Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

You may wonder why we're hitting so many days of just Psalms lately. We're reading chronologically,

so while we're at this point in history, we'll often be reading the Psalm David wrote in response to his current life events. David wrote approximately

half of the Psalms, so we'll hit a lot of them here, but since there are 150 of them, we'll

still have others sprinkled about our writing until we wrap up the Old Testament. So let's jump

into Psalm 6 first. David is troubled, and it sounds like he's saying God doesn't even

notice. David is also using poetic imagery and hyperbole to make a point about how he feels.

When we relate to his feelings or his language, it's easy to latch on to his poems, and then,

before we know it, we've built our theology on poetic imagery and hyperbole. So we have to ask a lot of questions of the

text. First, we have to look at it in its literary context, its poetry. And then we also have to look at it

in its historical context, much like we had to do with all the laws God gave the Israelites that

seemed so foreign to us. We also have to look at its theological context by measuring it against the rest of

scripture. So let's look at another place Psalm 6 can be confusing. In verse 5, David seems to

fear that his sin and eventual death will separate him from God. That sets this Psalm against

the rest of the Bible's teachings on this topic, So what do we do with it? What we know about

this period of time in ancient Judaism is that God hadn't revealed much about the afterlife to them yet.

It spent most of his time trying to talk to them about how to build a society and get to know him in this

life, not talking about what's going to happen in the next life. Think about it. You've read everything up to this point. Can you think of much,

if anything, that he said about the afterlife? We've read a lot about Sheal, but that's mostly just a

reference to the grave, not the afterlife. And as far as actual examples that we've read so far,

when Saul goes to visit the medium, Samuel still seem to exist after death, which contradicts what David appears

to be thinking here. All this to say, we have to be careful about building theology from the

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