The Bible Year

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 27, 1916

Assignment for April 30 to May 6

April 30: Psalms 38 to 40. May 1: Psalms 41, 103, 104. May 2: Psalms 3 to 5, 7. May 3: Psalms 42, 43, 55, 61. May 4: Psalms 62, 70, 71, 69. May 5: Psalms 86, 143, 144, 18. May 6: Psalms 8, 30, 91, 145.

Influence of the Psalms

“Between the first verse of Matthew’s Gospel and the last verse of John’s Revelation there are two hundred and eighty-three quotations from the Old Testament. One hundred and sixteen of them are from the Psalms. It was the first book which the early church put into the hands of her young converts, the primer of her religious teaching. . . .

“With the music of psalms the shepherds and plowmen cheered their toil in ancient Palestine; and to the same music the Gallic boatmen kept time as they rowed their barges against the swift current of the Rhone. A psalm supplied the daily grace with which the early Christians blessed their food; and the same psalm was repeated by the communicants as they went to the Lord’s table. Chrysostom fleeing into exile; Martin Luther going to Worms; George Wishart facing the plague at Dundee; Wycliffe on his sick bed, surrounded by his enemies; John Bunyan in Bedford jail; William Wilberforce in a crisis when all his most strenuous efforts seemed in vain, and his noble plans were threatened with ruin,—all stayed their hearts and renewed their courage with verses from the Psalms.

“The Huguenots at Dieppe marched to victory chanting the sixty-eighth psalm; and the same stately war song sounded over the field of Dunbar. It was a psalm that Alice Benden sang in the darkness of her Canterbury dungeon; and the lips of the Roman Paulla, faintly moving in death, breathed their last sigh in the words of a psalm. The motto of England’s proudest university is a verse from the Psalms; and a sentence from the same book is written above the loneliest grave on earth, among the snows of the arctic circle. It was with the fifth verse of the thirty-first psalm that our Lord Jesus commended his soul into the hands of God; and with the same words Stephen, Huss, Columbus, Luther, and Melanchthon—yea, and many more saints of whom no man knoweth—have bid their farewell to earth.”—Henry van Dyke.