Psalms Lesson 42

Psalm 96

 

This will be the last Psalm in the Psalm series.  Next time I will summarize what we have learned from the Psalm series so hopefully we can apply it and be a little bit more wise in the way we express our worship.  The Psalms can be categorized on the basis of their content or on the basis of their form.  And either of these areas would serve as appropriate classifications or tools or devices to work these Psalms into some sort of a way of handling them.  You want to understand when you read the Psalms for yourself just don’t read them 60 pmh but look at the form, look at the content and try to get a little more out of it. 

 

Tonight we are on the last category, called the enthronement Psalms and we could call them the gospel Psalms.  But the word “gospel” here means something different than it usually means.  So let’s turn to Psalm 96 and look at it and think what form it is.  We said we could classify this by content or by form.  The enthronement Psalms is a content classification; all the enthronement Psalms have this following thing in common: they speak of the future millennial reign of the Lord Jesus Christ.  This is why this entire category of enthronement Psalms is important to define the word “salvation.”  Salvation in the Old Testament was more than just the individual; the Hebrew would never have been satisfied with what many Christians are satisfied with, individual salvation, the universe had to be saved as well as the individual soul.  As we study this group of Psalms think, these Psalms picture salvation finished.  All these Psalms picture the end of the salvation process.  This is the hope which, if Jesus doesn’t fulfill it the Bible goes in the ashcan.  If Jesus Christ can’t pull off all the hopes of the Old Testament, you can just toss your Bible in an ashcan because it’s a fraudulent document.  So whatever we say and however we interpret the New Testament it’s got to fulfill these categories. 

 

Now as you look through Psalm 96, can you guess what this form is.  You’ve got a choice, the individual lament, the individual descriptive praise, or the declarative praise.  I’ll give you a hint, it’s nothing to do with the nation, though it has to do with the nation in its large sense it’s an individual type thing.  But forgetting individual and national, is it a lament, is it a descriptive praise or is it a declarative praise.  [someone says something] Descriptive praise.  Okay, there are two kinds of praise in the Old Testament, the descriptive praise and the declarative praise.  Do you remember the difference between these two kind of praises.  Praise in the Old Testament moves from the declarative up to descriptive; descriptive is the highest form of praise.  What is declarative praise.  Declarative praise is event centered; this means that when they are declaring, the praise in the declarative category the believers of the Old Testament have in their heads at that point a specific historic event.  They’ve got something concrete in their minds, it’s not some abstract some place, it’s a definite historic event and it’s not subjective experience.  This is something that should hit you like a ton of bricks as you go through the Psalms. What is the praise all about in the Psalm, how I feel about Jesus?  Negative!  It is what Jehovah has done in history, period!  That’s what it is.  So the declarative praise has to do with a historic event outside of the observer.  Very rarely in any of these Psalms do you ever get an inkling of how the psalmist feels because that isn’t the issue.

 

The descriptive praise is an advanced form because in the descriptive praise the Old Testament believer abstracts and says God is thus and such kind of God because He has done this, this, this, this and this.  In other words, after he has about 89 events to praise God for he generalizes and describes God’s character.  So descriptive praise is always essence centered; it’s centered on God’s essence and doesn’t bring into view specifics.  Someone said Psalm 96 was descriptive, not declarative praise because, as you read through here you don’t see any historic event mentioned.  Do you see the Exodus mentioned, for example, in Psalm 96?  No.  Do you see Abraham mentioned?  No. Do you see the Red Sea incident mentioned?  No.  None of these events are mentioned here.  The psalmist has already gone on to generalize. 

 

Now let’s break the Psalm down in an outline form.  We’ve said it’s descriptive praise; this means it’s going to be centering on the character of God.  If you were to outline this Psalm where would you see a convenient break.  How would you outline it, roughly; we haven’t got time for details because we want to go verse by verse.  Where would you make a break as you divide these 13 verses.  Do you see places in the sequence of verses where there’s a logical break.  The hint is watch your verbs.  See what kind of verbs you have in verse 1, 2, now watch what happens.  Between verse 3 and 4 you see a break.  Why?  Verses 1-3 have imperatives; verse 4 begins with “For,” the reason why we should do what we should do in verses 1-3, verse 4 gives you the reason, such and such, verse 5 for such and such. The next break is between 6 and 7.  What happens at verse 7 again?  You go back to imperatives.  This is tricky, the last part, 7-13, watch it.  Verse 7 is an imperative, verse 8 an imperative, verse 9 an imperative, verse 10 starts out with an imperative and then somehow something happens.  What happens in verse 10?  It’ll throw you for a curve here.  [someone says something] It looks future, it’ll be future, we’ll let that stand.  I’ll show you what happens here and then I’ll back it up later.  From verse 7-12 we have the call to praise; just like in verses 1-3 you had the call to praise, verses 4-6 is the is the cause of the praise.  Verses 7-12 is the call; verse 13 is the cause.  So you see two cycles in the Psalm, call and cause, and then secondly, call and cause. 

