Praying the Scripture

God’s word is powerful, and we can “pray” those Scriptures!  The 22^nd chapter of 2 Samuel, a song of David, is full of guidance and encouragement I want to share with you today.  I am using the New Living Translation in this post.

I briefly mentioned this chapter in my earlier post, “Forgive and Let God Punish Them.” Today I want to lead you through the many ways this passage strengthened me.  I pray this will remind you how much God loves you and how often he fights for you.  In the first four verses David praises God as his rock, fortress, salvation, shield, place of safety, refuge, and power that saves him.  He said God is worthy of praise.  These verses are beautiful and match how I have often felt—in danger, distress and in too many struggles.  I can read these verses and pray them just as they are written.  Actually I can directly pray verses 2-8 just as they are written.

After his jubilation in verses 2-4, in verse 5, David begins to speak of his distress even speaking of death overwhelming him and the grave wrapping its ropes around him.  I enjoy this kind of poetry where I can clearly understand what the author speaks of, yet still imagine the images he uses (ropes, floods, etc.)

I liked verses 7-8 so much, I memorized them, and I want to share them here: 2Samuel22:7-8 (NLT), “But in my distress I cried out to the Lord; yes, I cried to my God for help.  He heard me from his sanctuary; my cry reached his ears.  Then the earth quaked and trembled. The foundations of the heavens shook; they quaked because of his anger.”  God is angry with David’s enemies!  I feel so comforted knowing God is angry with the people who hurt me.  I might feel angry or scared, but knowing my great big God is angry with them shows me they were really wrong for hurting me, and my Good God will (at least one day) stop this evil action.  In the next verses, 9-13 David described the wild power of the angry God who is ready to avenge David’s foes.  I love hearing about the ways God expresses his anger towards my enemies.  For example, David speaks of smoke, flames, glowing coals, dark storm clouds, great brightness.  In the next two verses, 14-16, David begins to describe what God did, from God thundering, shooting arrows, scattering enemies, to confusing them. God even exposed the bottom of the sea.

Then in the next verses David spoke of being rescued.  I have to remind myself that despite how hard my struggles are, God has consistently rescued me, including from cruel people who have tried to thwart my work and turn people I love against me.  So I like to pray these verses about God rescuing me, because they remind me he has done so in the past. If I am in a struggle today, God will eventually rescue me from that too. He might not take away all the pain, but he will give me peace of mind to complete the tasks he gives me, and the ability to keep going when I am being mistreated by people.

But I want to caution about verses 21-25, because David speaks of God rewarding him because he had obeyed God and had not abandoned his decrees.  In the Old Testament, the Israelites had to obey God’s law to experience God’s delight in them. In the New Testament era, we know God delights in us, due to Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf. God sees us through Jesus’ perfection.  So I am careful when I pray the Old Testament Scripture so that I do not try to find God’s delight through my obedience.  I do want to obey God but my obedience does not determine how much God loves me.  So I do not pray those verses.  And the next verses (26-28) are a bit like verses 21-25, except they speak of God being faithful to those who are faithful and pure to those who are pure, and then the opposite to those who are impure.

But verse 29 is easy to pray, because David says, “O Lord, you are my lamp.  The Lord lights up my darkness.”

Yet again, in verse 30, I can only pray this verse if I know that “I can crush an army” can only mean the spiritual adversaries in my life, not a literal army that David did crush.  I memorized verse 31, because it is a praise of God and this praise lasts all the way through verse 37. 

But in the next verses, 38-43, I do not pray these, because David spoke of conquering his enemies in terms that can be a bit gruesome, since they speak of David’s war exploits. As such, many of the last verses in this chapter are more about David, as king and warrior than about my battles.  These verses still bless me, because they show me how David had victory over actual enemies who opposed him and the Israelites. Indirectly I can also relate to the last verses, since David does speak of overcoming enemies.  But I am not the king, nor do I have the actual army of an enemy nation opposing me. 

Not only in this great chapter, but throughout the Bible, I find some verses I can pray directly. Yet there are others where I feel blessed by what I read but I cannot pray those verses.  Whether it is the famous “Lord’s Prayer,” (Matt.6:9-13, Luke11:1-13) or some of the other more familiar prayers of the Bible, we might pray them directly as they are written.  And then there are many other Bible verses, which we can personalize, such as verse 51, the last one in this chapter.  It reads, “You give great victories to your king; you show unfailing love to your anointed, to David and all his descendants forever.”  Instead you might pray, “You give great victories to ME; you show unfailing love to ME, your daughter.”  As long as we are not changing the intent of the verse, we can pray it back to God and remind ourselves of God’s goodness in our lives (the way verse 51 reminds us that God has given us victory in the past and still offers his unfailing love to us today.)  We need to remind ourselves of God’s promises, and then we can be assured that God loves to hear us claiming the promises he gives us. 

We do not claim a promise he does not give, such as passages showing how a promise is to be fulfilled for someone else, whether Israel as a nation, or only for one individual, etc.  But when the promise is for all people, then we can claim God’s promises, from loving us, to redeeming us, to forgiving us, to calming us.  These are the promises God loves to hear us claim, and they are ours for praying, right out of the Scripture.

I pray we have blessed you with this short post.  Please let me know if there is anything else like this you would like me to write. I love to hear from you all and eagerly accept your suggestions.