Psalms 67
Psalm 67 is short - only seven verses - but its reach is the whole world. It opens with words any worshipper in Israel would have recognized at once, an echo of the blessing the priests were commanded to speak over the people: God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his face to shine upon us. Mercy, blessing, the shining of God's face - these are the great marks of His favor, the sense that the God of heaven has turned toward you and is for you.
But the prayer does not stop where most of our prayers for blessing stop. It immediately names a reason that points away from the ones being blessed: That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations.
That little word - that - is the hinge of the whole psalm. The blessing is asked for, but not as an end in itself. It is asked for so that something larger may happen: so that God's way - His character, His justice, the path of His salvation - may be known upon earth, and His saving health may reach all nations. The favor poured out on one people is meant to overflow its banks until the whole earth is reached by it.
And so the psalm breaks into a refrain it will sing twice, a summons that gathers in everyone: Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. Not Israel only. All the people. The whole human family, drawn into one great chorus of praise to the God who saves.
From there the song widens further still. O let the nations be glad and sing for joy: for thou shalt judge the people righteously, and govern the nations upon earth. The grounds for the nations' gladness is not merely mercy but justice - the assurance that the God who rules the world rules it rightly, fairly, with a hand that can be trusted.
And then the closing harvest, where blessing and praise come full circle: Then shall the earth yield her increase; and God, even our own God, shall bless us. God shall bless us; and all the ends of the earth shall fear him. The prayer that began with bless us ends with all the ends of the earth - the blessing of one people opening out, at last, into the worship of the whole world.
Hidden in that opening line, too, is a longing the gospel will answer by name: the shining face of God becoming a light to lighten the Gentiles.
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Psalm 67:1-4 · To the chief Musician on Neginoth, A Psalm or SongThat Thy Way May Be Known
1God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his face to shine upon us; Selah. 2That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations. 3Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. 4O let the nations be glad and sing for joy: for thou shalt judge the people righteously, and govern the nations upon earth. Selah.
The psalm opens with words that would have sounded familiar to anyone standing in the worship of Israel, for they are an unmistakable echo of the blessing the priests were commanded to pronounce over the people: The LORD bless thee, and keep thee: The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee (Num. 6:24-25). Here the worshippers take that blessing - once spoken over them by the priest - and pray it back to God for themselves: God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his face to shine upon us.
Three things are asked, and they belong together. Mercy - the favor of a God who need not be kind but chooses to be. Blessing - the good that God gives, the flourishing only He can grant. And the shining of his face - the most personal of all, the picture of God turning toward you with delight, the way a face lights up at the sight of someone loved.
To ask for the shining of God's face is to ask for nothing less than His glad attention, His presence turned warmly your way. It is a prayer for the whole of God's favor, gathered into one breath.
And then comes the hinge of the entire psalm, the small word on which everything turns: That thy way may be known upon earth. That. So that. The blessing of verse 1 is not requested as an end in itself; it is requested for a purpose, and the purpose points outward, away from the ones being blessed. They ask to be blessed so that God's way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations.
Pause over how rare and beautiful this is. The natural human instinct is to ask for blessing and stop there - to want the shining face of God on us and our own. But this prayer cannot rest until the blessing has done its larger work: making God known, not to one people, but upon earth, among all nations. God's way - the whole pattern of His character, His justice, His mercy, the road of His salvation - is meant to become visible to the watching world through the people He has favored.
The blessing is a means; the knowledge of God among the nations is the end.
Those who are blessed become, whether they intend it or not, a kind of window through which the world catches sight of what God is like.
And that is exactly how the gospel announces the coming of Christ. When the aged Simeon took the infant Jesus in his arms in the temple, he blessed God and said, mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel (Luke 2:30-32). There is Psalm 67 fulfilled in a single sentence: the salvation (the very yeshu'ah of v. 2) prepared before the face of all people; the light that comes through Israel but shines out to lighten the Gentiles - to reach the nations the psalm longed for.
The shining face of God, prayed for over one people, came at last as a Person, the One who said, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life (John 8:12). And the light was never meant to stay in one place; the risen Lord sent it out: ye shall be witnesses unto me… unto the uttermost part of the earth (Acts 1:8).
So when this psalm asks for God's blessing only that His way might be known among all nations, it is reaching, across the centuries, for Christ - the saving health of God, the light to lighten the Gentiles, the One in whom the shining face of God turns at last toward the whole world.
Out of that vision rises the refrain the psalm will sing twice, here and again at its center: Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. The repetition within the single verse is not mere poetic habit; it is an insistence, a widening, a door thrown open. First the people - then, as if that were not enough, all the people. Every nation, every tongue, every tribe of the earth, summoned into one chorus.
And the next verse names why the nations themselves should be glad to come: O let the nations be glad and sing for joy: for thou shalt judge the people righteously, and govern the nations upon earth.
The grounds for their gladness is striking. It is not first that God is merciful to them - though He is - but that He judges righteously and governs the world justly. There is deep relief in that for a world weary of crooked rulers and twisted justice: the God who governs the nations does so rightly, with a fairness that can be trusted absolutely. The nations are not summoned to praise a tyrant they must flatter, but a King whose rule is so just that to come under it is cause for joy.
It is worth asking honestly what we think our blessings are for. The instinct of the heart is to treat them as ours - earned, deserved, ours to enjoy and protect. This psalm gently corrects that instinct. The favor God shows you - the security, the relationships, the provision, the very shining of His face on your life - was never meant to terminate on you. It was meant to flow through you, so that someone watching your life might catch sight of what God is like and be drawn toward Him.
