Psalms 47

The psalm begins the way a coronation begins - with noise. O clap your hands, all ye people; shout unto God with the voice of triumph. There is nothing subdued about this. Clapping and shouting are the gestures of a crowd gathered for something momentous, the sounds people make when a king appears and the whole nation has turned out to greet him. The voice of triumph is the ringing cry of victory, the shout that goes up when the battle is won and the conqueror comes home. And notice the very first thing the psalm does with this command: it throws it wide open. All ye people. Not Israel only, not the worshippers in one temple, but all peoples, every nation on the earth. From its opening breath the psalm has a horizon as wide as the world. The King it is about to crown is not the property of one tribe; He is the King the whole earth is summoned to acclaim. That universal reach - the nations themselves called to clap and shout - is the note the psalm will sound again and again, all the way to its final verse.³

The reason for all the noise is given at once: For the LORD most high is terrible; he is a great King over all the earth. The word terrible here does not mean cruel or dreadful in the modern sense; it means awe-inspiring, fearful in the way that overwhelming greatness is fearful - the trembling wonder a small creature feels in the presence of immense power and majesty. He is not terrible the way a tyrant is terrible; He is terrible the way the sea is, the way a mountain is, the way glory is. And He is a great King over all the earth. Hold the scope of that. Not king over Israel only, not king over those who acknowledge Him, but King over all the earth - over every nation, every power, every people who has never heard His name and every power that defies it. His kingship is not a claim waiting to be ratified by the nations' consent; it is a fact about the way things are. He reigns over all the earth whether all the earth knows it or not. The psalm does not argue Him onto the throne. It announces a throne already occupied and calls the world to catch up to reality.

Verses 3 and 4 turn from the King's greatness to His care for His own: He shall subdue the people under us, and the nations under our feet. He shall choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom he loved. The great King over all the earth is also, intimately, their King, and He acts for them - subduing what rises against them, and choosing their inheritance, the portion of land and life He has set aside as theirs. Mark the verb: He shall choose it. The inheritance is not seized by their strength or selected by their preference; it is appointed by His love. And that love is named without embarrassment: the excellency of Jacob whom he loved. The God who reigns over all the earth has, of His own free affection, bound Himself to a particular people, fixed His love on them, and taken charge of their future. There is no tension in the psalm between these two truths - that He is King of all, and that He loves His own and chooses their portion. The sovereign over every nation is the same God who, out of sheer love, attends to the inheritance of those who are His. Then comes Selah - a pause, a held breath - before the psalm rises to its great central image.

Now the psalm reaches the image everything else has been climbing toward: God is gone up with a shout, the LORD with the sound of a trumpet. The whole song turns on the verb gone up. God ascends. Picture a king at the close of a triumph, processing up to the throne-room while the trumpets blast and the people roar - that is the scene the psalm paints, only the King is God Himself, and the throne is over all the earth. The shout and the sound of a trumpet are festival noise, the great clamor of a coronation: the trumpet that announces a king has come, the shout of the crowd that hails him. There is movement here, and direction - up. The God who is already most high (v. 2) is seen rising to take His seat, ascending to the place of rule while heaven and earth ring with the announcement. It is the most vivid moment in the psalm, and it is no accident that it sits at the very center. Everything before it summoned the world to watch; everything after it describes the King now seated and supreme. The ascent is the hinge on which the whole song turns.

Around that central image the psalm breaks into its most insistent command: Sing praises to God, sing praises: sing praises unto our King, sing praises. For God is the King of all the earth: sing ye praises with understanding. Count it - five times in two verses the song commands the singing, as though the one word praise could not possibly be said enough. This is not mere repetition for emphasis; it is the sound of a heart so full it keeps returning to the same note. And then a remarkable qualifier: sing ye praises with understanding. The praise commanded here is not mindless noise. The Hebrew suggests singing with skill and insight - worship that engages the mind, that knows what it is saying and why. The psalm wants more than loud voices; it wants comprehending hearts. It is possible to sing the right words with no grasp of their weight, and the psalm guards against it: understand what you are singing. Know who this King is, what He has done, what it means that He reigns over all the earth - and let the song rise out of that knowledge. The loudest praise in Scripture is also, here, the most thoughtful. Volume and understanding are not opposites; the psalm asks for both at once.

The psalm shows the King in His place: God reigneth over the heathen: God sitteth upon the throne of his holiness. Two things are said, and both matter. First, He sitteth. After the ascent, after the trumpet and the shout, the King takes His seat - and sitting is the posture of settled, untroubled rule. He is not pacing the throne-room, anxiously defending a contested crown; He is enthroned, at rest, in full possession of His reign. The battle is not still in doubt. The King is seated. And second, the throne is named: the throne of his holiness. His rule is not raw power only; it is holy power. The seat from which He governs all the nations is a throne of holiness - utterly pure, set apart from all evil, perfectly righteous in every exercise of its authority. This is no small thing. The history of the world is largely the history of thrones corrupted, power turned to cruelty, kings who ruled for themselves. The psalm sets against all of that a King who sitteth upon the throne of his holiness - whose every act of rule is as clean as it is mighty. To be ruled by this King is to be ruled rightly, by One whose power and whose goodness are never at odds.

The psalm ends by gathering the whole earth before the throne: The princes of the people are gathered together, even the people of the God of Abraham: for the shields of the earth belong unto God: he is greatly exalted. The princes - the rulers, the men of power - are assembled, drawn in around the King. And then the closing image: the shields of the earth belong unto God. A shield is the instrument of a nation's defense, and by extension its rulers and protectors, the powers in which a people trusts to keep them safe. The psalm sweeps them all up in a single phrase: they belong unto God. Every defense, every protector, every earthly power that seems to hold a nation's safety in its hand - all of it is His, under His authority, deriving whatever strength it has from Him. There is no shield in all the earth that stands outside His ownership, no power that can finally defy Him. And so the psalm closes on the only possible conclusion: he is greatly exalted. The God who went up with a shout is now lifted high above every rival, every throne, every shield - supreme and unrivaled over all the earth. The song that began with a command to the nations ends with the nations' every power laid at the feet of the King.