 

Now let’s go back and look at the first three verses in detail, the call to praise.  “Oh, sing unto the LORD a new song; sing unto the LORD, all the earth. [2] Sing unto the LORD, bless His name; show forth His salvation from day to day. [3] Declare His glory among the heathen, His wonders among all peoples.”  If you look at that, I want you to turn to 1 Chronicles 16, see if we can place how this Psalm was really used back in the days in which the Hebrews sung it regularly.  How did they use this kind of a Psalm.  It looks forward to the Lord Jesus Christ’s millennial reign but how was it used in worship.  1 Chronicles 16:23 tells us, this gives you a picture of what worship was like in David’s day.  Do you notice something familiar with verse 23.  “Sing unto the LORD, all the earth; show forth from day to day his salvation. [24] Declare His glory among the heathens, His marvelous works among all the nations. [25] For great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; He also is to be feared above all gods. [26] For all the gods of the people are idols; but the LORD made the heavens.” 

 

That’s an exact quote of Psalm 96 and it shows you this kind of language was in whose day?  Look at verse 7, “Then on that David delivered this first psalm, to thank the LORD, into the hand of Asaph and his brethren.”  Who are Asaph and his brethren?  Asaph and his brethren were the musical directors of the worship.  They were a highly skilled professional group of people who did not give performances in the front of the church for the congregation; they were people who led the congregation in singing.  This is why the Levite choirs were here; they didn’t do it like we often do it, with a singing group to entertain the people.  That wasn’t it all.  It was just that God realized some people have it and some people don’t when it comes to music.  And He took the haves to help the have-nots.  And the Levite choir was skilled to teach the congregation the song and guide them in its worship. 

 

So David gave this, and when did David give this Psalm; what had happened, what was the historic incident that gave rise to this in verses 1-6.  What was the historic thing that set this whole thing off, that stimulated David to start composing?  Verse 1, “So they brought the ark of God, and set it in the midst of the tent that David had pitched for it,” so the ark was now returned.  God was operational again at Mount Zion.  That’s the incident; that’s what the Jews saw in his day; he did not see the Lord Jesus Christ in the future coming with all the details.  He didn’t see that.  All he saw was that the physical ark, the size of a coffin basically, was brought, put up into this tent.  That’s what he saw with his eyes and he heard the Levite choirs with his ears and that was the extent of his insight.  Except the Holy Spirit being omniscient had greater insight and said now look, sing to that but behind all this that you see there’s some great climatic event. 

 

Now let’s turn to Psalm 96 and see how the Holy Spirit gave historic purpose to the nation Israel, that in this wasn’t just a miscellaneous event, it was something that looked forward to a greater climax.  “O sing unto the LORD a new song,” “a new song” in the Bible, you see this in the book of Revelation, means that you have a new item of praise or an advance on an older item.  It refers to progressive revelation.  The new song means that God has done something so now let’s sing to the latest thing that He has done.  So there’s a historic advance in man’s understanding of God.  “O sing unto the LORD a new song; sing unto the LORD, all the earth.” 

 

The second part of verse 1, “all the earth” testifies to something that we have seen over and over and over and over again in the Psalms, very important, in this day when liberalism would give you certain Bible courses that tells you well, Israel had her faith, the Assyrians had their faith and the Babylonians had their faith and it’s all just relative.  What does this verse do that completely bombs out the concept of relativism, that there are many ways to know God. Do you see the connection.  That little phrase “all the earth,” how does this negate every other religion except Israel’s?  Or does it?  This is the expression for an absolute dogmatic monotheism.  This is why the Bible is a hated document in the classroom, it is a hated document in most western thinking.  It’s been a hated document in eastern thinking for 20 centuries, but just recently it’s become a hated document in western thought.  And the reason is that western thought has gone over to the concept of relativism, that there are many, many different answers for these spiritual questions and there aren’t: 2 + 2 = 4 and salvation is through Christ alone, and that’s the way it is.  Absolutes, in other words, and here is where the absolutes appear in the Old Testament and don’t let anyone ever tell you that they did not have a concept of absolutes in the Old Testament, that they did not have the concept that Israel’s religion was superior to all other religions and that salvation would not happen till faith ruled the world, period.  As imperialistic and as colonialistic as that sounds, that’s the Old Testament.   Israel’s faith will subdue the earth. 

