"Oh come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
3 For the Lord is a great God,
and a great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
5 The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.
6 Oh come, let us worship and bow down;
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
7 For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.
Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
9 when your fathers put me to the test
and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
10 For forty years I loathed that generation
and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart,
and they have not known my ways.”
11 Therefore I swore in my wrath,
“They shall not enter my rest.”
Psalm 95
The word 'for' in 3 introduces three reasons for worshipping God: God is our King; He is our Creator (5); and He is our Shepherd (7). As to the first and second of these, the words of the well known hymn 'How great Thou art' express the thought as well as any, in the sense of adoring wonder and joy that fills the heart at the thought of all that He is, and all He shows Himself to be. More particularly, however, the idea of God as King speaks of His sovereign sway over all the universe: it is the emphasis that we see throughout the Book of Revelation, with the throne of God towering over turmoil and convulsions of the world. Also, in the idea of the Creator God, the language the Psalmist uses in 4 - 'the deep places of the earth, the height (AV margin) of the hills' - is surely echoed in the New Testament (cf Romans 8:38; Philippians 2:10; Colossians 1:16 - 'neither height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God...'). This is the ultimate meaning of the doctrine of God as Creator. For the idea of the Shepherd - 'the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand' - see John 10:1-16, and the remarkable association of ideas here in the Psalm, 'My sheep hear My
voice' (10:27), said Jesus - and look at the words in 7b, 'Today if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts'. These words bring us to the second part of the Psalm, with its challenge and summons to obedience. We shall consider the implications of this in the next Note.