Psalms Lesson 41

Psalm 47

In Psalm 47 we have the first of what we’ll call this last category, it’s known by various names, I’m going to use the name I was taught, the Enthronement Psalms. The Enthronement Psalms are Psalms that are not united by form. They’re like the Royal Psalms, they’re united by content. So this is a content designator, not a form designator. So we’re not looking, necessarily, at a particular kind of Psalm. But we are looking for specific content and I always like to present the Royal Psalms and the Enthronement Psalms back to back because both of these give two sides to essentially the same coin. Remember the Royal Psalms had as a unifying factor what? It wasn’t form, it was content, what was the content? The Davidic Covenant.

The Royal Psalms have to do with the office of Israel’s king, the human side. And this is why the category of Royal Psalms and the category of Enthronement Psalms are very important because the Enthronement Psalms give one line of truth and the Royal Psalms give another line of truth. The Royal Psalms speak of the human king and the Enthronement Psalms are going to speak of Yahweh as King. Now in the Old Testament these are parallel lines and they never merge, it’s always left in tension, always left in mystery and they never do merge, at any point in any part of the Old Testament. There is strong hints that they are going to merge but that’s all we have.

Now as we go through time and come into the New Testament the claim that Jesus is the Christ is that Jesus Christ in His person unites both parallel lines. He is both the human king of Israel and He’s also Jehovah Himself. And this sets you up to understand the character of the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is why an understanding of the Old Testament will always help you have a greater depth perception of the person of Christ. Jesus Christ fits both of these lines.

Now what about the Enthronement Psalms. We dealt with Psalm 2 and Psalm 89, these were Royal Psalms, I left out one of the key ones, Psalm 110. But this one is an Enthronement Psalm; most of the Enthronement Psalms are in the 90’s but Psalm 47 will be the first one we’ll deal with. These could also be called Gospel Psalms. I’m going to deliberately use that word because I know, if you think like I do, what kind of images arise in your mind when you hear the word “Gospel” Psalm. And just go ahead and let that image dawn in your mind, just let it sit there.

But now I want to take you to what the true content of the word “gospel” means. So we’re going to label these for the time being not Enthronement Psalms but Gospel Psalms. Now to understand the Gospel Psalms and why they’re called Gospel Psalms, turn to Isaiah 52:7, there’s a phrase that links the word “gospel” to these Psalms. In Isaiah 52:7 Isaiah looks forward in time, this is a prophetic passage of the Old Testament. And we read: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that brings the gospel,” the “good tidings” is the word which translated into the Greek becomes the word for “gospel.” Here is the first occurrence of the word “gospel.” And if you look here you’ll understand what the gospel meant in the original time in which it was preached. “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that brings the gospel,” (comma) and now it explains what this gospel is, “That publishes peace, that brings good tidings of good, that publishes salvation, that says unto Zion,” now the clause here, “that says unto Zion” is the gospel as the word originally occurred in the Old Testament. Now look how different this is from what is normally associated with the gospel today. The content is an announcement, you can obviously see it’s an announcement and this man who is publishing this is going around doing it, it says unto Israel, “Your God now reigns!” “Your God now reigns.” That is the gospel.

Now let’s amplify. “Your God now” though it’s not there, that’s the intent of it, “now reigns.” We’ve got numerous problems associated with this clause so let’s go very carefully through every word so we understand how this gospel thing got started. “Your God” refers to the God that belongs to Israel, therefore it reminds you of what? The covenant. “Your God,” essentially the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the one that is linked to the nation by covenant, so the God of the covenants is “your God.” Now what about “your God,” the God of the covenants. Why would Israel look forward to God reigning, in a way different than say the Greeks, or the Assyrians or any other culture on earth. What would be special about that clause to a Jew, whereas it wouldn’t be special to a Gentile? What’s special about it to a Jew? Think, what did Paul say the Jews had in Romans 9? [someone answers] The Scriptures, right. So immediately notice what happens here, if you just notice this it’ll help sharpen your evangelism. I’m going to lead you through a little line of reasoning here, follow me as we go through this and you’ll see why it is that a lot of our evangelism just isn’t doing anything except turning wheels.