 

And this is a call to “sing unto Jehovah,” notice those of you who have a King James you’ll see capital a L-O-R-D, Yahweh, that’s God’s private name to the nation Israel. So what it’s saying is all the earth, all the nations, you sing to Israel’s God, not your own, Israel’s God.  It’s religious imperialism and it’s Biblical, sound.

 

Verse 2, “Sing unto the LORD, bless His name; show forth His salvation from day to day.”  This verse describes some things that were done in the praise process. We’ve seen this, as to what praise consists of . We’ve learned that it does not consist of “praise the Lord, praise the Lord” kind of thing but that it includes some hard content, and the person who goes around saying “praise the Lord” would not even recognize true praise if it walked up and kissed them.  They’d never recognize it because true praise is based on relating what God has done in history.  And the shocker in this verse is that they thought of praise, look at the last part of verse 2, “show forth His salvation from day to day,” do you know what that verb, “show forth” is?  It’s a verb that is used in the Greek translation of this for evangelize.  It’s the word we get evangelize from.  Evangelize is not an English word, it’s taken from the Greek.  And the Greek verb translating this Hebrew word means to evangelize; “show forth” means to “preach out His salvation from day to day.”  Announce it from day to day. 

 

So this is the call to evangelize.  Now isn’t that interesting.  To the Jew he would conceive of evangelism as praising the Lord, somebody comes up to you and praises the Lord so you just quote back Acts 16:31 and say I just did.  Because you told them back the content of the gospel, and if you have some nutty roommate that goes this process once an hour the way to cure it is to say “praise the Lord” you just go ahead and do it, give a big long dissertation on the content of the gospel or something, and finally they’ll catch on that praising the Lord isn’t repeating a phase 80 times.  Praising the Lord is announcing clearly, coherently, the historic revelation of God.  And that’s what this means.  Evangelize, declare the good news of “His salvation from day to day.” 

 

Now here is the problem; looked at from our time in 1972, we think we understand the end of verse 2.  How did the people of David’s time understand verse 2?  What was the gospel in David’s day.  Remember, it’s a technical word, we talked about it last week, what is the first occurrence of the word “gospel.”  Historically it was in Isaiah’s day, actually the [can’t understand word] form is here, if this Psalm was written by David.  But the gospel to David’s generation was what?  Very technical.  God reigning, God on the throne ruling the world, that was the good news.  Now I want you to notice some things about this good news.  If you understand this it will save you a lot of screwball activities in the area of evangelism. 

 

First of all, the news wouldn’t even be recognized as news unless first somebody had an Old Testa­­­ment prophetic background.  What would a Greek care if Jehovah ruled over the world, he doesn’t even know what Jehovah means.  So the good news is a very small segment of doctrine and it doesn’t make sense to somebody who isn’t prepared for it.  So you do not go talking about the fine points of Jesus’ death on the cross to someone who doesn’t have in their mind clearly a concept of God.  You do not start with the finished work of Christ; that’s where you terminate in your message but you don’t start there.  And you don’t walk up and say are you feeling blue, Jesus is the great psychological aspirin of the 20th century.  It’s not that either.  The person has to say now just a minute; good news means God has performed what He promised, so the person has to have a lot of background before they can understand what the gospel means.  The Bible is trying to warn us about this and evangelical leaders are beginning to realize that we’ve really slipped a cog and there’s articles all over the place about the poor low quality evangelism going on in our time; the reason this is all coming out and hitting the press is because many of us pastors have to counsel people by the hour who were led to Christ under very, very bad conditions.  Frankly, it is irritating when all it would have taken was a little clearer presentation of the gospel.

So that’s the first thing you want to notice about the good news.  The second thing about the good news is that it is a final message.  In other words, this is good news in the Old Testament for salvation of the universe as well as the individual, and therefore the gospel in our day is not all of this gospel.  We announce that Christ has died, that Christ has risen, that Christ is at the Father’s right hand, and that by believing in Him you can have a personal relationship with God the Father.  That’s part of the salvation package in that that’s the individual.  But there’s a lot more to the full gospel, and by the “full gospel” I mean what the Bible says is the full gospel.  The full gospel includes Christ’s Second Advent and His work at redeeming the entire universe, physically.

