1O come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
2Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
3For the Lord is a great God,
and a great King above all gods.
4In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
5The sea is his, for he made it;
for his hands formed the dry land.
6O come, let us worship and bow down,
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
7For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.
“For” — not the preposition/adverb, as in “I need a new battery for my car, but I don’t have the money for it” — but the conjunction, as in Psalm 95:3 & 7, is not a word we use much nowadays except in reading the Bible or while trying to sound old-fashioned. It says that the words that come next give a reason for the words that come before. So the reason we “sing to the Lord . . .” (verses 1 & 2) is that he is a “great God . . .” (verses 3–5). And the reason we worship him (verse 6) is that “he is our God” and we are his (verse 7).
It is good to be reminded of those reasons for worship because so much of our way of life makes worship seem like something from another kind of existence. Perhaps it is something done by space aliens (or angels, which would be true) or something done in a language we don’t understand and don’t have the facial anatomy to speak. We can have such a struggle to keep up with all we have to do — or think we have to do — and to keep our cool in the midst of it that relaxing enough to let off an occasional “joyful noise” seems impossible or even inappropriate or caveman-ish.
So we get these reminders. The scale on which we begin (and only begin!) to think about God is much larger than both our daily fussin’ and our loftiest thoughts of the wide universe. If a little lapdog were to squeak on seeing a the world’s biggest dog, we might take that as an example of how the “joyful noise” begins: not with comprehension but with sheer amazement that breaks through even our smug scientific reduction of everything we see. We “sing to the Lord” because he is not at all what our experience has led us to expect.
Just as science can give us a sense that humanity can rise to be, in place of God, the one in whose “hand are the depths of the earth” (verse 4), so also my (or your) individual sense of having things (i.e., life, both daily and in the long term) under control can be a way of stepping into God’s shoes. The Bible is ours so that we can read of one for whom that “under control” is true in ways we haven’t the mental capacity to understand.
Yet that one, that God, is ours, and we are his. Sheep go where the shepherd leads them, and there they need only receive what is provided. So we have the strange identification of ourselves as “the people of [God’s] pasture,” as if we should get down on all fours and bend our necks down to munch on what springs from the ground, which isn’t far off the mark because the necessary and good things of life are, in fact, what we merely receive. But the strangest thing is that the God who busied himself with creating the universe also looks after individual sheep, sparrows (Matthew 10:29), and Christians.
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Psalm 95 is quoted here from the Revised Standard Version.
- These posts on the Psalms are in aid of the reading of the Psalms—one a day through the first five months of 2022—by members, attenders, friends, et al. of Together Church, Wyoming, MI.
The One Story 