On Friday, November 13, 2015, terrorists attacked Paris, France. Six venues, including a soccer stadium holding tens of thousands of people, were struck. More than 150 were killed. Three days later on live television, The Voice contestant Jordan Smith performed Great is Thy Faithfulness, a hymn written almost a t a century before by Thomas Chisholm ( Be With Me,
Bring Christ Your Broken Life,
Only in Thee, etc.) Within an hour the song had risen to #2 on the iTunes pop chart. Clearly, people felt the need to have someone remind them of the faithful God-always watching, always loving, sometimes invisible but always present. Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow, Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside! Words have power. Words accompanied by music, even more so. My love for spiritual singing feeds my love for the Psalms. Whether the words are tweaked slightly and set to music, or whether the sentiments are adopted and rephrased, or whether I am simply reading the text as it is and imagining the host of Israel singing a melody unheard, it is perhaps worship in its purest form. That, in a rather large nutshell, is the reason for To Your Name. You may ask, Why two volumes? At the risk of sounding simplistic, one was too few and three were too many. The two parts of this series cover 24 of the psalms in some detail, and reserve significant time for the consideration of 24 more. That is almost a third of them-enough to give the reader a fairly good overview of the longest book in the Bible. (I would venture to suggest two quarters of material in Job, Isaiah or Ezekiel would leave a lot of meat on the bone as well.) But the Psalter is, by its nature, somewhat repetitive. Extending the format of these two books to include a third would be forced. So, two. And if your favorite or the one that puzzles you the most is still left out, I apologize.