Psalms 81
Psalm 81 carries the heading To the chief Musician upon Gittith, A Psalm of Asaph - one of the songs of the temple guild Asaph led, and almost certainly written for a great festival. It opens with a burst of noise and joy: Sing aloud unto God our strength… Take a psalm, and bring hither the timbrel, the pleasant harp… Blow up the trumpet in the new moon, in the time appointed, on our solemn feast day (vv. 1-3). The trumpet, the new moon, the appointed feast - this is a summons to the whole nation to gather and remember. And what they are to remember is named at once: a testimony God ordained in Joseph… when he went out through the land of Egypt (v. 5). The feast exists to keep the Exodus alive in the memory of every generation.3
Then something rare happens in the Psalms. The human voice that called the people to sing falls silent, and God Himself begins to speak - and He keeps speaking, in the first person, almost to the end. He recalls how He lifted the burden from Israel's shoulder, answered them in the secret place of thunder, proved them at the waters of Meribah (vv. 6-7). He pleads with an aching tenderness: Hear, O my people… O Israel, if thou wilt hearken unto me (v. 8). And He lays out, in a single line, the most open-handed promise in all the Psalter: I am the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt: open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it (v. 10). The God who once rained bread out of heaven asks His people only to come empty and open - and He will do the rest.
But the psalm does not end in promise; it ends in grief. My people would not hearken to my voice; and Israel would none of me (v. 11). The open hand was refused. And so God does the most sorrowful thing a love that will not coerce can do: So I gave them up unto their own hearts' lust: and they walked in their own counsels (v. 12). Then comes the line at the heart of the whole psalm - not anger but longing, heaven sighing over a people it cannot make come home: Oh that my people had hearkened unto me, and Israel had walked in my ways! (v. 13). It is the very sorrow the Lord Jesus would one day weep over Jerusalem (Matt. 23:37; Luke 19:41-42). The psalm closes on the feast that might have been - the finest of the wheat, honey out of the rock - food forfeited only because His people would not open their mouths to receive it.2
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Psalm 81:1-5 · To the chief Musician upon Gittith, A Psalm of AsaphThe Festal Call
1Sing aloud unto God our strength: make a joyful noise unto the God of Jacob. 2Take a psalm, and bring hither the timbrel, the pleasant harp with the psaltery. 3Blow up the trumpet in the new moon, in the time appointed, on our solemn feast day. 4For this was a statute for Israel, and a law of the God of Jacob. 5This he ordained in Joseph for a testimony, when he went out through the land of Egypt: where I heard a language that I understood not.
The psalm does not ease in; it erupts. Sing aloud unto God our strength: make a joyful noise unto the God of Jacob (v. 1). Every verb is loud - sing aloud, make a joyful noise - and the instruments pile up: take a psalm, and bring hither the timbrel, the pleasant harp with the psaltery (v. 2). This is the worship of a whole people on a feast day, not a quiet private devotion. And notice the two names it reaches for: God our strength, and the God of Jacob. The first names what He is to them now - the place their strength comes from. The second names how far back the relationship goes - all the way to Jacob, the wrestling patriarch, the father of the tribes. The joy is loud because it is grounded. They are not working up an emotion; they are celebrating a God who has been faithful since before they were born, and who is, this very day, their strength.1
The feast has a content, and verse 5 names it: This he ordained in Joseph for a testimony, when he went out through the land of Egypt. The celebration is not an empty ritual on the calendar; it is a testimony - a standing witness, set up in the time of Joseph (a name here for the whole people of Israel) at the great moment he went out through the land of Egypt. The Exodus is the event the festival exists to preserve. Every blast of the trumpet, every gathering at the new moon, points back to the night God broke a slave-people out of the strongest empire on earth. And then the verse turns mysterious: where I heard a language that I understood not. The speaker seems to step, for an instant, into Israel's own experience - the strangeness of Egypt, the foreign tongue of their oppressors, the bewilderment of a people far from home. Or it may be the hinge into the next movement, where a new voice - God's own - is about to be heard. Either way, the festival's whole purpose is memory: keep telling the story, so that the God who delivered you once is never forgotten.
Psalm 81:6-10Open Thy Mouth Wide, and I Will Fill It
6I removed his shoulder from the burden: his hands were delivered from the pots. 7Thou calledst in trouble, and I delivered thee; I answered thee in the secret place of thunder: I proved thee at the waters of Meribah. Selah. 8Hear, O my people, and I will testify unto thee: O Israel, if thou wilt hearken unto me; 9There shall no strange god be in thee; neither shalt thou worship any strange god. 10I am the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt: open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it.
Now the voice changes. The one who called the people to sing falls silent, and God Himself begins to speak - and He will not stop until the psalm ends. He starts by recounting what He has done, in the most physical terms: I removed his shoulder from the burden: his hands were delivered from the pots (v. 6). This is the language of the brickyards of Egypt - the load lifted off a slave's aching shoulder, the hands set free from the heavy baskets they carried. God does not speak of the Exodus in abstractions. He speaks of a body that no longer has to bear what crushed it. Then He widens the picture across the whole wilderness story: Thou calledst in trouble, and I delivered thee; I answered thee in the secret place of thunder: I proved thee at the waters of Meribah (v. 7). They cried; He answered - out of the thundercloud at Sinai, and even at Meribah, the place where they quarrelled and doubted, He gave them water from the rock. The whole history is one long record of a God who hears trouble and acts. Selah - pause, and let that land.