 

The third thing that you want to understand about the good news is that it includes judgment.  You wouldn’t think judgment would be good news except if you’re a sensitive person you understand that you can’t have salvation without judgment of the evil.  If you’re going to be saved, how do you get out from under the imprisoning powers from which you have to be saved. Ever think of that?  Here we used the word salvation; salvation, salvation, salvation…salvation from what?  All right, how do you get out from under that which chains you, imprisons you?  The force that imprisons you has to be destroyed, so in the Bible judgment always accompanies salvation, wither you’re reading Romans 6, the sin nature is judged in order that we can enjoy the Christian life, whether it’s our sins that are judged on the cross that we can enjoy forgiveness of sins, whether it’s the world of Noah’s day that is judged in order that Noah be saved; whether it’s Sodom and Gomorrah that are judged in order to free Lot and his household; whether it’s Egypt that is judged in order that Israel might attain political freedom, you can’t have salvation without a simultaneous judgment of that which is imprisoning… the forces that are imprisoning the darkness powers.

 

Finally, the good news is universal; that it is for the entire world, not just Israel.  And this should show you again in these Psalms that this was not a narrow, prejudice, bigoted, cooped-up national religion.  The Old Testament faith looked out to its final culmination when it conquered the world.  I mention this last point because I want to take you to a little application.  Someone sometime is going to get you in a conversation and you’re going to wind up in this kind of a thing; this happens again and again and again.  It goes like this. If God revealed Himself on the planet Mars, wouldn’t He reveal Himself as a Martian to the Martians, presupposing there are Martians, which they’re not but if there were.  If there were Martians wouldn’t God reveal Himself to the Martians as a Martian, and therefore when He came to the planet earth He revealed Himself as a man to us.

 

Why isn’t this true?  What would you say to this?  There’s a very dangerous error in what I just said, an extremely dangerous error, it sounds nice, God has to communicate so He takes the form of the person to whom He’s communicating.  That sounds nice except there is a deadly error which if you allow to go on will poison the entire Christian system.  First let’s answer the question; do we know enough on the basis of God’s Word to know that if He showed up on the planet Mars would He or would He not show up as a Martian?  Think about it for a minute, would He or wouldn’t He?  No.  God would not show up as a Martian on Mars, He’d show up, if He did show up, as a man walking on Mars, whether the Martians liked it or not.  Why would God show up as a member of the human race?  Think.  Why, whenever God shows up in history He is going to show up as a human, not as anything else.  [someone says something].  All right, man in the creation account is made in God’s image; no other creature is, only us.  Therefore we know God’s nature.  Now just suppose God shows up, let’s just take the error that I just showed you and demonstrate why it’s an error.

Here God shows up on earth as a man; maybe He shows up as a Martian on Mars.  And He shows up as something else on another planet.  Do you see the logical result of what you’re going to get into here.  What is the error, besides the fact that it obviously clashes with the Biblical claim that man and man alone is made in God’s image?  Where does this little error take you; learn to think.  When somebody throws something like this at you take it to its logical conclusion and you’ll see the error.  [someone says something] It would contradict God’s immutability, can you show why.  [more said] All right, it would say that He has a double character.  Okay, suppose He shows up on planet Saturn like something else.  Now let’s just have a conference here.  You get a person from the earth, a person from Mars, a person from Saturn, we all get together, three persons sit down and have a conference, the topic of the conference is what is God like.  And the person from Saturn says He’s like we are; the earth person says He’s like we are; the person from Mars says He’s like we are.  Who’s right.  You’ve three contradictory answers, now what are you going to do with the conference.  How can you agree on what God is like?  [someone says something] No, He created them too. That wouldn’t negate the problem.  [someone says something, can’t hear most of it but something about He’d have to die as a Martian or Saturn too]  All right, you’re getting close to seeing what the problem is, that you saw the person of the Lord Jesus Christ as a man, what happens to Jesus Christ Himself if this is true?  What is Jesus Christ now no longer if it’s really true that God shows up like this.  [tape turns] 

 

… they’re fluid in their for.  When God shows up He shows up as a man.  What I’m trying to show you is this, going back to Psalm 96, when they are saying “show forth His salvation from day to day,” show it to all the earth, notice verse 3 “Declare His glory among the heathen, His wonders among all the peoples.”  The Jew would never have thought of Jesus Christ showing up as an Assyrian.  Jehovah would not appear as an Assyrian or a Gentile.  Jehovah, when He appeared would appear as a Hebrew, period.  Gentiles might not like it but that’s the way it is.  God appears as a Jew, not as a non-Jew.  He had a particular form which clearly and maximized the clarity of communication.  So when I look at the Lord Jesus Christ I’m not looking at a mask;  I’m looking at how God really is, and it’s very important you get that point across.  We’re not looking at God wearing a mask in order that He might appear to us; when you look at Jesus Christ you see God as He is.  Now that’s the universality.

