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There’s a Reason We See So Much Repetition in the Psalms
Foundational Truths
I think we often have a negative connotation with someone repeating himself. Maybe we know someone who tells the same stories or jokes over and over, or they’re just always talking about the same thing, and we tend to think of that as boring or that it gets old. Maybe we even start to tune that person out because we’ve heard it before. But in Scripture I think we want to take a very different perspective when we see repetition. God does repeat himself throughout his Word sometimes, and instead of tuning it out, what we really want to do is lean in and listen a little bit closer.
In the beginning of Philippians 3, Paul gives us a brief glimpse into why the Lord sometimes repeats himself. He says something to the Philippians along the lines of, “To write the same things to you is no trouble for me, and it is safe for you.”
Turn Your Eyes
Winfree Brisley, Sharonda Cooper
Turn Your Eyes provides a structured, step-by-step method to help readers observe, interpret, and apply the Psalms, helping us turn to God in every season and circumstance of life.
And I find it really interesting that Paul would say, Hey, I don’t mind writing the same things to you again and again because that’s safe for you. There’s this idea that some of the repetition in Scripture is a protection for us, that God is telling us these things over and over to make sure that we get it, because we need to know those things and we need to be assured of them so that we can be safe in his love, his care, and in the truth of his Word.
And so we see repetition in lots of parts of Scripture but particularly as you read the psalms, you’ll turn to the next one and think, That sounds a little familiar. I think I’ve heard that before. And then you turn to the next one and by the time you’ve gone from 1 to 150, it can start to feel like, I feel like I’ve heard a lot of these things before.
There are lots of repeated phrases. There’s an entire psalm that is almost exactly repeated again. And there are particular words and descriptions of God that we see the psalmist using just over and over and over. And so instead of glossing over those and maybe skipping some parts, saying, Oh, I feel like I read that a few psalms ago, we really want to look at it and ask, What is it that’s being repeated? What specifically is the Lord saying again and again? What are these psalmists pointing to?
What specifically is the Lord saying again and again? What are these psalmists pointing to?
For example, one of the descriptions of God that we find over and over in the psalms is about his steadfast love. We’ll find the psalmist being comforted by God’s steadfast love. They’re finding hope in it. They’re appealing to God’s steadfast love as a reason that he should act, or they’re calling on his steadfast love as a protection for his people. Again and again and again they’re pointing out his steadfast love. Sometimes they might pair his steadfast love with his other attributes like his faithfulness, his justice, or his mercy. But again and again, it’s his steadfast love that they come back to. We want to really look at that and ask, Well, why is it always a steadfast love?
There’s got to be something really foundational there that he wants us to understand about who he is, how he interacts with us, and what he intends for our relationship with him to be. And so we can follow the psalmist, realizing they really relied on his steadfast love. They looked to that in so many circumstances. And we can also realize that the Lord offers that to us. We can, in a similar way, lean on and be grounded in his steadfast love in every season and circumstance of life.
Winfree Brisley is the coauthor with Sharonda Cooper of Turn Your Eyes: A Bible Study on the Psalms.
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