Year 2, Day 228: Psalm 95

Psalm 95

Psalm 95 is a psalm that does double duty.  It begins as a song of worship and praise.  It ends as a psalm of warning.  Although it may seem strange to think of both the happy concept of praise mixing with the sad concept of warning, these pieces really fit together well as a whole.

In the beginning of this psalm we are called to come into the place of worship and make a joyful noise.  In fact, we are told this piece of advice twice in the opening two verses!  I think this is one of my favorite “often ignored” pieces of advice in scripture.  Over and over again we are told to come into worship and make a joyful noise.  Actually, in the original Hebrew the word is “rua.”  It can mean to make a joyful noise, but it most often means to make a loud shout or to give a battle cry.  One of the most famous stories in which this word is used is when the Lord is giving instructions to Joshua about the conquest of Jericho (See Joshua 6).  In Joshua 6:5 the Lord tells Joshua that on the seventh pass the priests will blast the horn and the people will give a loud “rua.”

When we come into the presence of the Lord, we are to give a mighty shout.  We are to give a rua!  We are come into the Lord’s presence and let out a battle cry!  Isn’t that a really neat thought?  How many of us think about coming into worship and giving out our battle cry?

In fact, that’s a really deep thought today.  How many of us go to church on Sunday and expect this nice, subdued, calm, sing-with-quiet-voices, orderly experience?  While there is nothing wrong with any of those qualities, it isn’t the impression we receive from the psalmist today.  Worship can be all of those things, but worship is also a time for battle cries!  Worship is our time for going before the Lord and getting ourselves ready for battle.  Worship is a time where we come before God like an army assembling before its commanding officer while giving a shout – a battle cry, even – to let the commanding officer know that we are committed and devoted to the battle.

I really love this image today.  This is an image that is going to stick with me for a while.  While there is absolutely nothing wrong with the “worship as calm learning experience” perspective that I know and love, I need to remember more often that worship is preparation for battle, too.  Worship is our time to profess with boldness to God that we are ready to go with Him into the world for battle!

Moving on in the psalm, we come to an explanation.  Why can we come into His presence and make this joyful noise, this battle cry, this rua?  The answer is simple.  He is a great and mighty God.  He knows the depths of the earth.  He knows the mountains.  The sea is His.  He owns the dry land.

This is really a humbling part of the psalm for me today. Remember that often the point of praise psalm is to humble us as well as give God the glory.  What are the parts of this world that we know the least about?  We know the least about the earth below our crust – the depths.  We know very little about our oceans – many of them are as of yet largely unexplored.  Our largest mountains we knew very little about – we can’t even survive very well at their heights.  Yet, the Lord knows all of these places.  We as an entire race cannot hope to equal the knowledge of the Lord.  We as a whole race cannot hope to know what our God knows.  That is humbling today.  That makes me want to make a rua for the Lord!

Then we turn to the psalmist’s response to the greatness of the Lord.  We come and kneel before our God.  We take a knee like an army confessing allegiance to Him and waiting to listen to His marching orders.  We come and submit before Him.  We recognize our place.  He is God, not us.  We are the sheep and the followers, not Him.  God sets the agenda, we do not.

Then we hit the end of the psalm.  This is the warning part of the psalm.  The psalmist talks about the people of Meribah.  Remember that Meribah is where God allowed Moses to draw water from the rock.  But it was also a place of great doubt and arguments from the Hebrew people.  It was at Meribah that God gave a great display of His power and the people did not respond in faith.

The psalmist’s point is really quite clear.  God comes among us and He desires that we respond by giving a great rua!  He wants us to respond by preparing ourselves for battle and by declaring our preparedness to go with Him into this world.  But so often we respond like the people at Meribah.  God comes into our midst.  He calls us to worship and prepare.  But we respond in confusion and quarreling.  We need to remember the lesson of this psalm and give God a rua of faith rather than a display of our ability to quarrel.

<><