 

So in verse 3, when they declare this glory it is a Hebrew message in a Gentile world.  Now this is offensive, you bear down hard at this point because people don’t like it, and this is where you cannot compromise an inch here; you have to be dogmatic with your absolutes here.  If you don’t, if you’re weak and you back off an inch you might as well just throw away the whole case because you’ve lost it.

 

Now let’s go to verses 4-6; here the cause of the praise, why should the nations “declare,” respond to this.  All right, the content, “For the LORD is great; and greatly to be praised; He is to be feared above all gods. [5] For all the gods of the nations are idols; but the LORD made the heavens. [6] Honor and majesty are before Him; strength and beauty are in His sanctuary.”  “For the LORD is great” obviously refers to His essence; the descriptive praise we started with tonight, not declarative, descriptive, emphasis on His essence.  Learn this because for all eternity we’re all going to be doing it according to the book of Revelation.  “Worthy art Thou to be praised, O Lord,” that’s descriptive praise, so now you can practice.  “For the LORD is great, and greatly to be praised,” it means He is praise-able, it’s a passive participle, hard to translate but what it means is His character is that which warrants praise. 

 

Again I remind you, God’s master plan, His total strategy for history is to prove one point: that God is worthy of all creature’s praise.  And He earns that, a strange thing; God appeals to us on the basis of His works, He earns His praiseworthi­ness by what He does for us in history.  But the marvel is that going the other way in the relationship we don’t earn a thing to merit our relation­ship with Him; He gives, we receive, always.  So we don’t earn or do a thing in history to merit God’s attention, but yet God, the infinite God condescends to His creation over and over and over to do things for us, promises us things, work with us, give us things, in order that we can at the end of history truly say yes God, You alone are worthy to be praised.  That is the ultimate goal and it is always this point that the powers of darkness want to blot out.  Whenever you have people that are troubled in this kind of thing, they’re in carnality, and you work with them and sweat with them, you always find out that at the depth of their problem is a warping of the essence of God in their mind; the god of this world has blinded the mind and he is always doing that.  When we don’t trust His promises, isn’t it because he has blinded our mind; you know the old story, oh that promise works for everybody else, all the other Christians, it doesn’t work for me.  What makes you the kook?  Why are you so queer that God’s promises don’t work for you but they work for everybody else.  What’s happened?  You have a bad image of God’s character.  God loves, but not me; yeah, I believe God has the attribute of love, very good, sounds orthodox, but what about you personally, do you believe that He loves you. 

 

Then it says in verse 4 another thing, “He is to be feared above all gods,” that is the word to respect His authority, remember the word “fear” in the Old Testament.  “Fear” comes before love, and why does the Jew today… if you would take an average believer in David’s day and he walked around in Lubbock and saw some bumper sticker that said “I love Jesus” he would have been appalled because he would have realized that you can’t love the Lord unless you first respect Him.  Respect precedes love, and this is why the first commandment, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,” is accompanied with all these verbs to fear, it doesn’t mean be scared of Him, but it just means to respect Him for His character and who He is; He isn’t a Father with a small stick, He’s a Father with a big one and He can wield it with infinite skill, as many of us have found out.  So God is to be respected, and then the love for Him will come.  But concentrate, do I respect God for who He is.  And that’s the hardest lesson for this generation because we don’t have respect for anything, any authority any where and therefore it carries over in the Christian life.  We don’t respect the Word, ah, man’s opinion.  We don’t respect anything and this is where our generation has to work very, very hard until we can honestly say we fear the Lord. 

