Psalms

In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “A Psalm of Life”, he expresses two key values: to be zealous about living and to appreciate life in its entirety. From the start of the poem, Longfellow contends that “life is but an empty dream!” and that it is not a fantasy, far-fetched, and difficult to create into a good reality. He believes “the soul is dead that slumbers”, because those souls have lost the motivation for life as they think “the grave is its [ultimate] goal”. I agree with Longfellow…

in the last essay about lament and Psalms 137 “Pain is to real and when we deny the truly raw and powerful emotions of loss [or hurt] we in fact are impairing faith; we are denying an important and potent agent of change” There is plenty of room for this notion in many biblical stories in fact many are fashioned about a complaint to God. Hopkins outlines and guides the reader though the typical lament structure in her chapter Complaining in Faith to God. The psalms can be seen as a valid lament…

difference of the books. There is many difference between each books. Psalms and Joshua have many difference, even though both were written during the Old Testament. Half of the Psalms were written by King David and are combined with 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles. Psalms is a book of song because it became the song of Israel and they sing while worshiping the God. Psalms uses emotion to answer questions and people should not be afraid to use Psalms in our everyday life. The book of Numbers were…

questions of life” from different scriptures. One of these worldviews stands on the belief that God is actively involved with all of his creation. This paper will illustrate this doctrine. An important point of instruction in this doctrine lies in Psalms 11: 4-7. It shows that it may appear too many as if God is off somewhere paying little to no attention to what happens in the world. This scripture, however, states that he is…

The week before I gave my sermon I settled on Psalm 25 and I decided to really sit with the text and meditate on it. I allowed myself the opportunity to really get to know the text. I focused on what Lammers- Gross called a personal conversation between the preacher and the text. What I found is that for the text I had bitten off more than I can chew. It was really three different segments. The first segment was about honor/shame, the second segment was about knowledge, and the third segment…

In an attempt to identify the parallelism in Psalm 1, we must first understand the three types of parallelisms found in the Hebrew Bible. Synonymous parallelism the thought or idea is carried over or reflected in the part of the passage using different language. In antithetical parallelism the thought or reference in the second part is opposite from that of the first part, and finally, in synthetic or formal parallelism, the second thought adds to the first idea or thought (Tullock & McEntire,…

For this reason, Creach justifies violence as a tool for God’s purpose alone. “If Scripture declared only that God shows compassion but did not also declare that God is involved in vengeance, it would then portray God as inept in expressing compassion in concrete ways.” While it may seem as if God’s nature of vengeance is contradictory to His nature of compassion, the two qualities actually go hand in hand. “God acts destructively in order to restore or preserve the order God intends; that…

Most people want to find that person who makes them whole, who gives them happiness and purpose. To quiet the painful longing inherent to the human heart. You know how a certain kind of sadness can be better than feeling happy? That shiver down your spine when you hear an exquisite piece of music, the breathless lump in your throat that comes when you witness some kind of art that deeply resonates with you, the overwhelming emotion when you see a beautiful landscape, like a craggy cliff or an…

Much like Psalm 1, most of these proverbs deal in comparisons and contradictions and the most blaring example is the seemingly endless list of differences between the paths of the wise and the wicked. Not only is good and wickedness contrasted in these proverbs, but also wisdom and foolishness (though the terms can be synonymous with good and wickedness). What is interesting is how wickedness and wisdom are portrayed in different ways. On one hand, there is heavy use of feminine imagery where…

surrounding it--the context of its writing, the purpose being addressed, and the relevance of it. All these would require an understanding of the world to be able to situate it properly. In fact, this is something the Scripture itself encourages. Psalm 111:2 says: "Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them." This passage puts forward the notion that one should study the world and understand the His creations. In the same way…