I’ve been slowly reading through Ben Witherington’s “Psalms Old and New: Exegesis, Intertextuality, and Hermeneutics.” It’s a fascinating exploration of how Jesus and the New Testament authors cited the Psalms, and while I don’t agree with his theology 100%, I appreciate the way Witherington explains these links between the Psalms and the New Testament.
One of my favorite psalms that I’ve read about in the book (so far) is Psalm 18. It’s been one of my favorite chapters in Psalms since I was in my late 20s when Christian rock band Waterdeep released its version:
Psalm 18 is one of David’s, and it has a parallel in 2 Samuel 22 with a few changes (maybe 2 Samuel 22 was David’s first draft). In this psalm, David describes how God rescued him from his enemies. David’s not recounting a specific incident here. Witherington asserts that the king is writing in more general terms, but there’s no denying that, for David, God’s work in his life was personal.
The continual use of “my” in this psalm speaks of a personal relationship and a personal rescue of the psalmist by God. God is said to be “my strength” and “my rock,” a characterization that is the most frequent epithet used of God in the psalms, and elsewhere in Hebrew poetry. The image of the rock suggests both something that is permanent and strong, on the one hand, and a place where one could hide, a refuge, on the other; and of course David did hide in a cave at one juncture while running from Saul (cf. 1 Sam 23:25–28). But the psalm is cast in very generic terms.
It's a wonderful, epic psalm — one of the longest chapters in the book of Psalms — and it’s fun to see how it surfaces in the New Testament. For starters, Witherington points out the immense parallels between Psalm 18 and Luke 1.
“When you set Psalm 18 side by side with Luke 1 you can hardly believe you are talking about the same subject, namely God coming to rescue his people,” he writes. “Yet clearly both Psalm 18 and Luke 1 are about God coming down to rescue his people, the main difference is that in Psalm 18, it is the king who is being rescued, whereas in Luke 1 it is the king who is doing the rescuing.”
In Luke 1:32-33, the angel Gabriel told Mary that her unborn Son, the Messiah, “will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” It’s remarkably different from the exalted earthly King David and his dramatic rescues in Psalm 18.
As Witherington puts it, “In gospel time, God did not come as the mighty warrior, but as the prince of peace, not riding on his throne chariot, but wrapped in bands of cloth and laid in an animal trough and then later riding on a donkey in Jerusalem. What a contrast.”
Related: Sunday Thoughts: 'The Bible Is Good Like That'
Psalm 18 pops up in another interesting place in the New Testament. In Romans 15:9, the Apostle Paul said that Jesus fulfilled God’s promises “in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, ‘Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles, and sing to your name.’”
Witherington points out that Paul treats the quote from Psalm 18:49 as if it’s not David speaking but Jesus. But Jesus never praised God’s name among the Gentiles in the gospels, and the psalm is clearly David’s words.
However, Witherington notes that “[J. Ross] Wagner points out that it is the last verse of the psalm, which speaks of not just David but also ‘his seed forever’ which ‘helped to hold Psalm 18 open to interpretation in terms of later historical monarchs and, after the fall of the house of David, in terms of an eschatological king. That Paul has read this psalm as the words of Christ is therefore not terribly surprising.’”
It's always fascinating the way God has woven the Old and New Testaments together. It’s all over the Bible, and it goes to show how unified God’s redemption story is. And we can see it here in Psalm 18, where the earthly King David and the eternal King Jesus show up.
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