 

“He is to be feared above all gods.”  Now if you just stopped at the end of verse 4 you’d wonder well, who are the other gods.  Verse 5 tells you who the other gods are and verse 5 sound the death now to the idea that the Old Testament people believed in many gods.  See, here’s Yahweh or Jehovah, that’s one God and some people will teach you that there are many gods that the people believed in and Jehovah was just one of many.  We call that, not monotheism but monolatry, “latry” is worship, worship of one, there are many gods, you take your pick, we worship Jehovah.  That’s not right.  I remember going down to Austin, the textbook committee, seven people had written a high school text for the state of Texas in which this professor said, had it right there in the high school textbook, he quoted 1 Chronicles and said you see, in Solomon’s day they believed in many gods, and then finally they got rid of that idea and in the evolution of their religion they devised monotheism; “they” devised it!  Now besides with conflicting with the whole idea of the Abrahamic Covenant and everything else, this verse shows you right there, it’s a proof text, what stronger proof text can you have that the Old Testament people did not believe there were other gods equal to Jehovah, in no sense of the Word.  “For all the gods of the nations are idols,” and that’s why our God must be worshiped in every nation.  Who are the gods of the nation?  Baal.  Who are some of the gods of the nations today?  Chance, development, progress, they’ve become abstracts but they’re still gods.  And the Bible simply dismisses them as idols. 

 

The word for “idol” here is interesting because the word “idol” here means worthless or ineffective.  Can you see why that last clause is added in verse 5, [“but the LORD made the heavens.”] you see how they answer this charge, what is the difference, do you think is on the mind of the psalmist.  How in his mind does he see the superiority of Yahweh?  What to him is the superiority, what’s he got on his mind when he writes this verse?  What’s the nature of the proof, in other words, that the God of Israel alone is the God with whom we have to do?  Where does he pull it out; think of the divine viewpoint framework.  What’s the first plain in the platform of the Bible?  Creation.  You see, if you don’t have creation you don’t have a thing going for you.  God made, if that’s not true, forget the rest of it, it’s ridiculous; don’t try to mix evolution and the Christian faith, just be honest and go one way or the other but stop standing in the middle, traffic is going to hit you both ways.  And when it says that “all the gods of the nations are idols” and it means the worthless ones, the ineffectual ones, they didn’t do anything in history, they don’t do any thing, they just sit there and look at you. Isaiah is even more sarcastic, he says you have to have chains to hold these things or they tip over, what are you guys doing trusting in this crowd. 

 

But here’s something else that tells us what these gods are.  When this Hebrew text was translated into the Greek, here’s the word they translated this word with: diamonim, it’s the word for demonic, demons, and here is one of the obvious teaching in the Bible; were these gods, yes they are real; they are demons, demons who appear to the pagan priests as they would have these dreams in the temple, you can read this in ancient history, the priests in order to get their inspiration would come and they would sleep in the temple until they had this dream and the temples apparently were demon infested and the demons would appear to the pagan priests in their dreams and the pagan priests would then go out and commission a craftsman or an artist, or he himself would be an artist, and then he would carve the idol and the actual idol that you can see in ancient history books is a rendition of how the demons appeared to these pagan priests.  The first 300 or 400 years of church history most church fathers taught this.  It dropped out because later on the Church got very superstitious about it, but in the early days of the Christian church most Christians accepted that the gods of the nations were nothing else than demons.  Once you see this then you can obviously see why the Hebrews said all the other gods are going to go, they’re going to get flushed, only Jehovah is going to be left when salvation is finished.

 

That’s why in verse 6, “Honor and majesty are before Him; strength and beauty are in His sanctuary.”  You notice “Him” used in apposition with “sanctuary.”  What is the sanctuary?  Historically, I took you back to 1 Chronicles 16, what was the historic incident that set up the whole Levite choir?  Where was the Psalm sung?  Where in the present tense, with a believer in the time of the psalmist be able to see the glory of God?  The ark, in the tabernacle. And that’s what’s meant when it says here, “Honor and majesty are before Him; strength and beauty are in His sanctuary.”  For those of you who haven’t had a chance to work with the concept of the sanctuary, it looks something like this.  They had a Holy of Holies, a holy place, does anybody know what the furniture in the holy place and the furniture in the Holy of Holies spoke of.  That furniture was all designed; what was its point?  The person and work of Jesus Christ.  So when the psalmist here says, “Honor and majesty are before Him, strength and beauty are in His sanctuary,” what does he really have on his mind?  The person and work of Jesus Christ.  That’s what he has on his mind because in the generation in which this Psalm was written that’s what they saw, the furniture that pointed to the person and work of Jesus Christ.  That’s the first half of the Psalm. 