The original gospel was an announcement that what had been prophesied had now come to pass. So the gospel is part of something else that’s larger than the gospel. The gospel is part of a framework which is the Old Testament covenant. So when people, every once in a while someone will come in and criticize me because I don’t preach the simple gospel. And I’ve started by standard rebuttal to this so if you think you’re going to come in I’ll save you the time because I’ll tell you right now what I’m going to say. I’m going to say what in your words is the simple gospel. And then they usually say Christ died for our sins or something like that. And I say yeah, but if I don’t have the Old Testament covenant that’s not a simple gospel to me because I don’t understand what sins are, I don’t understand what salvation means, and I have no comprehension of the nature of God. So it’s not a simple gospel; it’s a simple gospel to those who already have the framework, fine, but it’s not a simple gospel to somebody that doesn’t have the framework.

So you see, what happens is that today in our day what we do is we take the gospel announcement as it is given to the Jew in the Gospels, the four Gospels, New Testament, and we say that’s the simple gospel so our evangelism is going to concentrate on the simple gospel. We’re not going to get involved in all the other questions, we’ll leave those to the scholars, all we’re going to do is go around and preach the simple gospel. Well that’s a very commendable motive, to limit yourself to just preaching the simple gospel if by doing it your motive is you want to be effective. But my point is you’re wrong if you think you’re going to be effective this way because you’re not going to be effective. You’re going to get decisions but decisions for what.

The point is that people have to be filled in on such questions as the nature of the God of Abraham, the God who speaks, and then fulfills His Word in history. After the person has an understanding of that kind of God, and after the person has an understanding of what it means to sin against that God, then the gospel is the gospel, good news. But it’s not good news for a Greek, some dumb Greek that doesn’t know what God is, knows less what sin is, what does he care if God reigns. It doesn’t make any difference to him whether God reigns, it’s not good news to him; it would be good news only to a particular set of people; people that have been set up by divine viewpoint. Those people, yes, it’s good news to them but it’s not good news to anybody else. Translated another way what we’re not doing what Martin Luther told us 400 or 500 years ago to do, and that is you have to first preach the Law before you preach the gospel. And the point Luther was making wasn’t that you bring people under bondage but that you straighten them up and define them that their problem is one of sin and it’s not a problem of psychological maladjustment or emptiness, boredom, etc. etc. etc. Those are all symptoms but they’re not the issue. Jesus Christ is not a psychological aspirin, He is an answer to a very definite technical narrow and very misunderstood question: how can I be holy in the presence of the God of the Bible. That is the question, the gospel is the answer. But if the person hasn’t asked that question yet don’t bother to teach the gospel to them until that question is resolved.

So what’s the first step before you preach the gospel? You’ve got to give them some background and that’s why I’m convinced that today most evangelism and most witnessing situations are long term effort that will involve you on the job, in the classroom, in your family, your home, will involve you in many, many conversations over some extended time interval of gradually working with the people until they come to understand. And in any case, don’t be fooled, even if you walk up to someone, witness to them and they believe Christ and become Christians, don’t be fooled and say therefore no preparation of their heart was needed. All that happened was that you didn’t happen to be the one that sowed and watered, you happened to be the one that reaped; someone else sowed and watered. So just because you didn’t do the sowing and watering don’t walk away and say all I need is the simple gospel presentation, I don’t believe in all this. You’re ignorant, you’re just ignorant of how the human heart works; that is not how men’s souls work.

All right, now the gospel in Isaiah is set into the Old Testament framework. The Old Testament framework again, a God of Abraham’s covenant, the God of the Abrahamic Covenant. And this God is one who has announced that He is going to do certain things and now He’s done them. Now let’s look at Psalm 47 and watch how an enthronement Psalm looks. This enthronement Psalm will also help you understand something else if you haven’t understood this yet, and that is the idea of a completed salvation. Salvation has many phases; I think it was Bishop Westcott who was a British scholar in the 19^th century developed one of the great texts of the New Testament who was walking along the street one day and some girl in the Salvation Army came up and said hey, are you saved, and Westcott said do you mean saved in the past, in the present or in the future tense. And the point was have I been saved at the point of trusting in Christ and becoming a Christian, am I now being saved by the Holy Spirit, or are you asking me if I have been finally and ultimately redeemed. And needless to say it provoked quite the theological discussion.

But the point is that salvation has three parts. And tendency on the part of Christians in our day, because we basically… let’s face it, we come out of a Greek type of culture, not a Jewish culture, we tend to think of salvation as step one, I become a Christian, point in time; step two, Christian life, and then step three I go to heaven. And for most of us we think the separation of the soul from the body and going to heaven is the end of the salvation package. Not so, wrong again; the end of the salvation package, according to the Jew, is not the departure of the soul from the body; the end of the salvation package to the Jew is the salvation of the body. It’s not the salvation of the soul; the soul is saved now and during time, but the body has to be saved and resurrected. The Jew would look in horror at the idea that we’re saved because we go to heaven, that’s not complete salvation to him. The only complete salvation to him is when the earth and the whole universe and his body and everything has been saved, then we have salvation, not any whit less. Now the enthronement Psalms reveal the Jewish idea of a completed salvation. Let’s look at Psalm 47, it’s divided into two parts. I’m not going to guide you by any form because it doesn’t really fit any of the forms that we’ve said, but those of you who have worked through some of the Psalms, as you skim through 47, if you were to outline it where would you break it, make a major break. And while you’re looking also look for words that are repeated over and over again, another point about reading the Bible. [someone says something] Okay, it’s been suggested that verse 5 is the breaking point in Psalm 47, either before verse 5 or after verse 5. Now that’s right on target, can someone be a little more specific and make the critical decision whether the break occurs before verse 5 or after verse 5. Verse 5 is definitely an anchor. [someone says before] Why? [they answer something about verse 4 is talking about people, verse 5 is talking about can’t hear rest]

All right, verses 1-4 are the first part of this Psalm; verses 5-9 the last part. Now let’s just look at it real quickly to get an overview before we go through it verse by verse. How would you describe verse 1, what’s verse 1 doing. It’s praise, invitation to praise. Then verse 2 begins with “For” and describes something about God as the reason why we should praise Him. Then verse 5 is praise, “God has gone up with a shout, the LORD with the sound of a trumpet. [6] Sing praises to God… [7] For God is the King,” and then it lists various things why we should give praise. See we’re back to praise again.

Now let’s go through the Psalm, the two parts, pick up the imagery, understand and look at it forgetting the New Testament. So what you now know of completed history is going to be hard to do this but it’ll help you understand a little bit about the New Testament. Forget what you know has happened in history about Christ, that He has died for our sins, He is risen from the dead, He’s ascended to be with the Father, forget all of that and try to mentally put into your mind the thought that you are a Jew reading this in David’s time or in the time of Israel. Reading it from that perspective try to visualize what’s happening. See the trouble is we come, oh yeah, this is that Psalm, we come very confident because we have seen more history play out than the original author of this, but sympathize with the man who wrote it first and try to fit into his chair and sit where he’s sitting.

“Oh, clap your hands, all ye peoples; shout unto God with the voice of triumph.” Before we go any further, did you notice the words that repeat throughout this thing; look for some words that repeat over and over again; this will also give you a clue. Praises is one that repeats, what’s another word frequently occurring in this Psalm? King, that’s a critical word, “king.” “King” occurs as a noun and also the same word is a verb in verse 8, the Hebrew noun is malak, the Hebrew verb is malak, so it actually occurs one more time if you count up all the “kings.”

Now let’s go back to verse 1, this should tell us something. “Oh, clap your hands, all ye peoples; shout unto God with the voice of triumph.” The first part of verse 1, you should have a Psalm heading where it says, “To the chief Musician, A Psalm for the sons of Korah.” And the word “Psalm” is a technical word for song that is to be sung with musical accompaniment, with instrumental accompaniment. “Clap your hands,” now this shows how these people joined in. The clapping of the hands was equivalent to a serious version of an applause that we have today. When we clap our hands we don’t do it for serious reasons, but that was the intent behind this clapping of the hands. It was homage.

“Clap your hands, all ye peoples,” now do you suppose that the people in verse 1 are Israel or all people? What do you think? Anybody and why? [someone answers] All right, you’d say that the people in verse 1 refers to Israel because only Israel would triumph in this situation. All right, let’s go into the situation a little bit more. The word “triumph” here, it means triumph but in the sense of being very, very happy, elated over what has happened, and the people are going to be around in Psalm 47 are those people who are going to be there to share the kingdom, which will include both Jews and non-Jews. And the reason I mention this is that since this Psalm is an Enthronement or Gospel Psalm and since it gives you the final picture of redemption and salvation, isn’t it interesting that we’re right back to almost an erasure of the Jew/Gentile difference. See history began with no difference between Jew and Gentile. Then it was Abraham that was called out as a particular peculiar people. Now in the last view of history according to the Jews, the Gentile/Israelite difference was downplayed as God Yahweh was King over all nations.

This disproves what you so often hear in college religion courses, that the God of the Old Testament and the religion of the Old Testament was a national tribal religion, that it was narrow, bigoted and nationalistic. It was not. The Old Testament is a missionary document that talks to the nations of the world. The narrowness comes in simply because of the way God is going to reach the nations; it will be first through Israel, then to the nations but it’s not going to stop with just Israel, it goes on to the nation. So the invitation is “clap your hands, all ye peoples.” All the people!

“Shout unto God with the voice of triumph. [2] For the LORD Most High is a terrible [awe-inspiring],” actually “a terrible one, “He is a great King over all the earth.” Now in verse 2 there are two words used for God. The word “LORD” capitalized in the King James is the Tetragrammaton, which is Yahweh, which was Israel’s private name for God, Yahweh. But then right after this, as though to get across this universalism there’s a word, Elyon; Elyon is the word that God apparently was known by before Abraham. When you have the Melchizedek incident, they are worshiping the Most High God, El Elyon, and Elyon was the old, old name for God. People who study religion, religion phenomenologist and so on, and some anthropologists that have their heads screwed on right, will tell you about you about what they call the deist [not sure of word: sounds like: aut ee o sis] or the fact that the old, old, old people to the world used to worship this God that disappeared, and you can trace it in tribal culture after tribal culture after tribal culture, that there was originally one God and He made the world and then somehow He disappeared, or He just went up in the clouds and then you have all the other gods come, and this old, old, old God that disappeared we interpret, as Christians, the fact that that’s the human race turning away from God. God didn’t disappear, the human race just didn’t want Him and it’s their faint memory of this, and so the last name is Elyon.

So now in this verse when it says “Yahweh Elyon” the author of Psalms is deliberately linking Israel’s God with the Dios Adiosis, the one who had disappeared centuries before out of the stream of history and left man wallowing in his polytheism and his mythologies. And so “Yahweh Elyon is terrible, [awe-inspiring]” the word “terrible” means awesome in the sense of miraculous. This is the word that is used of the Exodus, when God physically intervenes into history and men have, you might say, a spectacular fireworks demonstration of God. If you to exercise your imagination as to the ancient world thought you’ll have the opportunity in December because you’ll be able to see one of the largest comets in the last 200-300 years and if you go out and look at it and imagine what a man who had no idea of the Noahic covenant, who had no idea that there weren’t bad forces in nature, looking up and seeing this comet cross the sky what it would do to your faith if all of a sudden night after night you watched the evening star and morning star, you’d watched how the moon rises and how it sets and how the morning star eventually becomes the evening star because the moon moves through the constellations and so on, you’d finally have a sense of regularity and then all of a sudden your sense of regularity would be smashed as this strange body moves through the heavens.

This was the fear of the ancient world. It was that kind of thing that led to awe and that’s the word here; “the LORD, Yahweh Elyon, is terrible.” Now what does that imply must have happened in the vision of this man in order for people to be able to say that “Yahweh Elyon is terrible?” There must have been a spectacular revelation of Him in nature, meaning therefore, in prophecy, this Psalm looks as a devastating judgment at the end of history. And this is the conclusion that mankind comes to, the God of Abraham, the God of that nation Israel is Elyon, the Dios Adiosis that dropped out of history. And He, in one person, is the One behind all these horrible judgments we have seen; truly He is an awesome God. Mankind, collectively, has not witnessed a horrible judgment of God on a global scale for at least thirty centuries, so the idea of God being an awesome God in the sense of a globally observable phenomena has dropped out of our human consciousness. It’s there deep down but collectively man has no recollection of this kind of a God. Even Christians ourselves, living in our own generation, we have no real empirical direct observation of the horribleness when God moves in nature on a global scale.

The exercise you might perform mentally, if you want to do a kind of mental experiment that will create within you the feeling of this, ask yourself what you would do if tomorrow morning you woke up and there was an announcement, say by people of the Smithsonian Institute or the Observatories in England that a foreign body had been spotted in the solar system that on a collision orbit with the earth; the earth had, say, three months to exist and it was computed that the bodies would intersect at such and such a time on such and such a day and that would be it because it would be big enough by various gravitational forces to destroy the earth. If you knew that for a certainty, that within 60 to 90 days the earth itself would be dissolved, and man’s technology and rockets, etc. is not enough to provide …[tape turns, appears some left out and after tape turns he is talking about 2b, “He is a great King over all the earth.”]

