The Psalms

The Psalms are often said to be deficient as a vehicle of evangelical truth and Christian feeling . Scarcely any charge could be more unfounded . The Psalms are full of Christ . When He himself first tasted the joy of His incarnation , and set His face upon the steep but pleasant path of obedience which ended in Joseph's tomb , He found the words which best described the willingness of His heart in the Book of Psalms . When He gave expression again to those awful sufferings which culminated in the agony of His dereliction , it was in the same portion of the sacred volume that He sought the fitting medium of utterance . And , on the other hand , when an inspired apostle seeks , in the Epistle to the Hebrews , to declare the glory and honour which the risen Saviour received from the hand of His Father as the reward of His redemptive service , it is to the Book of Psalms that He turns for the terms that most appropriately unfold the splendour of the Mediatorial Throne . Again , when after the resurrection Christ expounded to His wondering disciples " the things conbcerning Himself " as the suffering and triumphant Messiah , the Psalms were one of the special portions of the Divine oracles to whose testimony He appealed . And when the apostles went forth on their great mission of preaching the Gospel of Christ to their fellow men , the effect of the illumination which then flooded their minds was at once apparent . Their recorded sermons are in some cases are little more than an exposition of those portions of the Book of Psalms which speak of the death and resurrection of their Lord .
    Once  indeed we realise that the key to the Psalter is held in the Saviour's pierced hand , we shall find it "vital with His presence and vocal with His voice ." The Book of Psalms is a perfect instrument of praise , a complete and permenant manual of congregational song . Their is no aspect of spiritual experience that it does not delineate . There is no phase of spiritual emotion to which it does no give utterance . From the  de profundis  of penitential sorrow to the exultant strains that are appropriate to the Delectable Mountains  -  it covers the whole range of expression . There is no form of Christian effort to whose activities it will not form a fitting accompaniment  of song . For long generations in Scotland it has been inseparably associated with those peaceful and hallowed Sabbath scenes in which
                                          "the kneeling hamlet drains
                                       The chalice of the grapes of God .";
and for the more stirring and arduous field of missionary enterprise it furnishes material not less sufficient or suitable . The Psalms are adapted to every age of the Church's history . " Unshackled from time altogether ," to use Dr Hugh Martin's striking words , " they are the Holy Spirit's expression for mental action and Spiritual emotion transpiring in a realm above all outward dispensation -  the realm of immediate fellowship with God ."