Before the great promise comes the one condition, and it is the first commandment in miniature: There shall no strange god be in thee; neither shalt thou worship any strange god (v. 9). The God who lifted the burden and answered from the thunder asks one thing in return - that He alone be God to them. A strange god is a foreign one, an imported substitute, anything set up in the heart's holy place where only the LORD belongs. The logic is tender, not tyrannical: the same God who proved Himself faithful in Egypt and at Meribah is the only one who has ever actually delivered them, so to run after some other god is to abandon the only One who has ever kept a promise to them. And there is room in this for every age. The strange gods are rarely carved statues now; they are the things we quietly trust to do for us what only God can do - to make us safe, to make us full, to make us matter. The verse clears the heart of rivals precisely so that the next verse can fill it.
Psalm 81:11-16Oh That My People Had Hearkened
11But my people would not hearken to my voice; and Israel would none of me. 12So I gave them up unto their own hearts' lust: and they walked in their own counsels. 13Oh that my people had hearkened unto me, and Israel had walked in my ways! 14I should soon have subdued their enemies, and turned my hand against their adversaries. 15The haters of the LORD should have submitted themselves unto him: but their time should have endured for ever. 16He should have fed them also with the finest of the wheat: and with honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee.
After the wide-open promise, a single word breaks the music: But. But my people would not hearken to my voice; and Israel would none of me (v. 11). The open hand was held out, and it was refused. Read the verbs closely, because they are about the will, not the ability. It is not that Israel could not hear - God had spoken plainly, lifted their burden, answered their cries. It is that they would not. Would none of me is even starker: they wanted none of Him. The most generous offer ever made - open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it - was met not with hunger but with a turned back. This is the deepest mystery and the deepest sorrow of the whole relationship between God and His people: that a love this open can be, and is, refused. God will not force the mouth open. He holds out the bread of heaven, and waits, and a people who could have everything choose to want none of it.
The next verse is among the most sobering in Scripture: So I gave them up unto their own hearts' lust: and they walked in their own counsels (v. 12). Here is what a love that refuses to coerce finally does when it is refused - it lets the refusal stand. God gives them up, not to a punishment He invents, but to the very thing they insisted on: their own hearts' desires, their own counsels, their own way. This is judgment, but it is judgment with a terrible mercy in it - God honouring the freedom He gave, even when it breaks His heart. The apostle Paul would later describe the slow ruin of a world the same way, three times over: God gave them up… God gave them up… God gave them over to a reprobate mind (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28). To be given over to your own counsels sounds at first like freedom; it is in fact the heaviest sentence there is, because it means getting exactly what you wanted and discovering it was never enough. The fence God puts around the heart is not a cage. To be left outside it, walking in your own counsels, is the real prison.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Psalm 81 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for shama (vv. 8, 11, 13, “hear, hearken, obey”), for rachab (v. 10, to “open wide”), for the festal teqa and the shophar of verse 3, and for the long Jewish reading of this psalm as the song for the new-moon feast.
- Psalm 81 ↔ Luke 1 · Matthew 5 · Matthew 23 · John 6Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Psalm 81 to the Gospel - the God who fills the hungry (Luke 1:53; Matt. 5:6), the lament over a people who would not come (Matt. 23:37; Luke 19:41-42), and the wheat and the rock that meet in the bread of life (John 6:35) and the Rock that followed Israel (1 Cor. 10:4).
- Psalm 81 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Psalm 81 - the festal setting of the new moon and solemn feast day, the shift from the congregation's call to God's own first-person speech at verse 6, the difficult language that I understood not of verse 5, and the conditional grief of verses 13-16.
Where this echoes in Scripture
The Festal Call
- Leviticus 23:24In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall ye have a sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets.The new-moon trumpet-feast behind verse 3 - the appointed day Israel was commanded to keep.
- Numbers 10:10in the day of your gladness, and in your solemn days, and in the beginnings of your months, ye shall blow with the trumpets.The trumpet sounded over the feasts as a remembrance before God - the practice of verses 1-3.
- Exodus 13:3Remember this day, in which ye came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage.The Exodus “testimony” the feast preserves (v. 5) - the deliverance Israel must never forget.
- Psalm 98:4Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise.The same loud, instrumented joy commanded in verses 1-2 - worship that refuses to stay quiet.
Open Thy Mouth Wide, and I Will Fill It
- Luke 1:53He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.Mary’s song of the God of verse 10 - who fills the hungry, the open-mouthed, not the self-sufficient.
- Matthew 5:6Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.Jesus pronounces the promise of verse 10 as blessing - the hungry are the ones God fills.
- Exodus 16:4Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you.The first literal filling of Israel’s open mouths - the manna behind “I will fill it” (v. 10).
- Exodus 20:2-3I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt... Thou shalt have no other gods before me.The exact pairing of verses 9-10 - the Deliverer’s claim, and the one rival-clearing condition.
Oh That My People Had Hearkened
- Matthew 23:37how often would I have gathered thy children together... and ye would not!Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem echoes verse 13 exactly - “I would… and ye would not.”
- Luke 19:41-42And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it.The tears behind the “Oh that” of verse 13 - the grief of refused love made visible.
- Romans 1:24Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts.Paul’s threefold “God gave them up” - the judgment of verse 12, letting refusal stand.
- 1 Corinthians 10:4they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.The honey-from-the-rock of verse 16 - the Rock that fed Israel revealed at last as Christ.