Musing on God's Music: Forming Hearts of Praise with the Psalms

Why should the Psalms be read like a book, from beginning to end, instead of cherry picking Psalms we like? What are the overall themes of the five sections in Psalms, and how do they build toward a message of great hope? What do the Psalms—even the ones about the Israelites and the ones that invoke curses—mean for Christians today? How is Psalms one of the most important books for Christians living in twenty-first-century society? Find out all this and more inside this book on the Psalms by Scott Aniol!

C. H. Spurgeon once bemoaned, “It is to be feared that the Psalms are by no means so prized as in earlier ages of the church.”

It is no secret that among evangelicals today the psalms are mostly ignored in corporate worship. This despite the fact that the Psalter is the only book whose contents are singled out by Paul for us to minister to one another in gathered church worship (Col 3:16, Eph 5:19). Numerous factors contribute to the decline of psalm singing among Christians, but one central reason for contemporary neglect of the Psalter may be that most Christians today do not understand this God-inspired collection of songs.

In Musing on God’s Music, Scott Aniol explores two central ideas that can help Christians recover the importance of psalm singing today: the deliberate canonical organization of the Psalter and the purpose and power of poetry. Aniol provides an important corrective that will remedy modern deficiency among contemporary psalm usage by explaining that God has given us the psalms, not merely to find a mood that fits our present state of being, but rather, God has given us the psalms to form us.

“God calls his people to sing the Psalms so that we will be conformed to the image of His Son. Believers often treat the Psalms merely as doctrine hidden in poetry or as expressions of personal feelings. But, as Scott Aniol shows, God inspired the Psalter to shape our whole life—mind, heart, and conduct—as we sing the Psalms corporately in the gathered church and individually in daily life. Aniol offers profound reflections on the content and structure of the Psalms in a way that is both formative and informative.”

Joel R. Beeke, President, Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan