Kalamazoo, Michigan  ·  Reformed Baptist Church

Jon Hutchins reads carefully. Before writing a single line of a song, he works through a psalm in detail — its structure, imagery, the progression of its thought. When he came to Psalm 19, he saw two main ideas: the words of the sky, speaking God’s glory without language, and the words of God’s law, more desirable than gold, sweeter than honey. Two ideas. He began writing a two-part song. Then he opened Scriptura’s resources.

The analysis showed him a third idea he had missed. The psalm doesn’t just move from the sky’s speech to God’s written word — it moves to a third voice: the psalmist’s own words, offered at the end as a contrast to both. “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight.” Having heard the heavens declare God’s glory and the Torah set out his perfection, the psalmist can only offer himself — imperfect, prone to hidden faults — and ask that God find even this acceptable. The three-part structure transformed the song and led Jon to write a third verse about Jesus as the living Word.

For Psalm 14, the materials did something different. Jon had come to it through the lens of Romans 3: judgment, condemnation, wrath. Scriptura showed him the psalm is also a reflection on Genesis 6 — and that the primary mood is not anger but grief. God looks down on humanity and mourns. That realization changed the entire emotional arc of the song. Jon scrapped his first melody and started over.

He is currently waiting on the Psalm 50 analysis before returning to that text. Scriptura hasn’t published that analysis yet. He’s waiting. A songwriter in Michigan, pausing his work until a team of Hebrew scholars finishes theirs — that is the partnership Scriptura is building, one psalm at a time.