Sing His Praise among the Nations

Sing His Praise among the Nations

Psalm 96

Main Idea: To see the glory of God is to respond in joyful worship and witness.

This psalm was composed for a specific event in the Old Testament. We find this psalm back in 1 Chronicles 16 as the ark of the covenant was being transported to the city of Jerusalem. It was a huge moment of celebration because it represented God’s coming to Jerusalem to rule and reign. This was not a somber occasion. Trumpets, harps, and lyres were cranked up full volume. People were singing and dancing. This is the moment King David danced so hard his wife was embarrassed.

This psalm points forward as well as backward: backward to the celebration as the ark approached the city of God and forward to the coming reign of Jesus Christ over creation.

I graduated from high school in 1993, and certain things about that year stand out. The TV show Cheers ended its eleven-year run. Michael Jordan retired from the NBA. Hollywood generated films from the timelessly significant (Schindler’s List) to the shamelessly silly (Robin Hood: Men in Tights). Bill Clinton became the forty-second president of the United States. Perhaps you remember watching scenes from the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Baseball fans may remember Joe Carter winning the World Series for the Toronto Blue Jays with a three-run homer in game six.

In the Christian corner of the world, 1993 was also the year John Piper wrote a little book called Let the Nations Be Glad! in which he said this:

Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. . . . Worship, therefore, is the fuel and goal of missions. It’s the goal of missions because in missions we simply aim to bring the nations into the white-hot enjoyment of God’s glory. (17)

That was a good year indeed. What a truth to recapture! That’s Psalm 96 in one sentence: worship is the fuel and goal of missions. Our passage unfolds in three stages.

A Singing People

Psalm 96:1-3

Just think about the physical real estate the book of Psalms takes up. Right in the middle of your Bible is a giant, thirty-thousand-word hymnal. It’s three times longer than Mark’s Gospel, three times longer than Revelation, four times longer than Romans.

The Scriptures are inspired by God (2 Tim 3:16). Even the balance of literary styles we have in the Bible came together under God’s direction. There are more than five hundred references to singing and more than one hundred direct commands to sing. So why so much singing?

In Psalm 96 God commands his people to sing. It compels us to sing to the Lord “a new song.” This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t sing old songs. The point is it’s not enough to just remember the past. Many psalms point back to God’s mighty acts of redemption in history—the exodus, for example, where God broke the chains of Israel’s oppressors. God instituted Passover so Israel would never forget what he did for them. Then this same God says to his people in Psalms 33, 40, 96, 98, 144, and 149 to sing new songs. Why? Because God’s mercies aren’t all centuries old. “They are new every morning” (Lam 3:23).

Many vital signs are given in Scripture to evaluate the condition of the church of Jesus Christ. One you might not have considered before is, Are new songs being written and sung? New mercies call for new music. We are blessed in our time to have so many songwriters who manifest a love for and firm grasp of the Scriptures—all using their musical gifts to give the church modern hymns by which believers today may sing ourselves deeper into the hope of the gospel.

Singing here isn’t just singing. Verse 2 expounds, “Sing to the Lord, bless his name; proclaim his salvation from day to day.” In the LXX the Greek word translated “proclaim” is where we get our word evangelize. Publish it! Make known his salvation! In other words, spreading the gospel is a means by which we praise God.

Think about this in marriage, for example. I can praise my wife in two ways: I can tell her she’s awesome, or I can tell you she’s awesome. Both praise her. The same is true with God. We sing to him, and this is praise. We proclaim his salvation to the nations, and this is praise. This idea of calling the nations/outsiders/Gentiles to worship comes up in verses 1, 2, 3, 7, and 10. There is a missionary heartbeat here.

There’s a sense in which “sing” can be a metaphor for praising God in nonmusical ways, but it’s really important not to skip over the fact that the call to sing isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a call to sing, literally, which leads us to the next point.

Not only are we commanded to sing, three times in the space of two verses, but the command goes on to include a word about who is listening. We are singing “to the Lord” (v. 2). God is the audience as we sing.

Our singing matters for all kinds of reasons—if for no other reason than he commands his people to sing, and since he has captured our hearts and our affections, we delight to do this. However, as it relates to verse 2, do we sing in the awareness that God is listening? It’s so easy to approach corporate musical worship thoughtlessly. We underestimate the privilege and honor it is to have a God who actually delights to hear his people sing. His favorite instruments in the world are the collected voices of his singing people. He never gets tired of it. The great apologist G. K. Chesterton expressed this beautifully:

Because children have abounding vitality . . . they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.

It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. (Orthodoxy, 61)

He listens and he delights. They say it’s hard to make a billionaire smile. Why? Because the billionaire has seen better. Now we’re talking about God! It’s not like God doesn’t have better art at his disposal. He put stars into places science won’t see for another thousand years. He has art, for now tucked in cosmic closets, that would blow our minds. Yet he delights in our singing!

