Daily Psalms - Classical Psalms Every Day

Psalm 75: The Cup in His Hand
There is a moment in this psalm that ought to make every reader sit up straight. "For in the hand of the Lord there is a cup, and the wine is red; it is full of mixture; and he poureth out of the same." The image is not decorative. It is the cup of judgment — mixed, potent, inevitable — and the wicked will drink it to the dregs. What makes the psalm remarkable, though, is not the warning but the calm. Asaph is not panicking about the state of the world; he is resting in the architecture of it. "Promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south. But God is the judge: he putteth down one, and setteth up another." The compass has been surveyed in three directions, and the fourth — the direction of God — is the only one that matters. When the earth dissolves and its inhabitants tremble, it is God who bears up the pillars. The fools who lift their horns in arrogance are performing for an audience that is not impressed. The righteous need only wait, and sing.
00:00 Unto Thee Do We Give Thanks
01:00 The Cup of the Lord

Psalm 74: The Silence Where the Prophets Were
There are psalms of praise and psalms of trust and psalms of quiet confidence, and then there is Psalm 74, which smells of smoke. The sanctuary has been violated — axes and hammers have done their work on the carved wood, fire has gutted the holy place, and the ensigns of the enemy stand where the signs of God once were. But the most devastating line is not about the destruction itself. It is this: "We see not our signs: there is no more any prophet: neither is there among us any that knoweth how long." To lose the temple is terrible; to lose the voice of God in the midst of losing the temple is something worse. Yet Asaph does an extraordinary thing with his silence. He fills it with memory. "Thou didst divide the sea. Thou brakest the heads of leviathan. The day is thine, the night also is thine." He cannot hear God speaking in the present, so he rehearses what God has said in the past — and discovers that the past is not past at all. It is the very ground he is standing on, even in the ruins.
00:00 Why Hast Thou Cast Us Off
01:00 Axes in the Sanctuary
02:00 Thou Didst Divide the Sea
03:00 Arise, O God, Plead Thine Own Cause

Psalm 73: The Turning in the Sanctuary
Asaph nearly lost his footing, and he tells us so with disarming honesty. "My feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh slipped." The cause was not tragedy but something more insidious: he looked at the wicked and saw that they were doing splendidly. No pain in their death, no trouble like other men, riches increasing while his own hands, washed in innocence, seemed to earn nothing but plague. It is the oldest and most corrosive temptation — the suspicion that goodness does not pay. And Asaph could find no answer to it until, he says, "I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end." He does not tell us what happened there. No argument is reported, no theorem proved. He simply entered the presence and saw things differently, as a man who steps outside a house sees the landscape he could not see from within. And from that vantage point comes one of the most beautiful confessions in all Scripture: "Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee." The envious heart has become, in a single turn, the satisfied one.
00:00 My Feet Were Almost Gone
01:00 The Prosperity of the Wicked
02:00 Then Understood I Their End
03:00 Whom Have I but Thee

Psalm 72: Rain Upon the Mown Grass
Of all the images Scripture gives us of the good king, this one is perhaps the most startling: "He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass." Not rain upon a garden in its glory, but upon grass that has been cut — shorn, diminished, lying flat and spent. This is where the true king arrives: not at the feast but at the aftermath. The psalm builds an empire of justice outward from this single tenderness — sea to sea, river to the ends of the earth — but it never loses its center. The king who rules all nations is the same king who delivers the needy when he cries and spares the poor who has no helper. "Precious shall their blood be in his sight." One suspects the psalmist could see, even if only in outline, that the throne of heaven would one day look less like a palace and more like a cross. The final line — "the prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended" — closes like a great door. But the kingdom it described has no such ending.
00:00 Give the King Thy Judgments
01:00 Dominion from Sea to Sea
02:00 His Name Shall Endure Forever

Psalm 71: The Lifelong Refuge
Here is a prayer written, as it were, in the handwriting of an old man — and what a thing it is to watch. The psalmist has known God since the womb, has been held up by Him from birth, and now, with grey hairs and failing strength, makes one request above all others: do not cast me off in old age. It is not the plea of a man who has forgotten God but of one who has known Him so long that the thought of being without Him is simply unbearable. His enemies whisper that God has abandoned him, and the cruelty of the accusation is that it strikes at the one thing he cannot prove to them — that God is still there. But notice what he does with his fear. He does not collapse into it; he turns it into a vocation. "Until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come." The old man wants more time not for comfort but for testimony. He has, it seems, one more song to sing — and he intends to sing it on the psaltery, the harp, and with whatever breath he has left.
00:00 In Thee Do I Put My Trust
01:00 Cast Me Not Off in Old Age
02:00 Declaring His Wondrous Works
03:00 A Song That Will Not Stop