You Keep Using That Verse
How main character energy replaced the Bible.
Pete Hegseth ended an Iran war briefing this week with a prayer for the troops. He quoted Psalm 144: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”
He was standing behind the seal of the Department of Defense. American flags behind him. And he reached for a warrior psalm to consecrate a bombing campaign.
Let’s take the text seriously.
The Psalm Hegseth Didn’t Quote
Hegseth quoted Psalm 144 over a Pentagon podium. Fine. He used the Psalter. So do I. But more important than either of us, Jesus used the Psalter. A lot.
And how he used it matters for this conversation.
The Psalms, in the Jewish tradition, exist to do two things. They internalize the Torah, the prayers and songs that form God’s people around God’s law. And they announce, revere, and praise the King and his descendant, the Messiah.
If you’re a Christian, both of those purposes are fulfilled in Jesus. He is the Torah embodied. The Word made flesh. And he is the King, the Messiah the whole Psalter has been pointing toward.
So let’s look at what Jesus actually did with the Psalms. Not what we do with them. What he did. Because every time he reaches for the Psalter, he’s doing three things at once: claiming to be the Messiah the Psalms announce, redefining what that Messiah looks like, and showing his followers how the one the scriptures are about will behave.
From the cross, he quotes Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That’s a messianic psalm. The Gospel writers knew it. They framed the entire crucifixion around it: the soldiers dividing garments (Psalm 22:18), the crowd mocking and shaking their heads (22:7), the bystanders sneering “he trusts in God; let God deliver him” (22:8). John flags it explicitly: “that the scripture might be fulfilled.” The crucifixion narrative is Psalm 22 being enacted. Jesus is claiming it. And the claim sounds like abandonment.
Then he quotes Psalm 31: “Into your hands I commit my spirit.”
This deserves more than a passing glance. This is not just surrender. This is trust. This is Psalm 23 enacted: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” Jesus is in the valley of the shadow of death. He is being killed. And he does not reach for a weapon, does not call down fire, does not invoke the warrior God of Psalm 144. He commits his spirit into the Father’s hands. That is how the one the scriptures are about behaves when he is being murdered.
In his teaching, he quotes Psalm 110, “The Lord said to my Lord,” and turns it into a question the Pharisees can’t answer. If David calls the Messiah “Lord,” then the Messiah is bigger than David’s throne. Jesus is claiming the title. And in the same breath, he’s exploding the category. The kingship is real. But it’s something David himself couldn’t contain.
He quotes Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” He’s identifying himself as the cornerstone. That’s a messianic claim. But the cornerstone was rejected. That’s how God builds. He quotes 118 again in his lament over Jerusalem: “How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. You will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’” The Messiah is claiming the title. And the way he describes his own posture toward the city that will kill him is a mother hen covering her young with her body. That’s how this King behaves.
And the posture of crucifixion itself tells the same story. Arms stretched out. Open. Covering. Drawing close. As the BCP’s morning collect for mission puts it: “Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace.” The hen gathering her chicks. The crucified body absorbing the blow. The Messiah’s body becomes the shelter.
When challenged about children praising him in the temple, he reaches for Psalm 8: “From the lips of children you have ordained praise.” He accepts the praise, the messianic acclamation from the mouths of babes, not from the halls of power.
About Judas, he quotes Psalm 41: “He who shared my bread has turned against me.” He’s the anointed one, the King, and the King is being betrayed by his own table companion. About the world’s hatred, Psalm 69: “They hated me without reason.” The Messiah is here. And the world’s response is hatred.
He quotes Psalm 82: “I said, you are gods.” Defending his divine claim. And he defends it not with thunder but with Torah. Not with force but with argument.
Every single time, all three things are happening. Jesus claims the psalms. The psalms he claims are about suffering, rejection, and self-giving love. And by claiming them, he’s establishing how messianic power operates. This is who the Messiah is. This is what happens to the Messiah. And this is how the Messiah acts, how the one the whole story is about will behave in the world. The identity, the shape, and the ethic are inseparable. You cannot have the Christ without the cross.
He had 150 psalms to choose from (151 if ya nasty). He never once reached for military victory, conquest, or divine violence. The pattern is so consistent it cannot be accidental.
