"A Psalm of Asaph.
The Mighty One, God the Lord,
speaks and summons the earth
from the rising of the sun to its setting.
2 Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty,
God shines forth.
3 Our God comes; he does not keep silence;
before him is a devouring fire,
around him a mighty tempest.
4 He calls to the heavens above
and to the earth, that he may judge his people:
5 “Gather to me my faithful ones,
who made a covenant with me by sacrifice!”
6 The heavens declare his righteousness,
for God himself is judge! Selah
7 “Hear, O my people, and I will speak;
O Israel, I will testify against you.
I am God, your God.
8 Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you;
your burnt offerings are continually before me.
9 I will not accept a bull from your house
or goats from your folds.
10 For every beast of the forest is mine,
the cattle on a thousand hills.
11 I know all the birds of the hills,
and all that moves in the field is mine.
12 “If I were hungry, I would not tell you,
for the world and its fullness are mine.
13 Do I eat the flesh of bulls
or drink the blood of goats?
14 Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,
and perform your vows to the Most High,
15 and call upon me in the day of trouble;
I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.”
16 But to the wicked God says:
“What right have you to recite my statutes
or take my covenant on your lips?
17 For you hate discipline,
and you cast my words behind you.
18 If you see a thief, you are pleased with him,
and you keep company with adulterers.
19 “You give your mouth free rein for evil,
and your tongue frames deceit.
20 You sit and speak against your brother;
you slander your own mother's son.
21 These things you have done, and I have been silent;
you thought that I was one like yourself.
But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.
22 “Mark this, then, you who forget God,
lest I tear you apart, and there be none to deliver!
23 The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me;
to one who orders his way rightly
I will show the salvation of God!”"
Psalm 50
In the next two sections, 7-15 and 16-21, the Psalmist deals with the two paramount tendencies which work for the corruption of true religion. The first of these is the reliance on external worship (interestingly, in this stanza, it is breaches of the first table of the Ten Commandments that are dealt with, while in the next (16-21) it is breaches of the second table. Here, sins against God, there sins against our fellows). God's complaint against His people was that, punctilious in their observance of the sacrifices as they were, they had not understood that they were valueless in themselves when what they signified, namely the giving of themselves to God, was not perceived. It is this that lies behind the great prophetic word, 'I will have mercy, not sacrifice'. They multiplied sacrifices, but their hearts were far from God. This is a perennial danger: outward form can often take the place of, and do duty for, inward reality (as we see from our Lord's strictures on Pharisaism in Matthew 6). The second great corruption of religion (16-21) is hypocrisy, and the first surely leads to the second. Preoccupation with the externals of religion tends to make people eventually take up the attitude that outward appearance is more important than inward reality: it becomes more important to appear holy than to be holy, more important to do right things than to be right. This is the fatal thing, for it leads to a dichotomy between belief and behaviour, doctrine and duty, profession and conduct, and the Name of God becomes blasphemed among the Gentiles (Romans 2:24). Compassion, justice and mercy become obscured in a preoccupation with the outward minutiae of one's own spiritual life, which are often mere externals. This, the Psalmist points out, is equivalent to 'forgetting God' (22). Solemn thought, indeed.