When we sing (or read) Psalms, we usually think about how those are the words that the Lord has given us to be able to use as we pray those words back to Him, expressing in His own God-breathed words, whatever joys or sorrows, praises or confessions, hurts or delights we might be dealing with at the moment in our own personal experiences. That’s why Calvin (and others) have called the Psalms “the anatomy of the soul.” There is no human experience to which the Psalms fail to speak to counsel, comfort, guide, and strengthen.
We ought also to consider how those Psalms became the words of the human author who first wrote them. We know the names of some of those authors, as they are named in the lines preceding the lyrics of the Psalm, occasionally even with the name of the original Hebrew tune or even the circumstances of their composition. And we know that about half of the Psalms were written by David, the Shepherd/King. The books of Samuel and Kings give us many of the stories that lay behind those Psalms of David, as with Psalm 3 written as he was fleeing from his son Absalom and the military coup that had driven him from his palace, or with Psalms 51 and 32 written after the terrible adultery and murder conspiracy over Uriah and Bathsheba.
But shouldn’t we also think about what the words of each Psalm would have meant to the Lord Jesus as He prayed and sang them so many times during His years of earthly ministry? When we do that, they take on an incredibly different, richer meaning. It isn’t just remembering that as God Himself, the second person of the blessed trinity, He was actually and ultimately the author, through His Holy Spirit inspiring (“breathing out”) the words these human authors wrote. Here are a few examples to contemplate.