 

We’ll go to verses 7-13, again verse 7-10 you see the imperatives.  “Give unto the LORD,” and it sounds like in verse 7 that you’re supposed to give money but don’t worry, this is not going to hit your pocketbooks.  This is called climactic parallelism and the way it works is that you start a sentence and you just leave it hanging.  Here’s the verb, “give” but it doesn’t tell you what.  It tells you to whom you should give it.  And then the second line of climactic parallelism will then repeat the main verb and then finish the sentence, just to leave you hanging so that you’ll think.  All these literary gimmicks are to get you to think.  “Give unto the LORD,” give what? And then the last of it is “O ye kindreds of the peoples; give unto the LORD glory and strength.”  So the giving is not money, it is praise again.  It’s just another expression, round about way of saying praise. 

 

Verse 8, “Give unto the LORD the glory due His name,” name refers to essence, you see the essence of God, the focal point of all worship.  And by the way, have you noticed anywhere so far any mention of the subjective experience of the psalmist.  You notice, it’s conspicuous.  All you have to do, we haven’t got time to do it, is to pick up the hymnal and just open it up and the chances are out of ten you are going to read some hymn that supposedly is praising God, it isn’t praising God, it’s praising man and his experience, O How I Love Jesus, or something else.  And you don’t read any of that when you read the Psalms.  You see how different the Psalms are. 

 

Verse 9, “Oh, worship,” bring an offering, this is the way of praise for Him, “Oh, worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness,” notice again the Old Testament mentality, but not in our own, is that God’s holiness was something to be enjoyed.  The old Westminster catechism of the old Presbyterian Church, why has man been created? Man has been created to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.  You don’t have to worry that in eternity you’re going to groan and moan your way through.  If you feel that way your regenerate nature hasn’t taken hold yet.  This is the sign of the regenerate nature in your heart; do you enjoy God for just who He is, not what you can get out of Him, but do you enjoy Him personally or do you just trot in when you need a check cashed.  This is the mature faith.  “…the beauty of His holiness, fear before Him, all the earth,” again respect Him.  See the respect and the enjoyment go together.  You don’t enjoy anything you really don’t respect.  The deepest joys in life come in combination with respect.  You respect something you enjoy it. 

 

Then in verse 10, this amplifies in a parallel way that “declare his salvation” in verse 2, “Say among the heathen,” and now we’re going to have four things mentioned in verses 10-12 that you are to say among the heathen.  Who is to say among the heathen?  The believers, they’re to announce these things.  Four things they are to announce and these four things are the gospel as conceived in David’s day.  We today only have half a gospel in the sense that half of the salvation package has actually come to pass, and that is good news, but it’s not all the good news there is.  There’s prophecy yet unfulfilled.  Next time you’re around one of the (quote) “Full Gospel” (end quote) people, tell them that we’re half gospel, and just go on record and say, just to provoke the conversation and see what happens, and that’ll give you an opportunity to go into why we believe in half a gospel.  And the other half is going to be fulfilled later, but it would make an amusing conversation. 

 

“The Lord reigns,” that’s the first thing; this is an announcement.  Turn to Isaiah 52, that famous chapter, 52 and 53, but remember in 52:7, see where the gospel shows up here, look at this.  “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that brings good tidings,” that’s the word for “gospel.”  The “gospel” is an Old English word which means a good spiel, which is a good tale, something that is of great value, “good tidings, that publish peace, that bring good tidings of good, that publishes salvation, that says unto Zion, Thy God reigns.”  Now you say wait a minute, somebody that wasn’t here, do you think you can resolve this little problem.  If God is sovereign, He always has been reigning; why is it then something new as history goes down the time line, all of a sudden there’s a new era in which God reigns and the old era God was not reigning.  How do you reconcile that with the doctrine of God’s sovereignty.  Anyone have an idea how we can solve this problem; it is a problem because if God is reigning He’s always reigning. [someone says something]  They didn’t have any reality of God’s reigning, did they. 

 

All right, this is the thing, God is sovereign over everything, true.  But for a time in history you don’t see God exercising direct judgment upon evil, do you?  Isn’t this what the skeptic always comes up to you with.  Oh, God isn’t a good God, take a look out your window, read the paper, any God that would leave the universe in a wreck like this, you tell me He’s good; you’re crazy.  Now why is the skeptic able to say this?  Because there’s a time delay between the commission of the crime and the execution of judgment upon the criminal.  There’s a time delay between sin and death.  Now that’s God’s grace.  God is being very gracious to not execute judgment upon sin, to wait, to give men a chance to change their mental attitude.  But there is coming a time when that’s not going to be the case, and when we have a graphic political, historical, manifestation of God’s justice, when the crime is committed and instantly you have judgment.  Then God reigns; it will be clear in other words, whereas today it’s indirect and it gets kind of fuzzy.  That’s what “Thy God reigns” means.  “Thy God reigns” means Jesus Christ will reign and you will have perfect peace and so on.  So that’s the first thing in Psalm 96, God reigns. 