The Bible is making a careful distinction and you want to be quick to pick it up between the way sovereignty works today and the way sovereignty is going to work in the future. God still is sovereign, He always was, always will be, but something does change. [someone says something] Isn’t He historically sovereign today. [something else said] All right, He’s not reigning like Christ will. Can somebody describe, try to be more specific how this sovereignty differs from this sovereignty. [someone says something] All right, Christ reigns in His humanity on the earth; I’m not trying to be pick here but Christ reigns in His humanity now at the Father’s right hand. You’re all getting there, just keep on. Let’s use these words and see if we can push it further. The sovereignty today is there; God is sovereign today but we call it in an indirect sense. God is sovereign in the future in a direct sense. Can you give some details as to what indirect sovereignty and direct sovereignty refer to. He said Christ will rule with a rod of iron; directly or indirectly.

Okay, now let’s expand what he said. Let’s expand the content between the word “direct” and “indirect.” [someone said something] Well, volition can’t be destroyed. Volition will still be there. [something else] All right, an attitude, volition is not destroyed but volition universally responds to God in the future. This is one part of the eternal state where we have positive volition, the negative volition is imprisoned. Let’s bring it out a little bit more. [someone said something] What is observable? All right, Christ, but He was visible before, in the incarnation. What’s the difference between His previous appearance and His future appearance? [someone said something] He didn’t have a direct command over what? [something else said] Over the visible universe and all that is in it. Let’s say this, in the future the sovereignty will be direct in the sense that, for example, the millennial kingdom, if you have negative volition, bang, immediately it’s punished. What we’re saying is that in the future moral cause and effect will be empirically observable. Today moral cause and effect is somewhat blurred; it’s enough blurred to allow men to say that God is not really a moral God because He permits evil to reign in the universe. This is the law of final effect, the law of temporal effect that we went through in Proverbs. Remember I said the law of temporal effect in grace is ameliorated or melted or weakened so that man actually looking at the world today doesn’t see God immediately punishing sin. That’s not there; in some areas yes, but you’ll have to admit if you’re really honest, there are many, many areas where evil is not punished today. And so therefore this has led men to be discouraged, has led men to have heartache and has led to great attacks upon God Himself, on His character; what kind of a God is this that allows the world to go on like this. Not always, and that is one of the differences that we’ll observe between indirect sovereignty of today, this present moment, and this, what he’s talking about, “He is a great King over all the earth.”

That is what the Jew looked forward to and he was not satisfied until that kind of demonstration was made in history. The Jew would never have been satisfied with anything less. There is no such thing as salvation until this has been achieved; until there will be historically visible to every man, woman and child the glory, majesty, justice and sovereignty of Jehovah. And until that state is reached in history there is no final salvation, period. So this should show you what was on their heart as they prayed for… for example, you’ve prayed the Lord’s prayer, “Thy kingdom come,” think of those words, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” “…as it is in heaven” referring then to the works around the third heaven, as the new heavens and new earth gradually expanding sphere of conquest and so on. “Thy kingdom come,” now Christ wasn’t saying pray that God would be sovereign, because He is sovereign, but Christ was saying that we should pray for His kingdom to come, that hope. You see why even the Lord’s prayer, so-called, is an expression of what is here right in this Psalm. “Let that hope that He be “King over all the earth,” let that kingdom come, and that’s the prayer; “He is a great King over all the earth.”

Verse 3, “He shall subdue the peoples under us, and the nations under our feet.” Here again you have the divine order, not pompous nationalism but simply saying that when God conquers it will be through the physical nation of Israel. This is why there’s so much trouble with Israel in history because Satan wants to eliminate Israel’s existence and God’s sovereignty has decreed Israel will exist. And you have a tremendous war going on. We don’t have time to go into this in the political sense, but the use of the word “King” in verse 2 and the use of the word “nations” shall telegraph to you some signals about how the Bible looks upon the future of government, that government, the fourth and fifth divine institutions, is an institution that is not yet full, that human government is an anticipatory institution that will be fulfilled when Christ returns, then we’ll have perfect government, just like the second divine institution of marriage, fundamentally for century after century was an unfulfilled institution, until Christ revealed the relationship between Himself and the church, and that was the filling up of the second divine institution, the idealization and completion of it.

