Psalms 96

Three times in two verses the same command falls like a struck bell: sing… sing… sing unto the LORD. But it is the audience that startles. The psalm does not summon Israel, or the temple choir, or the assembled tribes. It summons all the earth. Every land, every people, every tongue is conscripted into the one choir.

This is an astonishing claim to make in the ancient world, where each nation had its own gods and its own songs, and where the worship of Israel's God might have seemed the private possession of one small people. The psalm will have none of that. The LORD is not a local deity with a local following; He is the God of the whole earth, and the whole earth owes Him a song.

And the song is to be new. Not because the old songs were bad, but because something is always freshly true of this God that yesterday's words cannot exhaust - new mercies, new deliverances, a salvation reaching peoples it had never reached before. A new song is the natural overflow of a heart that has met God doing a new thing.

The song does not stay inside the worshipper. It turns immediately outward: bless his name; shew forth his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the heathen, his wonders among all people (vv. 2-3). Worship and witness are joined at the hip here. To bless God's name is, in the same breath, to tell of His salvation - and not once, but from day to day, a steady daily proclamation rather than a single announcement.

And the audience for the telling is again the widest possible: among the heathen… among all people. The nations are not the enemy to be feared or the outsiders to be kept at arm's length; they are the congregation to be reached.

There is a missionary impulse beating at the very heart of this psalm. The glory of God and the wonders of God are realities meant to be carried - published abroad, spoken into places that have never heard, until the whole earth knows what those who already worship Him know. The psalm assumes that good news this large cannot, in good conscience, be kept quiet.

Why must all the earth sing to this God and no other? Verse 5 gives the reason, and it is uncompromising: For all the gods of the nations are idols: but the LORD made the heavens. The contrast could not be sharper. On one side, the gods of the nations - and the Hebrew word behind idols carries the sense of things that are empty, worthless, nothing at all. They have shrines and names and priests, but behind the carved face there is no one home.

On the other side, the LORD - and the single fact that settles everything: He made the heavens. The idols are made by men; the LORD is the Maker of the very sky above the men who carve them.

This is not narrow intolerance; it is the plainest possible accuracy. To worship an idol is to bow to a thing that cannot see, or speak, or save, while the living God who flung the stars across the dark waits to be known. The psalm is not sneering at the nations; it is trying to free them. It calls the whole earth to abandon what is empty and turn to the One who is really there - the only worship that is not, in the end, a kind of heartbreak.

Now the psalm turns to the nations and hands them the words of an invitation: Give unto the LORD, O ye kindreds of the people, give unto the LORD glory and strength… bring an offering, and come into his courts. O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness (vv. 7-9). Notice that the families of the earth are not summoned to be destroyed or subdued; they are summoned to come in - into His courts, with an offering in their hands, as worshippers rather than captives.

And the worship has a particular flavour: the beauty of holiness. It is a haunting phrase. Holiness is not pictured here as something severe or forbidding, but as something beautiful - the loveliness of God's utter purity, the radiance of His set-apart majesty, drawing the worshipper rather than driving him away. To worship in the beauty of holiness is to be caught up in a glory that is at once holy and lovely, awesome and attractive.

The same God who is to be feared above all gods (v. 4) is the God whose holiness is a beauty worth crossing the earth to behold. Fear and delight meet in this worship, as they always do when a creature stands before the living God.

The psalm now states the message its heralds are to carry to the ends of the earth, and it is three words: the LORD reigneth (v. 10). This is the headline of the good news the nations are to hear - not merely that the LORD exists, or that He is great, but that He reigns. He is King, and His kingship is not a distant abstraction; it has consequences the whole creation can feel.

Two of them follow at once. First, the world also shall be established that it shall not be moved - under the reign of the true King there is a stability nothing can finally shake; the world rests on a throne, not on chance. Second, he shall judge the people righteously. The reign of the LORD means judgement is coming - and for a world groaning under crookedness and cruelty, that is not a threat but a hope. A King reigns who will at last set things right, weighing every people not by power or partiality but by righteousness.

To say among the heathen that the LORD reigneth is to announce that the world has a rightful King, that it is held and not adrift, and that the day is coming when all wrongs answer to Him.

And now the strangest, most beautiful turn of the whole psalm. Having called all the earth to sing, the psalm widens the choir one final time - past the nations, past humanity altogether - until it takes in the creation itself: Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof. Let the field be joyful… then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice (vv. 11-12). The heavens, the sea with everything in it, the open fields, the very trees of the forest - all of it summoned to break into joy.

This is no mere poetic flourish. Scripture knows that the creation itself was caught up in the wreckage of human sin and groans under it, and that creation itself waits for the day of its release. So when the King comes to judge the earth in righteousness, the rivers and forests are not bystanders; they are among the glad.

The roar of the sea becomes applause; the trees of the wood lift their branches like a congregation rising to its feet. A world that has long lain under futility hears that its true King is coming to set everything right - and the only fitting response, from the cedars to the breakers, is joy.