The Messiah and the Psalms: Preaching Christ from all the Psalms

by Richard P. Belcher, Jr.

To allow Belcher to speak for himself: “The basic thesis of this book is that all the psalms have a relationship to the person and/or work of Christ, not just the traditional Messianic psalms. The goal is not to find Christ in every verse, but to understand how the major concepts and ideas in the Old Testament are foundational for understanding the person and work of Christ” (7). One way in which Belcher accomplishes this is by looking at a variety of individual psalms and noting how their details would have fit into Jesus’ life—even though they need not necessarily be read as Messianic—or by looking at the thought conveyed in the psalmist’s prayer and finding a time in Jesus’ life where such a prayer would have been appropriate for Him to pray.

Of course, if one is studying Psalms that clearly are not Messianic in any regard, he should be careful in applying them to Jesus’ life and His prayers. Jesus certainly could have prayed those very same things, but we cannot read into the details of His circumstances by better understanding the details of the psalmist’s. To extrapolate from the grammatical-historical context of the psalmist the details of Jesus’ situation would certainly be reading too much of the OT into the NT. Belcher was not out to do this in his application, but to “open up possibilities concerning how the psalms relate to Christ as our covenant mediator” (196).

As potentially beneficial as this book was, I found it tedious and difficult to read. Part of the problem was the clear lack of a good editor. That is not to say that it was written sloppily or that it’s filled with typos, but that no one put a stop to Belcher’s obsession with notes. Several of the chapters had more than 100 notes—and since they’re endnotes rather than footnotes, it requires either flipping to the back of the book (over and over and over…) or ignoring every one and hoping that what it said wasn’t important. In addition, there were times when it seemed as if Belcher were hammering the same point a time or two more than necessary. After making his point and illustrating it with a psalm or two, he felt compelled to illustrate it with two or three more. If this were a book that was intended to be an exposition of the psalms, the barrage of illustrations would have been welcome. But since it isn’t that, it seemed a bit overdone. That said, some of Belcher’s best points were in his expositions of the psalms rather than the points that fell in line with the thesis of the book.

Overall, you can probably pass on this book. It’s good, but not necessarily good enough to force yourself to wade through the sea of endnotes and superfluous illustrations—unless studying the Psalms is a specialty or obsession, in which case you might want to go ahead and grab it.