Now we go to the fourth verse, continuing the same thing, “He shall choose our inheritance for us; the excellency of Jacob, whom He has loved.” The word “loved” in verse 4, now get this and be careful, do you suppose it’s the word chesed or ahav? Chesed is love according to a covenant; ahav means a sovereign love that’s independent of any agreement. [someone answers] You think chesed, why? [answer given] He has promised the covenant. It is a true statement to say this could be chesed, “Jacob, whom He had loved.” Because He has loved, hasn’t He been faithful to do what He has promised to Jacob. Yes. But here it’s ahav. Can anybody explain why; that verb shifts completely here. [someone answers] All right, they don’t deserve it and particularly when he says Jacob; he goes all the way back to when the covenant first began. The covenant itself wasn’t based on chesed love, was it? In other words, when He entered into the agreement, it’s like marriage, before the marriage vow is consummated, it’s ahav love because there’s no form to it; it’s not compelled by any covenant, but once an agreement has been made then the love is in accordance with the covenant, it’s chesed love. It changes from ahav to chesed. At this point the psalmist goes all the way back in history to the time when God elected Jacob. So he’s saying, God, You loved Jacob uncaused, You weren’t compelled to, You didn’t have to there was no moral or political agreement that forced you to, You just did because You chose to do so. That’s what he’s saying here.

Now to clarify the context of verses 1-4, the future tense of the verbs in verses 3-4 may be past; this is odd, but these are two particular instances of a strange kind of tense form that occurs in Hebrew grammar, which was not well understood in the time of the King James translation, and can refer to past tense. And I am interpreting verses 3-4 as past tense, not future, that He has subdued the people under us, that He has chosen our inheritance for us. In other words, verses 1-4 are said after history is closed. In other words, the event has happened, God has finished history and now verse 1, as a result of the end of history, “clap your hands” for God is King over the nations. This is the end and the final whistle.

Now verses 5-9 repeat the same picture, but instead of being general and outlining the covenants and the promises and what God has decided to do, verse 5 takes us to a specific event. “God is gone up with a shout, the LORD with the sound of a trumpet.” The word “goes up” means to ascend, the LORD has ascended, and this, although translated in the past, may be a present of accomplishment; the Hebrew perfect means… like when I’ll say, I say something; the Hebrew would say, I said something. I said to you, and then I would repeat a quote. And this appears to be that kind of a construction, “The LORD is now going up with a shout,” in other words He’s going up to sit on His throne, that’s the picture. It’s a picture of a kingly celebration; it occurs in Psalm 68 also. In history, forgetting Christ for a moment and going backwards in time, what this probably referred to was the movement of the ark. In Psalm 68 you have a procession up to Zion, Jerusalem, and the ark is the throne of God. And so they would carry this ark and they would set it up on the mountain, and they said “God has gone up.” And it would mean that He has returned to His Holy place from coming down to do battle and He’s finished; it’s a picture of victory of a triumphant king returning to his throne and sitting down.

“God has gone up with a shout, the LORD with the sound of a trumpet.” “The sound of a trumpet” again points to instrumental music, that there is music that is being played all the time this event occurs. And it is music that involves instruments.

Verse 6, the invitation to enter in, further music, “Sing praises to God,” this verb is a singular, it’s not two words, “sing praises,” it’s one verb, a single verb, and it means “psalm Him” if you want a literal thing. We think of the word “Psalm” as a noun, but that’s what this means, it’s a verb, “psalm Him.” “Psalm Him, psalm God, psalm Him, psalm our King, psalm Him.” It’s repeated four times and the idea is again skilled music that is being sung as he conducts this.

Now the reasons why the praise occurs, “For God is the King of all the earth; sing praises” or “psalm Him with understanding.” The word “understanding” means skill; in other words, when music is made in this situation, make it skillful. Let your art and that which you create please Him. And the way it pleases Him is to make it the best art that you can create, the best job that you can do for this event. And again I point out to you, those of you who are interested in music, this is one of those passages in Scripture that make it very clear that from eternity to eternity, music along with regular language, is something we share with the Godhead itself. Music is related to language; animals do not make music, only man, angels and God do. It is a faculty in the human soul that we do share because we are made in God’s image, and music therefore is something that is very, very important. This is why, both in lyric and in form, music has tremendous spiritual influence for good or evil.

