Psalm 20 is one of the psalms for the daily office today, a prayer that God will aid one in the hour of trouble and prosper one’s plans. Of course, the psalm was originally a prayer for the king. Generations of people, however, have understood this psalm as a personal prayer for God's help in difficulty and assistance in good times. Are they wrong?
Historically, answering the question of relevance is easy. The psalm clearly pertains to Israel’s king.
Theologically, determining the psalm’s relevance requires a far more nuanced answer. Scripture is scripture precisely because generations have heard the words as vehicles – metaphors – that help people to experience God's presence. Therefore, we, like our spiritual forebears, should pray the psalm believing that words speak to and about us.
Accepting the psalm as a metaphor requires not only recognizing its relevance to people who are not Israel’s king but also recognizing that this psalm expresses heartfelt hope and not a statement of fact. The person praying the psalm hopes for God's assistance in bad and good times but knows that our hopes do not always determine the future. Equating hope with control over the future, even when we articulate those hopes as prayer, reduces God to a servant at our beck and call, like a genie in a bottle from whom we receive not three but an infinite number of wishes.
We pray not because we believe we can manipulate or placate God into complying with our desires because when we express our hopes, dreams, fears, and hurts to God we open ourselves to the moving of the Spirit within us. That moving helps to shape the future by giving clarity to our aspirations, guiding us in more Godly directions, calming our anxiety, and easing our pain. This deeper, profounder understanding of prayer results in a very different type of religion than the one Marx parodied and that today’s prosperity gospel preachers promote.
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