Psalm 95A - Sing and Shout!

For many years now Worship Leaders around the world have been recording their corporate worship experiences where congregations gather together and invite the community into arenas for large event worship experiences. People can purchase the recorded products. In one such worship experience, Arizona worship leader and recording artist B.J. Putnam began his worship experience with a song called “Dance," which is on YouTube at: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7DJqxsQph4

and the lyrics are:

[Chorus ]

Everybody dance the dance of freedom

Everybody shout the shout of joy

Come on, come on and praise Him

Get up and make some noise

Everybody dance

Hey! Hey! Hey!

Everybody dance

Hey! Hey! Hey!

[Verse 1]

I have good, good news for you

There is a God who loves you

And He calls you His own

He has given life

Life for you and me, ooh

And now we are free

[Verse 2]

There has been a change in me

My world's never been the same

Since I've found You

You have given life

Life for all who will believe

And now we are free

BJ Putnam, Doug Engquist

©2012 Centricity Songs R E M Publishing DLD Music

This expression of praise may not be appropriate for all congregations. In East Africa, dance plays an integral role in the worship experience. Everyone is moving as the praise and worship part of the service develops. There are many songs, and the music builds in intensity and energy from song to song, as do the dances. The song style is different than the Western “Hillsong” model, but the element of dance is definitely integral to the experience.

In the Presbyterian Church of America, this song would probably be too much for most congregations to use, especially for older communities. They would not enjoy the musical style, and they certainly would not dance. Ever. Not a chance.

And yet, Psalm 95 is an exhortation to praise and worship in a way which is more … cut loose. 

O come, let us sing for joy to the Lord,

Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation.

Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving,

Let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms. (Psalm 95: 1-2, NASB)

The exhortations in these opening verses are to sing and shout:

Come

Sing joyfully

Shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation

Come with Thanksgiving

Shout joyfully with psalms

i) Come

The word is the imperative of “to walk”, so it might be better translated “Move it!” or “Let’s get going!”

It is a call to action. “Get up!” “Let’s go!”

ii) Sing [for joy] to the Lord 

verb: “ranan” - Piel = call loudly

to Yahweh - the name of God revealed to Moses - the “I AM”.

iii) Shout [joyfully] to the rock of our salvation

verb: “rua” = a war cry of alarm

The English translators of the NASB and NIV have added the words joy and joyfully to the first verse of Psalm 95, and thus have colored the expressions, making them sweet sounding when instead they should be energetic.

iv) Come before His presence with thanksgiving

“Come before” = “qadam" - to meet; to confront; to have a meeting, to make an appointment

A meeting with your doctor or your lawyer would be this kind of meeting.

“His presence” - literally, his face. Meet God face to face. How awesome is that? 

“with thanksgiving” - we recognize that God provides, sustains, and gives us our lives and our very being. We acknowledge Him as the authority in our lives. But not with fear and trembling - this is a positive expression.

v) Shout joyful to Him with psalms

“shout joyfully” = “nariyah” = “extol” with songs [zimrot]

So we are to “get a move on” and enter before the face of God with aggressive anticipation. We are to make noise with music before him with energy and determination.

This is not a passive activity. This is action. We prepare for this. We arrive with a spirit of anticipation - not of what we will get - but of what we will give! We are to make these expressions to God! We are to be outgoing in our worship, invigorated, enthusiastic, unashamed, bold, and energized!

The reason we sing and shout is expressed in verses 3 through 5: 

For the Lord is a great God

And a great King above all gods,

In whose hand are the depths of the earth,

The peaks of the mountains are His also.

The sea is His, for it was He who made it,

And His hands formed the dry land. (Psalm 95: 3-5, NASB)

We sing and shout in corporate worship because of who God is.

Hebrew poetry uses meter and parallelism as to organize and express the thought of the writer.

Meter - refers to how many syllables there are in each phrase. You count them, much like we used to do with hymns. One line has six syllables, and the next has eight. So the next set of phrases might follow the same pattern, six then eight.

Parallelism takes many forms:

i) Synonymous parallelism - two phrases say the same thing using different words.

“For the Lord is a great God,

and a great King above all gods.”

These phrases say similar things.

ii) Antithetical parallelism - two phrases are contrasting. 

There are other forms of parallelism, but these are two of the most frequently occurring.

In Psalm 95, we have a series of synonymous parallels to express why it is appropriate for us to meet with God in worship.

i) The Lord is a great God

The Lord is a great King above all gods.

The Lord is great. There is no one like Him. That is not an arrogant statement; it is merely a statement of fact. It is the truth. It is the way things really are. 

We should worship God because He is.

ii) The Lord holds the depths of earth in his hand

The Lord holds the peaks of mountains

iii) The Lord made the sea and owns it

The Lord formed the dry land

The double parallelism expresses the same thing: We should worship God because of what He has created.

Has anyone ever asked you,  "Do you think there is life on other planets in the universe?”

There certainly could be. God is not limited in his creation of the earth in the solar system of our galaxy. There are millions of solar systems in our galaxy, and there are billions of galaxies in the universe. God created them all. He is big enough to handle all of it. We don't need to limit his creative activity of life to only our planet.

We sing and shout in private worship because of who He is.

Come, let us worship and bow down,

Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. (Psalm 95: 6, NASB)

The exhortation to worship uses four verbs:

i) Come

A third word is used here which is also translated by the English “come” and “b’u” - is an invitation to enter in.

