Dr. Thomas Schreiner · The Master's Seminary · 25 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Thomas Schreiner, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This session begins in the classroom's questions about Job: why God gave us this book, how it sits beside Proverbs, and what wisdom looks like beside sufferers. Then Dr. Schreiner turns to the Psalms and reads the Psalter as a shaped collection, five books that move from David's life through exile toward a new exodus and a coming King. Listen for how the very order of the Psalms preaches.
Schreiner returns to his own family's severe trial and describes it as almost a second conversion: the Lord drew near, he believes, because so many people were praying. He is careful to add that his experience is no paradigm for everyone; Job is often in agony, sufferings differ, and there is pain that does not relent. But the point of Job stands: at the end of the day, the book is about encounter with God.
Should the godly be surprised when Job-like suffering comes? Schreiner's answer is that God revealed this book precisely so his people would know. It certainly surprised Job, and the friends had much to learn; but the story is in Scripture because God does not want us caught unprepared.
Schreiner holds an early date for Job while granting it is not certain and not weighty. What matters canonically is the book's placement: Job and Ecclesiastes counteract a superficial understanding of reward and punishment, the misuse of Deuteronomy's blessings and curses and of Proverbs. He resists the word correct, since Proverbs itself, read carefully, already carries the theme of injustice; the canon's shape gives the whole contour.
How do you comfort the suffering? Scripture says to weep with those who weep, and the first thing is that they know you care. Schreiner agrees with D. A. Carson's counsel in How Long, O Lord: the best way is to prepare people in advance, so that truths like God working all things for good are already believed when the storm arrives. Spoken at the wrong moment, even a true word can land as an alien thud; spoken well, as he has watched a trusted friend do, it ministers. There is no rule; God gives pastoral wisdom, a feel for the moment. Sometimes, as in a recent grief in his own congregation, the first word is a silent embrace, and the talking comes after.
Schreiner observes, from years of teaching, that a man who cannot sense what everyone in the room is thinking will struggle to shepherd, because pastoral care lives on that God-given sense of what a situation needs. It is not infallible, and it does not make anyone a better person than another; but those called to pastor are given, in the main, a wisdom for what to say and when.
How do you cover the Psalms in a course like this? You do not; you look at the big picture. Following Jim Hamilton, Schreiner reads Books 1 and 2 as focused on David's life; Book 3 as discouragement that the Davidic kings do not reign, which is to say exile; Book 4 as a new exodus; and Book 5 as praise with the coming of a new David. Lament and praise sound all the way through, and much current work is tracing this movement.
Schreiner agrees with those who read Psalms 1 and 2 as the introduction to the whole Psalter: a wisdom psalm about the one whose delight is the LORD's instruction, meditating on it day and night, and then the psalm of the king. The two are stitched together by linked words: the nations meditate in vain with the very Hebrew word of Psalm 1's meditating. The godly meditate on the law; the wicked meditate on evil. Such linked words run again and again through the collection.
Psalm 88 is the only psalm with no glimmer of light in it, and it sits in Book 3, the book of exile. That book closes with Psalm 89, a deeply Davidic psalm that asks where the unconditional promises to David have gone now that Israel is in exile. Then Book 4 opens with Psalm 90 and the movement toward a new exodus. The Psalms were put together as a collection, and the order of the collection is important.
No records survive of the process; we know only that the psalms, written across different eras, were gathered into five books like the five books of Moses, and beyond that we can only weigh the evidence. Schreiner takes the superscriptions to be inspired, early inspired commentary belonging to the text, though not all agree, and he leans toward, without claiming certainty, real significance in the book divisions. Gerald Wilson and McCann have worked along these lines and can be read with care about their critical commitments. His counsel is taste and see: read the Psalter this way and judge whether the connections are there.
It matters that Psalm 110 comes early in Book 5: if the Psalter is moving toward consummation and the reign of the king, this psalm declares that God's rule will come through a king. In Jesus' exchange with the religious leaders they missed the psalm's riddle, that the one who is David's son is also David's Lord. Some expected a merely human Messiah; Jesus, and the New Testament writers after him, press that the Messiah is also divine. So the New Testament proclaims Jesus exalted, reigning at God's right hand until all his enemies are put beneath his feet, the refrain to which Hebrews returns again and again.
Psalm 8 says human beings were ordained to rule the world. That rule, Schreiner argues, comes through a king: the last Adam, who is also Messiah and Lord. The dominion God intended Adam and Eve to have arrives through him, as Psalm 2 also testifies. This is why the Psalms fit the course's theme: they preach that God's rule comes through a King who is both David's son and David's Lord.
Schreiner warmly commends a short book on the Psalms by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, not so much biblical theology as devotion, while noting the standing debate over where Bonhoeffer's theology finally lands. Since Bonhoeffer is not inspired, the reader is free to take the good and leave the rest, and Schreiner is emphatic, with a smile, that he does not read Scripture that way: the Bible is in a category of its own.
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twelve are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why, according to the lecture, should Job-like suffering not blindside God's people?
2. How do Job and Ecclesiastes relate to Proverbs in the canon?
3. What counsel from Carson's How Long, O Lord does the lecture affirm?
4. What does the lecture say God gives those he calls to shepherd?
5. Following Hamilton, what movement do the Psalter's five books trace?
6. What role do Psalms 1 and 2 play?
7. What is singular about Psalm 88?
8. What does Psalm 89, closing Book 3, ask of God?
9. What is Schreiner's view of the psalm superscriptions?
10. What did the religious leaders miss in Psalm 110, in Jesus' exchange with them?
11. How does the dominion of Psalm 8 reach its fulfillment?
12. How does the lecture commend Bonhoeffer's short book on the Psalms?
All twelve correct. Lecture 13 is complete.
The lecture commends prepared comfort: truths settled before the crisis. Which truth about suffering do you most need settled now, in the calm, and who could you gently teach it to this season?
Psalm 88 ends in darkness, and God kept it in his people's songbook. What does its presence permit in your own praying that you have not been permitting yourself?
The Psalter moves from David's troubles through exile toward the praise of the coming King. Where in that movement does your own life sit right now, and what would it look like to pray through one of its books on purpose?
Psalm 110:1, the riddle Jesus pressed: the LORD invites David's own Lord to sit enthroned at his right hand while every enemy is put beneath his feet.
The lecture's own recommendations: D. A. Carson's How Long, O Lord, for preparing believers before suffering comes, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's short book on the Psalms, read with the discernment the lecture urges. The King in His Beauty traces a little of the Psalter's shape the same way.