Soulfood

For the seventeenth day of each month the psalms are 17, 47, 77, 107, and 137.

Psalm 17 is a prayer to pray when we are seeking justice. We can pray this psalm with and for each other in several ways. First, we can simply ask God for justice for those who are facing injustices of various sorts – especially that God would vindicate them (or us). Second, we can pray for each for the Spirit to support us in our sanctification so that we can, with David and David’s greater son Jesus, say verses 3-5 about ourselves with a clear conscience. And finally we can ask for God to guard and defend us from all His and our enemies using the language of this psalm. 

Psalm 47 is a prayer of praise, rejoicing, and thanksgiving to the God Who is in covenant community with His people. We use the words of this psalm to proclaim to one another His praises, to encourage one another to rejoice, to remember that YHWH is King of all the earth, and to look forward with hope to the day when all His chosen ones will be gathered together from the four winds into His blessed rest. 

In Psalm 77 we remember what God has done of old as we hope in His promises to us now. We pray this psalm asking God to do as He has promised, knowing that He is faithful by the works of promise-fulfillment He has accomplished in the past. As we remind each of what God has already done for us, we pray all the more that He will deliver us from our present afflictions including depression, anxiety, and hopelessness such as what the psalmist relates in vv. 4-9.

Psalm 107 is likewise a psalm of remembering, but with a focus on those whom YHWH is redeeming. The psalm focuses on 4 types of people who are in need of redemption: those who wander in the desert wastes (vv. 4-9), those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death (vv. 10-16), fools who suffer affliction because of their sin (vv. 17-22), and those who are successful and see YHWH’s wondrous works. For each of these there is a prayer to pray for their deliverance, and the psalm closes with an extended meditation on God’s covenant faithfulness which we can simply pray verbatim.

We pray Psalm 137 as a lament, remembering that we are strangers in a foreign land. We desire our heavenly home – let us pray never to forget where we truly belong! And we pray for our enemies to be cut off from perpetuating their wicked ways. Lord, have mercy!