 

The second point that is to be announced according to Psalm 96 is “The world also shall be established that it shall not be moved,” this means the physical universe will be stabilized.  This testifies to God’s power over the physical nature which was astounding to the ancient man. As I said before, if you really want to do a psychological exercise to get a personal feeling of how the ancient man felt you’ll have the opportunity in December because one of the largest comets in the 20th century is going to pass close by the earth and you’ll have a chance to observe this.  When you walk out and see this thing in the sky, ask yourself, if you really weren’t brought up in the 20th century and you didn’t have any sense of regularity in nature and all of a sudden you saw this thing, moving, every night it’s moving in a different position, seemingly in collision with everything in the universe, just cuts across all of the stars, the morning star goes from east to west, and you have the moon changing in its trajectory, and this thing doesn’t follow any trajectory, it just goes right through the system.  What is this?  And if you just use that it’ll be an excellent teaching tool.  All right, “the world shall be established that it shall not be moved…”

“…He shall judge the people righteously,” the third announcement, there will be justice, both individual and social.  The fourth announcement, verse 11, “Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; let the sear roar, and the fullness thereof. [12] Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein; then shall all the trees of the forest rejoice.”  This is a testimony that all of nature will respond to God’s reign.  It seems strange again for us living in the 20th century to think this way but you’ve got to go back to the Adam and Eve story.  That’s why it’s not a story, it’s an account of what happened, that God cursed nature and nature hates man.  Nature stumbles us all the time, it’s work for the farmer to maintain his crop in the field. Watch the first hail storm and you’ll see what happens.  The farmer here is always fighting to hold his crops, against weeds, against winds, against hail, against everything to hold that crop.  And against the government.  But he has all these things oriented against him and he has to bring it into submission or he’s not going to be successful. 

 

This is a testimony that salvation is going to be complete.  This is why today we only have half a gospel, we do not have the heavens rejoicing today, the earth is not glad, the seas do not roar their approval, the fields are not joyful, and the trees of the wood are not rejoicing.  That is not happening today; it will happen in the future but not today.  If you want a parallel text look at Isaiah 11, that’ll give you an overview of the millennial condition.

 

Now verse 13, let’s see if we can tie this in.  You see it kind of starts out in an odd way, “Before the LORD,” and then kind of just stops and starts all over again.  What are those words, “before the LORD” business.  If you had quotation marks which most translations don’t, the first set of quotation marks should be “the LORD reigns,” just before “the LORD reigns,” because that’s the beginning of what they’re saying among the nation, and what they’re saying ends with the verb “rejoice” at the end of verse 12, that’s the other quotation mark.  So between the two quote marks you’ve got the content of the gospel that’s being announced to the nation.  Now in verse 13 “before the LORD” refers back to what preceded the first set of quotation marks.  What preceded the first set of quotation marks?  “Say,” that was your verb, “Say among the heathen,” and “Before the LORD” means say this message before the Lord, in other words, respecting His authority, commissioned by Him, open to His guidance, open to His judgment. 

 

And then the last part of verse 13 is another cause of praise.  So far we’ve had a call to praise, the gospel invitation, and now we go to the call, “For He comes to judge the earth,” those of you who have been in liturgical churches, this is the Episcopalian Church or the Lutheran Church you will recognize the end of this because it is in the liturgy, it’s a very beautiful part of the service where this is recited, “For He cometh, for He cometh to judge the earth,” and it’s looking forward to the Second Advent of the Lord Jesus Christ.  “Coming” is a participle, meaning He’s on His way, and this is an urgent announcement just prior to the millennial beginning, that this is about to happen.  Christ is on His way, “He comes to judge the world with righteousness, and the people with His truth,” and this means that the people should praise God for two reasons in this Psalm.  One is His essence, they should praise God because of His essence, that was verses 4-6.  Why is another reason, because they’re going to meet Him as their personal judge.  And remember, this is a Hebrew talking to the Gentiles, our God is going to judge you so you’d better get straightened out.  And furthermore He’s not going to judge you on your standard, He’s going to judge it with His truth, the absolutes of God’s own revelation.  It’s not going to be by man’s or social standards, it will be on His terms.    Next time we’ll summarize the whole Psalm series.