And, yes. Psalm 144 is in the Bible. So are Psalm 137 and Psalm 109. If I am going to claim the Psalter is about Jesus, that means Psalm 144 and the other warmaking psalms are about Jesus too. So what does it look like when this Messiah, the Messiah I claim, makes war?
It looks like the Harrowing of Hell. The ancient tradition, affirmed in the Apostles’ Creed, confesses that Jesus “descended to hell.” The warrior King goes to battle in the depths. He kicks the gates of hell open from the inside. He storms the stronghold of death not with an army at his back but with his own broken body. And he doesn’t come to destroy. He comes to rescue every soul claimed by the devil.
This is Psalm 144 fulfilled. The hands trained for war are the hands with nail holes in them. If that’s not what this psalm is about, I don’t know what is.
You Have Heard It Said
When Jesus opens the scriptures to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24, he shows them how every word points toward his saving work of death and resurrection. Paul does something similar in 1 Corinthians 10, reading the Exodus story through Christ: “The rock that followed them was Christ.” The entire book of Hebrews is a sustained Christological rereading of the Old Testament: the priesthood, the sacrificial code, the covenant promises, everything fulfilled and transformed. The apostles didn’t invent this method. They learned it from Jesus on that road.
Augustine took it further. In his commentary on the Psalms, he argued that Christ speaks in the Psalter in three ways: sometimes as the Head (Christ himself speaking), sometimes as the Body (the Church crying out through him), and sometimes as both together. That means every psalm, even the violent ones, has to be read through this question: whose voice is this, and what does it sound like coming from the mouth of the crucified and risen Messiah? Augustine didn’t skip the hard psalms. He read them harder.
This is not a progressive invention. It is the oldest hermeneutic the Church has.
And Jesus is explicit about what it looks like in practice. The Sermon on the Mount is not a suggestion. It is Jesus standing in front of the Torah and saying, “You have heard it said... but I tell you.” You have heard an eye for an eye. But I tell you, do not resist an evildoer. You have heard, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
What Happens When You Skip the Messiah
I need to make something clear before I go on. Praying for those in danger is a profoundly Christian act. That includes our military personnel. In my pastoral ministry I have had the privilege of ministering to active duty military service members and veterans, some of whom bear deep physical and emotional scars. I pray for them.
But Hegseth’s prayer, sincere as it may have been, appropriates Psalm 144 in order to baptize warmaking, to consecrate the carnage. And he’s able to do this, and do it without even trying, because of the hermeneutical move that defines modern American evangelicalism.
It shifts the main character.
Evangelicalism, in its popular American expression, invites you to read scripture as though it is primarily about you. About what God does for you. About your life, your calling, your nation. Jeremiah 29:11 becomes a personal promise about your career. Psalm 144 becomes a blessing over your war. The “my” in “trains my hands for battle” gets read as Pete Hegseth. As America. As whoever holds the book.
But the main character of the Bible is Jesus. It is God acting through Christ. The whole narrative bends toward him. And if we displace him from the center — if we slide ourselves or our nation into the subject position of the text — we have made a presuppositional error so deep that everything built on top of it comes out wrong. We are not reading scripture incorrectly. We are reading a different book.
Hegseth can quote Psalm 144 over a bombing campaign because he has already, at the level of presupposition, replaced the Messiah with himself. Or with the nation he serves. The “my” doesn’t belong to Jesus anymore. It belongs to the Pentagon.
Peter drew a sword in the garden and Jesus told him to put it away. Same impulse. Same mistake.
There’s an irony buried in all this.
The Psalter already contains the critique. Psalm 20:7: “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.” The Psalms themselves are suspicious of military power. The tradition Hegseth is quoting has its own built-in warning against exactly what he’s doing with it.
And the Psalms of lament, the ones Jesus chose from the cross, are not weakness. Psalm 22 begins in abandonment and ends in praise. Psalm 31 begins in distress and ends in trust. The shape of the Psalter is the shape of the gospel: suffering that opens into glory. Death that becomes resurrection. The cross before the empty tomb.
We often find ourselves looking for a God who trains hands for war. The God who comes among us in the person of Jesus Christ trained his own hands to be nailed open.