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19th April 2024
FridayReflection
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'Enduring Word' considers
Psalm 95 God worthy of our humble and obedient worship
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This wonderful psalm is quoted and analysed in Hebrews 3:7-4:13.
Oh come, let us sing 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.
Singing is not the only way to give honour and worship to God, but it is a chief and important way.
God should be honoured with a happy, enthusiastic heart.
There is a place for a sombre, reflective mood in worship, but it should not be the dominant tone.
God's people have much to shout joyfully about.
Worship should not be simply saying things about God, but with thought and with a connection to what we have experienced, or need to experience, from Him.
This means that worship should be done with a conscious sense of God's presence.
God's people don't sing into empty space; He is in their presence and they are in His presence.
There is - or should be - a true connection between God and His people in worship.
Even when they had the tabernacle and the temple, the Jewish people rightly understood the spiritual presence of God.
Understanding the greatness of God helps us to properly worship Him.
Most everyone has some sense of awe or appreciation of greatness when in the presence of someone the culture regards as great.
This is natural; it is even more natural and appropriate for us to deeply regard Yahweh as the great God and the great King above all gods.
If God owns the sea because he made it, he owns you, because he made you too.
You are his creature, and by all the rights of creatorship you belong to him.
He claims you; will you dispute the claim?"
The psalmist spoke of God's mastery over all creation.
Now he includes humanity itself among God's creation.
We owe humble worship to God because He made us.
Worship is an obligation that the creature owes to the Creator.
"We have the right to come before God with great gladness, but never without a sense of His majesty, and what is due to it."
The psalmist exhorts us to hear the voice of God in the midst of our worship.
God spoke to His people and He gave them and gave us a word of warning.
"If you want to worship God, make sure you do not harden your heart against God's Word, or quarrel with him or test him, as the ancients did."
This word of warning is important enough to be referenced three times in the book of Hebrews (Hebrews 3:7, 3:15, and 4:7).
"If you hear God's voice today, do not be stubborn."
In Hebrews 4:7 the emphasis is on the word 'today', indicating the urgency of listening to God with a soft heart today.
The appeal do not harden your hearts means there is some aspect of the will involved.
Many regard a hard or soft heart as something that just happens to someone and is beyond his ability to control.
The Holy Spirit indicates differently.
We test God by our unbelief.
Israel saw the work of God, yet would not trust Him at Meribah or in the wilderness in general.
We are warned not to do the same.
"Every one comes, in the Christian life, once at least, to Kadesh-barnea [Numbers 13:26].
On the one hand the land of rest and victory; on the other the desert wastes.
The balance, quivering between the two, is turned this way by faith; that by unbelief.
Trust God, and rest.
God offered the generation that came out of Egypt the opportunity to take the Promised Land by faith.
Their unbelieving rejection of God's offer grieved Him for forty years.
It was evidence that they went astray in their hearts, away from humble confidence in Him as Creator and Redeemer.
They did not know His ways; therefore they chose their own."
To know God is to trust Him.
Unbelief is evidence of small or faulty knowledge of God.
God did not honour the unbelief of His people.
It was an insult to Him, and prompted a solemn, angry declaration from Him.
God condemned Israel's generation of unbelievers to die in the wilderness, so that a generation of faithful believers could inherit the Promised Land, His appointed place of rest for His people.
If manna and miracles could not satisfy Israel, neither would they have been content with the land which flowed with milk and honey."
"By ending on this note the psalm sacrifices literary grace to moral urgency.
This is a psalm about worship, it could give no blunter indication of the heart of the matter.
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This is an edited version.
The full article and Bible references are avaiable on request
Enduring Word
exists to promote the work of Christian discipleship and evangelism worldwide, mainly through the publication and dissemination of the Bible teaching work of David Guzik and likeminded people.
When David Guzik was a young pastor in Simi Valley, California, he (among many other pastors) was asked to send his teaching notes to the developers of a new internet Bible research site: Blue Letter Bible.
In the late 1990's, David's material first appeared on the Blue Letter Bible, and was found to be a valuable resource.
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