Category Archives: Reading – Grogan – PPP

Geoffrey Grogan. Prayer, Praise and Prophecy: A Theology of the Psalms. Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor (Christian Focus), 2001.

Trustful worship for puzzled believers

At the end of his discussion of the God of the psalms, Geoffrey Grogan mentions those psalms where the psalmists come to God with their deeply troubling problems. It is noteworthy that they come to God with them, and that their troubles do not cause them to lose their faith.  “To be puzzled and to give up belief are not the same thing,”\1/ he says. I really found his conclusion heart-warming and helpful:

Christians too may be puzzled by the ways of God, but he has given us such affirmations of his holiness, grace and wisdom in the cross and resurrection of Jesus that faith is constantly renewed as it contemplates these wonderful facts in a spirit of trustful worship. \2/

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Geoffrey Grogan. Prayer, Praise and Prophecy: A Theology of the Psalms. Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor (Christian Focus), 2001. \1/ p. 75, \2/ p. 76.

Blunted metaphor

Geoffrey Grogan gives Psalm 23 as an example of metaphor in the Psalter. “In asserting that the Lord is his shepherd,” he says, “the psalmist uses a figure familiar to his readers and which therefore conveys more, and does so more vividly, than any abstract statement about God.” (p. 58) *

But for the modern, western, urban reader, I suspect the metaphor has lost a lot of its force. We have romanticised the shepherd, and we have elevated the status of sheep as animals to an unnatural position in the created order. Our Shepherd has become little more than a provider who gives us sheep what we want. Yet, the Shepherd is the dominant figure, not the sheep. He owns the sheep for which he cares. He calls the shots, not us. So he provides graciously what we need, not necessarily what we want. We need to bear in mind that the Shepherd was also a metaphor for the King.

There’s more to the metaphor than we might at first suspect.

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* Geoffrey Grogan. Prayer, Praise and Prophecy: A Theology of the Psalms. Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor (Christian Focus), 2001.