we see that we need both the Old Testament and the New Testament.

(Life-Study of Psalms, Chapter 26, by Witness Lee)