Psalm 144

“who trains my hands for battle”

I picked, here, the most triggering line from Psalm 144. Psalm 144 is a royal psalm, and it’s opening lines call upon the Lord to be an aid in battle:

Blessed be the Lord, my rock
who trains my hands for battle
and my fingers for warfare.
He is my faithful love and my fortress,
my stronghold and my deliverer.
He is my shield, and I take refuge in him;
he subdues my people under me.

Narratively, we understand how these petitions functioned in the life of David as he fought with the peoples around him. But once we step outside of that story, how do we apply such texts to our time and place? Especially as war rages again in the Middle East. We can see how texts like Psalm 144 can be easily coopted as prayers for our war-making efforts.

So let me say this: Reading the Bible is hard.

This is one of the points I make at the start of The Book of Love. I recently shared this quote from the book on Substack Notes:

In the book, I go on to make the following observation, which I think has great applicability when it comes to reading texts like Psalm 144:

Consider what you have to go through to obtain a driver’s license. To become certified as a safe operator of a motor vehicle, you must take a written exam, spend many supervised hours behind the wheel, and pass a driving test where you are asked to make turns, change lanes, and parallel park. And parallel parking is hard! Driving takes practice and skill. Getting a driver’s license is a laborious and stressful process. But it’s important because, when you get behind the wheel of a car, you’re putting all of us at risk. Driving is high stakes, a matter of life and death. Your life and mine. Given those risks, we demand that everyone undergo rigorous safety training.

Reading the Bible is also high stakes. You can harm people with a car, and you can harm people with the word of God. To read the Bible well, we need safety training. Like driving, reading the Bible takes practice and skill. We don’t hand out licenses to untrained drivers, but we regularly give Bibles to untrained Christians, unskilled in the virtues of kindness, gentleness, self-control, wisdom, and love. The outcome is predicable. We crash into people in the name of God, doing massive amounts of damage. The Bible is a book of love, but it takes some training to read it properly.