As Dr. Howard Hinsen, for many years the director of Eastman-Rochester’s Conservatory said, “Music has moral force.” And Dr. Hinsen, by saying that, said that music can stimulate the demonic and the human soul and act as an instrument of the demon power or it can also stimulate praise to God as David did in suppressing demonic powers in Saul’s soul in 1 Samuel. So music is a very, very, VERY important piece, and woe to the Christian church today that we do not have skilled theoreticians; we should, by the logic of our position, we should have the most advanced theoreticians in the field of music. It is the Christian, more than the humanist or anybody else, that music becomes a sacred thing and it should be our people that are doing the advanced work. And yet how often in evangelical fundamentalist circles do you have serious music research and writing going on. And of all people, the only people where our theology should lead to this it should be us, and what do we have?

Verse 8, “God reigns over the nations; God sits upon the throne of His holiness.” See, it’s all finished, history has finished, He is now displaying empirically His direct sovereignty. Now if you turn to Psalm 2, compare verse 6-8 of this Psalm with Psalm 2. If you look in Psalm 2:6 what does he say? “I have set My King upon the holy hill,” in other words, Jehovah in Psalm 2, you have Yahweh here and down below Him you have the King, you have them separated in other words, Jehovah in heaven; King on earth. You flip back to Psalm 47 and what have you got? You’ve got Jehovah on earth. It is Jehovah that sits upon the throne of His holiness, it is Jehovah that is King over the earth. So now you have the King equals Yahweh. And here’s where you begin to have at least two persons of the Trinity, the Father in heaven, and Yahweh who becomes the King, the Second Person here. You begin to have the Trinity showing up right here.

Verse 9 is a fantastic verse to close on because verse 9 proves beyond all shadow of a doubt the universality of the Old Testament, and it was not a narrow nationalistic religion. There’s a statement in here that if you have any sensitivity to the Old Testament it should just about bowl you over when you read it carefully. “The princes of the peoples are gathered together, the people of the God of Abraham,” that’s in apposition, look at it again and think of all of what has been emphasized in the Old Testament. Now look at this, this is a shocking statement. “The princes of the peoples,” these are the heathen, “the princes of the heathen are gathered together,” comma, apposition, “the people of the God of Abraham.” What is going on; the Gentiles all gathered together as the people of the God of Abraham? Yes, that was the final vision of history in the Old Testament, that the Gentiles, like Abraham, would come to God. Why? What does Paul do in Romans? Remember the argument, Paul said we are all children of God by faith, and we imitate Abraham and so in a way we’re Abraham’s children. Where to you think Paul got that argument; think that’s new to the New Testament? Not at all, it was here in the Psalms for at least ten centuries before Paul said that. And here it is.

“All the Gentiles gather together as the people of the God of Abraham.” That would mean, number one, that the Gentiles have come to God like Abraham did, with imputed righteousness; righteousness credited to their account by faith; righteousness that wasn’t theirs to begin with but credited, free; that’s why. Tie this with how I started the Psalm, what was the word that started the Psalm? The gospel. What was the gospel? The good news that God’s pulled something of that He promised. What is the final verse? What is it that God has pulled off? Imputation. What is imputation? That you and I who do not merit salvation in any way and can’t get it any way have perfect righteousness credited to our account; that’s imputation and that’s what it means, “the people of the God of Abraham, they are brought into union with this God by imputation.

And then the last phrase, “for the shields of the earth belong unto God,” it’s an autonomy for the princes again, it’s repetition, “shields” means “the defenders of the earth belong unto God, He now is greatly exalted.” And that last phase in the Psalm summarizes the whole purpose of history. The purpose of history is that God be exalted, not man. The people who are striving to be true in their evangelism today are the ones that are making the evangel centering on God and His nature, not on man’s psychological state. The gospel, where it’s preached in its truth and power, will always exalt God Himself and His finished work, and imputed righteousness. Every where else you have the gospel mixed in with humanist categories that will emphasize how I feel. I feel depressed so I invite Jesus into my heart and I get un-depressed; well that may be, but that’s not the gospel, that’s a side-effect. The gospel is that you are a damned miserable sinner in Jonathan Edward’s terms, and need salvation by grace. And therefore have found it in Jesus Christ.

Next week we’ll deal with some of the other enthronement Psalms in the 90s. `