Note: Dr. Roff has released an update to this hymn study, enjoy! — ed.
Singing the Psalms has long been a distinguishing mark of biblical faith. It dates from the time of David, the author of half of the Psalms, about 1000 BC. One of the Psalms, number 90, goes back even further, since that one was probably written by Moses four hundred years before David. The divinely inspired collection of the 150 Psalms in the middle of our Bibles was the songbook of Israel throughout the rest of the Old Testament period, and continued into the New Testament era. As a boy and as a man, Jesus sang the Psalms. Growing up in Nazareth, He would have known them all very well, perhaps even by memory.
When we review the history of the Christian church, we find Psalms to be the heart of medieval worship in churches and monasteries as they were sung in monophonic chants (melody only, as in Gregorian plainsong). When Calvin overcame the millennia-long ban on congregational song imposed by the Roman Church in the fifth century, it was to the Psalms that he turned. He provided music and texts for all 150 Psalms for the churches in Reformation Geneva, employing the finest musician and finest poet in France to compose the 1551 Genevan Psalter. In Reformed churches on the continent, in the British Isles, and in the American colonies, believers sang the Psalms exclusively in corporate and family worship. And that is still the practice in the Covenanter denomination, the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America (RPCNA).