The obvious is only obvious when you’ve seen it. Obviously.
I can still remember the first time it really hit me that the David of the Psalms was actually a soldier. It happened when I was reading Psalm 144:1, ‘Praise be to the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.’ Suddenly I realised that David was saying that God trained him to be effective in his day job as a soldier, a dispenser of death in the service of his God. All those references to shields and swords and enemies came out of his actual experience of battle, of feeling the force of an enemy’s sword on his shield, of being a fugitive from Saul, of being the target of his own son’s rebel forces. It was obvious but I’d missed it. How easy to generalise too quickly and preach David’s psalms as if they were written by a contemporary singer-songwriter struggling with inner demons, emotional anxiety, and relational breakdown, rather than written by a soldier facing Philistine armies, the threat of execution, and civil war. But how could I have missed it? And therefore missed the rich range of potential application to contemporary workaday situations?
I missed it because I didn’t pause to ask those basic questions about authorship and context that I suppose we were all taught to ask: who is this, what is happening, where is it happening, when is it happening?