You are blessed, in part, so that God's way might be known. So look at the good in your life again and ask the missions question this psalm is really asking: who else is this for? Whose knowledge of God might depend, in some small way, on how the blessing God gave you flows out through you to them?
Psalm 67:5-7All the Ends of the Earth
5Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. 6Then shall the earth yield her increase; and God, even our own God, shall bless us. 7God shall bless us; and all the ends of the earth shall fear him.
The refrain returns, word for word, at the very heart of the psalm: Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. A psalm of only seven verses gives this one line twice - once near the start, once near the end - and the repetition is the point. It frames everything between. Whatever else the psalm says about blessing and harvest and the justice of God, the thing it most wants is this: that all the people would praise Him.
The doubled refrain works like the two hands of the psalm, reaching out on either side to gather the whole world into a single song.
It is worth noticing that the great longing here is not that the nations would merely be saved, or merely be safe, but that they would praise - that the whole earth would find its voice and turn it toward God. Salvation, in the vision of this psalm, is not finally about the rescued; it is about the One who is worthy to be praised by all He has rescued. The end of the missions story is not a counted multitude but a singing one.
Now the song turns to harvest: Then shall the earth yield her increase; and God, even our own God, shall bless us. The little word then ties the harvest to everything that came before - when the nations are glad, when God's way is known, when praise rises from all the peoples, then the earth itself responds with fruitfulness.
There is an old and deep connection in Scripture between the rightness of God's people before Him and the flourishing of the land beneath them; when worship is whole, creation answers with abundance. But the psalm is careful to keep the increase from becoming the point. It does not say then the earth shall yield her increase and stop, as though crops were the goal. It says the earth yields her increase, and God… shall bless us - the true gift is not the harvest but the God who gives it.
And mark the tender phrase tucked into the middle: even our own God. Not God in the abstract, not merely the God who governs the nations from on high - our own God, the One who has bound Himself to His people in covenant, who belongs to them and to whom they belong. The whole wide vision of the nations never loosens that intimate grip: the God of all the earth is still, gladly, our own.
There is all the people praising at last - every nation, every tongue, gathered into one numberless chorus, crying out the very thing the psalm names as God's gift to the world: salvation, the saving health of Psalm 67:2, ascribed now to God and to the Lamb who was slain.
And the road from this psalm's prayer to that final scene runs straight through the command the risen Christ left His followers: Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them… and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world (Matt. 28:19-20). The psalm prayed that all peoples would praise; Christ commanded that all nations be reached; and the last book of the Bible shows the prayer and the command meeting in a multitude no one can count.
So Psalm 67 is not only a prayer - it is a promise on its way to being kept. The God who blessed one people that all the earth might know Him will not rest until every nation stands before Him and sings.
The psalm closes by repeating its central word one last time and then flinging the door as wide as it will go: God shall bless us; and all the ends of the earth shall fear him. Twice in two verses the people say God shall bless us - but the blessing does not curve back to rest on them. It opens outward in the very next breath: and all the ends of the earth shall fear him.
This is where the whole psalm has been traveling from its first line. It began with bless us; it ends with all the ends of the earth. The blessing asked for in verse 1 has done its appointed work, flowing through the blessed until it reaches the farthest edges of the world. And the response of the ends of the earth is to fear him - not to cower in terror, but to render that deep reverence and awe which is the right posture of every creature before its Maker, the beginning of all wisdom.
The psalm thus ends with the whole earth gathered in worship: not one people praising God in one place, but the ends of the earth themselves bowed in reverence before the God who blesses. The prayer of seven short verses turns out to have been a prayer for the redemption of the world.
That is the arc this psalm invites your own life to trace. It is easy to let the blessings of God curve inward - to let the favor God shows us make our world smaller, more comfortable, more about us. This psalm pulls the other way. It takes the most personal prayer imaginable, the shining of God's face on you, and bends it outward until it reaches the ends of the earth.
You are not asked to despise the blessing or feel guilty for it; the people in this psalm gladly say bless us. You are asked to let it flow. To remember, when you count your mercies, that you were blessed so that God's way might be known - that your small, ordinary, blessed life is meant to be one more channel through which the saving health of God runs out toward someone who has not yet learned to praise Him. Let the blessing travel. Let it reach, through you, a little further toward the ends of the earth.
Where this echoes in Scripture
That Thy Way May Be Known
- Numbers 6:24-26The LORD bless thee, and keep thee: The LORD make his face shine upon thee... and give thee peace.The priestly blessing echoed in verse 1 - mercy, blessing, and the shining face of God, prayed back to Him.
- Genesis 12:2-3I will bless thee... and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.The shape of the blessing in verse 1 - one people blessed so that all the families of the earth might be.
- Luke 2:30-32Mine eyes have seen thy salvation... a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.The shining face and saving health of verses 1-2 - the light through Israel that reaches all nations, come in Christ.
- Acts 28:28The salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles, and that they will hear it.The saving health (yeshu'ah) of verse 2 going out at last to all the nations the psalm longed for.
All the Ends of the Earth
- Revelation 7:9-10A great multitude... of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne... Salvation to our God.The refrain of verses 3 and 5 answered - all the people praising at last, every nation before the throne.
- Matthew 28:19-20Go ye therefore, and teach all nations... and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.The missions heart of the psalm - the saving health carried to all nations by Christ's own command.
- Galatians 3:14That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ.The blessing of verses 6-7 flowing to the nations - Abraham's blessing reaching the Gentiles in Christ.
- Psalm 22:27All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the LORD: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee.The close of verse 7 - all the ends of the earth turning to fear and worship the God who blesses.