Category Archives: Psalms

Fights and Wars/Battles – Psalm 144

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After writing about Attacks, Test, Storms and then revisiting Test and Storms I realized that I was not finished and that the attacks and storms part seemed lop-sided.  I guess when you are in them it seems one-sided and that you are always the one getting beat-up and there is little you can do about it.

We know that is not true but we still need to be reminded of the fact that part of the Christian life is battling against the works and deeds of Satan. Three verses that help me are:

1.  1 Samuel 30:6 But David found strength in the Lord his God. (NIV)

2.  Proverbs 21:30 + 31 The horse is made ready for the day of battle but victory rests with the Lord (see Lord). (NIV)

3. Psalms 144:1 Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight. (KJV)

To just read one of David’s psalms is good but I like to put them into his story; read them in the context where they may have been written. (see The Writer)  I put Psalm 144 somewhere in 1 Samuel 21 & 22.  This is a very trying time for David (he is running from Saul, did not kill Doeg the Edomite, and is worried by the King of Gath) but he reminds himself and God that he has been trained to do battle.  He sees a big picture, which is hard when you are attacked, that God is his fortress and asks for help from God in verse 5 – 7.                     (see Storms Revisited)

The King James reads differently than the New International Version in that the words are war and fight and not war and battle.  Using my Strong’s Concordance I looked up these words.  War/battle is used over “three hundred times in the Old Testament, indicating how large a part military life was to an Israelite.”  And the word fight (used 149x) comes from a primary root word that means to feed or consume and the implication is to battle or destroy. There is a separation of the idea between battle, a single encounter, and war, a series of encounters. You can draw some interesting parallels from hands being matched to war/battle and fingers with fighting.  The hand is the larger/stronger part and yet the fingers are part of the hand.

Wars/battles can include storms, trials, and attacks and go on for a long time where battles are those single attacks or pesky trials that hit quick and are over.

But I have to remind myself (the three verses), we are to be attacking, trying, and storming the enemy’s work also.  God trains us for war, gives us tools and resources to confront evil and its work, and will even fight with/for us if the battle gets too big.

King David the Writer

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I once heard someone say that David was a yo-yo when he wrote Psalms because one psalm he was up and one psalm he was down.  I was just starting to write and I recognized how silly that statement was because David did not write them all at one time and that he was writing these as a response to the times he was living in and what he was experiencing. To read David’s psalms are to read his struggles and victories of his life, his cries for help and his shouts of praise. Songwriters don’t always write just happy songs or just sad ones. And if you study psalms many of them may have been written for specific reasons (scholars have classified them as to content).

A study of psalms would be incomplete without a reading of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. So I started to place the Psalms in 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles (see Joined) where I thought they might have been written.  Some of the psalms give you clues in the titles; some translations and Bibles don’t always include those.  For the other ones I tried to place myself in the moment or look for other clues.  I know the Chronological Bible does something similar but I have never really looked at their placement because I wanted this to be from a writer’s point of view not a timeline one.

I am sure that if you look at the list you may put some in a different location.  That is fine as these are just my guesses as to where I would have written them.  But I would challenge you to check mine out and then do your own list; the only rule to guide this would be that you must have a reason for its placement.

I am not finished with this yet because some are hard to place but by the end of the year I may have another list to post.  You will need to click on the link that is part of WordPress.com as it is saved in there as a media file.  My original copy is a word document and should be put into a table or in EXCEL but that will be a while in coming.

Have fun and I want to hear your feedback as you place the Psalms where you think they should go!

Click here to see my list.   psalm position