Quote:
Originally Posted by countmeworthy
If you don't mind can you explain your comments?
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Of course; let me try to recap my argument on this thread.
Paul twice (Eph. 5 & Col. 3) encourages the saints to sing the Psalms, likening them to "being filled richly with the word of Christ" and also "being filled in Spirit". (Of course, Paul didn't say
exclusively to sing the Psalms, but I never said that, either.)
The fact that Paul repeats his encouragement in separate epistles is significant. Two is the number of witness. Once might be an anomaly; twice signals a trend, a confirmation.
Secondly, the Psalms were obviously an "engine of revelation", to both the gospel and epistle writers of the NT, for presenting aspects of God's Christ, who is Jesus our Lord. A lot of the aspects of Jesus' life and especially his mystical union with the Father in heaven are revealed there.
Thirdly, I didn't see anywhere that Christ or his disciples or subsequent "church fathers" of the first centuries discouraged any of the Psalms as somehow lacking in revelation for Christians. So what basis did WL have? Was he really "continuing steadfastly in the teaching and fellowship of the apostles" by discriminating against so much Scripture as non-revelatory? What precedent for this do we see in either within the NT text or in church history?
I noted that WL discouraged Psalm-singing among the saints, and secondly that the RecV barely covers them. And the RecV coverage is largely dismissive, calling them "natural" and "fallen concepts", versus "divine revelation". A cursory investigation of the first 35 Psalms led me to estimate that over 75% of the material was either ignored or put down. Many verses lack even the basic cross-references, much less footnotes.
Even in places where WL was forced to acknowledge the "divine revelation", i.e. "not one of his bone will be broken" in Psalm 34, he dismissed the entire surrounding text as irrelevant. So I argued that he pretty much only acknowledged as much "Christ" in the Psalms as he absolutely had to.
And I noted the disparity between this kind of treatment the Psalms versus his studies elsewhere in the OT, where he spent message after message after message gleaning "spiritual" details of the Christ from the text.
Lastly, I noted the irony that WL encouraged the LC saints to focus on the "high peak" NT revelations versus wasting time on the Psalms, when the "heart of the divine revelation" (Eph/Gal/Col/Phil) twice encouraged the saints to sing the Psalms!