FOR YEARS, I taught a course on the place and function of narrative and story, and that’s still part of the way I think about life, therapy, and even ministry. Story is important to me. If I watch a movie and come away dissatisfied, it’s usually because the story felt weak. There may have been plenty of action, impressive special effects, or gorgeous cinematography. But the script has to give me characters I care enough about that I become invested in seeing what happens to them. Can I identify with them in any way? Do they win or overcome their difficulties? Do they somehow become better or wiser people?

Similarly, I listen to memoirs because I want to hear people’s stories, particularly when they tell stories of suffering that lead by twists and turns to growth or redemption. Even if we haven’t been through the same things that the author has (as in stories I’ve read about people who were literally run over by a truck!), we can still identify with what it means to struggle through seasons of pain, anxiety, and heartbreak. We want to know that these people have come out the other side of their suffering, the better for having gone in. It gives us hope; if such an outcome was possible for them, then something similar may be possible for us.

The best stories, therefore, create a world for our imaginations to inhabit for a time. We get to see how things might look through someone else’s eyes. We have our vision widened, helping us to imagine and appreciate new possibilities.

So too with the stories of Scripture. That’s not to say, of course, that all of Scripture is narrative in form. The books that tell us the history of God’s people are not the same kind of writing as the Psalms and Proverbs, nor the prophets. The gospel stories are not the same as the letters of Paul and others, and these in turn are different than the apocalyptic vision of the book of Revelation. Our Bibles are deeper and richer for the variety. But in a sense, all these different forms of literature contribute to one overarching narrative of what God has been doing in history; the stories point to The Story, with a capital T and a capital S.

Our own personal stories of suffering and redemption matter too, especially when we’re able to begin seeing them in the context of God’s story. Thus far, we’ve seen psalms of praise and psalms of lament, as well as psalms that contain elements of both. And with life being as complex as it is, we need both to be able to tell our stories well and honestly.

It’s right and good to tell others our grateful stories of God’s goodness, of his faithful love toward us. We all need the encouragement of such stories. We have to take care, of course, to never tell such stories as a way of denying suffering or trying to anxiously cheer someone up without making a place for and hearing the depth of someone else’s lament. If we learn anything from the Psalms, it’s that lament has its proper place in the community of faith.

But so does praise. Words of gratitude and wonder, especially those uttered by people who know the depths of suffering, who see the brokenness of the world without blinders, can help us know that suffering is not the end of the story.

Psalm 107 opens with just such words of gratitude for the faithful love of God. “Give thanks to the LORD,” the psalmist writes, “for he is good; his love endures forever.” The Hebrew word translated here as “love” is hesed, the same one we saw in Psalm 23, the Shepherd Psalm, where it was translated as “mercy.” Hesed appears again and again in the Psalter, pointing to the love, kindness, and mercy of a God who is faithful to his covenant promise.

Moreover, hesed appears three times in Psalm 106, tying the two psalms together thematically. Both psalms use the same opening line (though as we’ve seen, 106 has a hallelujah first), which in turn echoes the song of praise used in 1 Chronicles 16 to celebrate the coming of the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, the city of David. Psalm 106, you’ll remember, closes Book IV of the Psalms by praising God for his faithfulness while soberly remembering all the ways the people failed at being faithful in turn. Psalm 107 then opens Book V in a way that both looks backward to Psalm 106 and simultaneously forward to the theme of praise that will dominate the rest of Book V.  

“Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.” Here, the psalmist is not merely encouraging people to practice gratitude in general, but to be thankful for the hesed of God, for the ways he has demonstrated his lovingkindness and mercy. Nor are we to keep that gratitude to ourselves, as the psalmist says in verses 2 and 3:

Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story—
    those he redeemed from the hand of the foe,
those he gathered from the lands,
    from east and west, from north and south.

“Redeemed.” The word is used throughout the Old Testament, but is particularly prominent in the story of Ruth and Boaz in the book of Ruth. There, Boaz acts as the “kinsman-redeemer,” someone who sacrificially pays off the debt of a family member to keep them from losing their inheritance or being sold into slavery. This, the psalmist suggests, is what God does for us; God redeems us, buys us back, saves us from disaster. And those who have been redeemed, the psalmist says, should tell their story of hesed.

What follows, therefore, is not one but four stories of redemption, illustrating how God rescued the needy from a variety of circumstances. They come from every direction, from every corner of the globe: east and west, north and south. It’s possible that the psalmist is specifically envisioning the Jewish people after the exile and dispersion to other lands. But naming the four compass directions may also be a poetic way of saying “everybody, everywhere”: God is merciful to all, and all should bear witness to that mercy.

While the four stories of redemption that the psalmist tells reflect four different kinds of trouble, all the stories have the same narrative structure. First, the trouble is described. Each of the stories begins with the word “some,” as in “Some people struggled with this, while some struggled with that.” The middle of the story has the words, “Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress”; the words are nearly identical each time. Finally, each story ends with the formula, “Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love, for his wonderful deeds for mankind,” followed by a summary statement about what God has done or how the redeemed should respond.

The structure is clear and obvious, almost like a piece of boilerplate text with blanks to fill in your own personal information: Insert trouble here. Ultimately, it’s not about the specific stories of distress as much as it is about The Story: the narrative of the God of steadfast, faithful love and mercy, the God who redeems and rescues, the God to whom we must give thanks.

We’ll begin looking at the stories and their implications next. But for the moment, consider: what trouble would you want to insert into the Story of the God who Redeems?