This is expressed in the plural because it is an invitation for all of us to enter. 

There is a sense that we are alone when we are in corporate worship. Though we are all gathered together, we are each an individual who is interacting personally with God. We are a collection of individuals who are each talking with God about themselves and their situations.

ii) Worship

We shout at times, but we also are quiet before God as we talk with Him. 

Hebrew root = “shachah"; bowing down, to prostrate oneself before an official or magistrate. 

We acknowledge the authority of the Lord by His role as the King.

iii) Bow down

Hebrew root = “kara’” To kneel, as to drink; also as in childbirth

iii) Kneel before the LORD our Maker.

Hebrew root “barak” = to kneel and to bless; 

This is an activity that we can do physically or mentally - we bless God in our kneeling. It is our sign before God that we are honoring Him - we want good for God, even though there is nothing we could ever give Him, which would increase His value. If someone gave you a gold watch, your net worth would increase by the amount of that gold watch, say, by $1000. We cannot increase God’s value, but we can do something that pleases Him when kneel and bless Him.

The reason we worship is found in verse 7:

For He is our God,

And we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. (Psalm 95:7, NASB)

i) He is our God

Not in the sense that we own Him. We do not. 

But in the sense that He is personal toward us.

We are individuals that God likes. 

ii) We are the people of His pasture

We live in His world. We operate by His rules; we dwell on His land.

iii) We are the sheep of His hand

We are His property, even though God has given us choice.

He is free to do whatever He wants to do with us. He still feeds us, waters us, sheers us when necessary. He protects us.

Psalm 23

1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

he leadeth me beside the still waters.

3 He restoreth my soul:

he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;

thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:

thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. (Psalm 23: 1-6, KJV)

Even though the Lord owns us as sheep, He has given us choice. And with choice comes consequences both for good and for evil.

The exhortation to not harden our hearts comes in verses 8-11.

Today, if you would hear His voice,

Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,

As in the day of Massah in the wilderness,

“When your fathers tested Me,

They tried Me, though they had seen My work.

“For forty years I loathed that generation,

And said they are a people who err in their heart,

And they do not know My ways.

“Therefore I swore in My anger,

Truly they shall not enter into My rest.” (Psalm 95: 8-11, NASB)

The two examples of hard hearts are:

Meribah = “place of strife” 

Massah in the wilderness = “temptation”

These are two names for the same place, describing two different events. The first time,  people demonstrated a hard heart, and then the second time, it was Moses who had a hard heart.

Exodus 17:1-7 (NASB) 

1 Then all the congregation of the sons of Israel journeyed by stages from the wilderness of Sin, according to the command of the Lord, and camped at Rephidim, and there was no water for the people to drink. 2 Therefore the people quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water that we may drink.” And Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” 3 But the people thirsted there for water; and they grumbled against Moses and said, “Why, now, have you brought us up from Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” 4 So Moses cried out to the Lord, saying, “What shall I do to this people? A little more and they will stone me.” 5 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Pass before the people and take with you some of the elders of Israel; and take in your hand your staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. 6 Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb; and you shall strike the rock, and water will come out of it, that the people may drink.” And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel. 7 He named the place Massah and Meribah because of the quarrel of the sons of Israel, and because they tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us, or not?”

Numbers 20: 13 - This is the 2nd story - God commands Moses to speak to the rock, but Moses strikes the rock.  Moses sinned, demonstrating his own hard heart, and he was not allowed to enter into the promised land but only to view it from the top of the mountain.

Deuteronomy 6:16-18 (NASB) “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested Him at Massah. 17 You should diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God, and His testimonies and His statutes which He has commanded you.

The psalmist expresses these examples as God’s words:

“When your fathers tested Me,

they tried Me, though they had seen My work.”

Again, we see synonymous parallelism in which God explains that it is inappropriate to question Him as though we are His judge. There are certainly ways to express legitimate questioning of God - the psalms are full of these expressions. There are 150 psalms because the psalms are the voice of our emotions back to God. God gave us feelings, and He knows how those feelings work. When you are angry, it is not because you say to yourself, hmmm, this situation should produce anger in me, so I guess I should turn on the valve of anger and fill myself with it. No, it just happens when we see or experience injustice. Anger is necessary for our survival and the survival of our communities. But when it becomes rage, it is dangerous, and we must be able to control it. 

But there is a difference between being angry with God because things have happened, which we don’t understand, and being angry with God because we believe that God has done something wrong. God can never do anything wrong. So when we accuse God, we place ourselves over God as His judge. We are saying we know more than He does, that we are morally better than He is, and that we understand more than He does. Those assertions are absurd. They are untrue. So God hates them.

God responded to their hard hearts.

“For forty years I loathed that generation,

And said they are a people who err in their heart,

And they do not know My ways.

“Therefore I swore in My anger,

Truly they shall not enter into My rest.” (Psalm 95: 10-11, NASB)

The psalm ends with what appears to be a negative expression, and perhaps even a petty comment on the part of God. That appearance would be incorrect.

Instead, this is a statement that He is the King of His Kingdom. God's charges are true, and we must change our world view - how we understand life and how we understand our place in the world.

For those who might like to spend some extra time, see the supplement to Psalm 95, which deals with the Kingdom of God, and Suggestions for Preparing for Worship.