The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum True Worship John 4:23

jadeitedrake0,

Thanks for replying and making an extremely important point in my behalf. The point being, that the singing of the Psalms only is insufficient to worship God because they lack the fullness of meaning in and of themselves of the truth of God's redemption in Christ Jesus. One must have the N.T. to understand the Psalms. This is a fundamental axiom of biblical hermeneutics, i.e., the O.T. is interpreted by the N.T. as the N.T.'s foundation is built upon the O.T.

If the Psalms were sufficient in themselves, there would be no need for the New Testament. The truths found in the Psalms are "shadows" and "types" of the coming of Jesus Christ and His life, death, resurrection and the salvation He secured. It is only in the N.T. that we learn what what was hinted at in the Psalms; in fact in the entire O.T. When you reverse this hermeneutical principle, you are violating the principle of progressive revelation and the Scripture's own hermeneutical principle; i.e., "grammatico-historico". In plain terms, one is guilty of eisogesis when the fuller revelation is forced back into the a text which God inspired to be a "type" of that fuller revelation.

The O.T. and the N.T. compliment each other, but they are not to be so combined that they lose their uniqueness and purpose which God the Spirit designed. God is a Trinity; 3 persons in the one God. They are inseparable but they are not so related that they lose their individual identities as "persons". Each had a part in our salvation and those parts are to be understood and appreciated in relation to the Person Who accomplished their part. But to separate any of the three parts from the others destroys the whole.

Thus, I say, we should without question sing the Psalms and the doctrines and experimental realities which are revealed in them. But likewise, we should also sing the doctrines and truths in Genesis through Revelation as the whole of God's inspired Word is His revelation and who are we to dismiss any part of it as irrelevant or worse yet, to commit idolatry if we do?

In His Grace,