A Glorious God

Psalm 96:4-6

This psalm doesn’t just tell us to sing; it gives us a reason.

God Is the Reason We Sing

The only thing that adequately explains the worship of the church is the glory of her God. “The Lord is great and is highly praised” (v. 4). A great God is to be greatly praised. The praise we offer is to be proportionate to the greatness of the God we praise. You might say, “That’s impossible.” Of course it is. However, the point is that God’s people don’t offer half-hearted worship. No, it’s heart, soul, mind, strength worship. Lips, life, voice, hands, feet. All his! Nothing held back.

My dad planted a church in New Orleans, and the music was soulful. My mom played the Hammond B3 organ, and she sang riffs into the open spaces of the song. We sang a song growing up; it was so simple, but it was drawn straight from Scripture. We’d clap our hands on beats two and four and sing, “He Has Made Me Glad.” I would look around and watch those believers, and here’s what I was learning even as a child: The Lord is great and is highly praised! Listen, the nations aren’t drawn to praise God if his own people look like they’re doing chores. I wonder whether unbelievers who happen to come into the gathering of God’s people ever leave thinking, God seemed real! Those people sang as if God was giving them hope—as if God were holding them up, supplying them with strength.

Every Rival God Leaves Us Empty

That’s the reminder of verse 5. “All the gods of the peoples are idols.” In the original Hebrew it’s a play on words. All the elohim of the people are elilim. Elohim is the word for “God.” Elilim is the word for “nothing.” In other words, what they treat as a god really has no power, no life. This means you can buy all the cars and houses you ever dreamed of. You can get the trophy spouse and the corner office. You can wrap your fingers around every joy held out by this world, but you’ll never know rest a day in this world without Christ. Every trinket, self-help solution, or man-made religion is just one more in an endless line of broken cisterns that hold no water (Jer 2:13). Meanwhile, the living God is in verse 6. All the beauty your soul longs for isn’t on the next website. If only we knew where true strength and beauty are found. The Lord is the strength of his people. Jesus gives beauty for ashes. Jesus makes all things new.

That’s why we sing the way we do. The one explanation for the singing of the church is the greatness and strength and beauty of our God.

A Global Summons

Psalm 96:7-13

We call the nations to worship. Think about the work of the church. Why do we send out missionaries, including to places that are hostile to Christian witness, to closed countries where it’s illegal to convert to Christianity? We do it because verse 3 commands the people of God to “declare his glory among the nations.” It’s a global invocation, a global call to worship.

I remember the first time I heard the Muslim call to prayer in the horn of Africa. Suddenly a voice was singing over a loud speaker, and you heard it all over the city at the appointed hours. Unless you’ve learned the language, you can’t tell what they’re singing. Here’s what’s being broadcast all over the city:

God is the greatest!

I bear witness that there is none worthy of worship except God.

I bear witness that Mohammed is the messenger of God.

Hasten to prayer.

Hasten to security.

God is the greatest!

There is no god but Allah.

I was sitting on the floor in the home of a gracious Muslim family. We were eating and talking. Then came the call to worship. The men stood and excused themselves to go and pray. They heard the call and answered. In our passage there is a wider call. Verses 7-12 are a call to worship that rings out over the whole cosmos.

As we go with the gospel, we go with verse 10 beating in our hearts. We go to say among the nations, “The Lord reigns!” To declare that Jesus Christ is Lord. To announce that the one and only Savior has come. He lived the life we could not live. He died the death we deserved to die. He rose and conquered the enemy that we could never conquer. This King now reigns over the nations. This King will return to judge the world in righteousness. But whoever trusts him now, whoever calls on the name of the Lord, shall be saved. This salvation is gloriously comprehensive: sins forgiven, conscience cleansed, death defeated, adopted into his forever family, and destined for pleasures evermore at his right hand.

As local churches committed to the Great Commission, our praying, giving, going, and sending are all aimed at one thing: global worship! We’re saying, “Ascribe to the Lord, you nations, you families of the peoples. You Hui. You Baloch. Kurds. Egyptians. Come sing a new song to the Lord. Let the whole earth sing to the Lord!” And we do this in the confidence that our labor will not be in vain. We call the nations to worship, knowing the nations will join in the singing.

What happens when the nations hear and turn from idols to ascribe glory to the one true and living God? The answer is in verses 11-12. The heavens are glad. The earth rejoices. The sea resounds. The fields celebrate. The trees shout for joy. What beautiful imagery! The gospel leaves joy in its wake. The Great Commission is the awesome prospect of good news spreading around the world. It’s a joy project. It’s gladness in tennis shoes, joy on the run.

We, God’s image bearers, were created for song. Our voices were broken at the fall, but many places in Scripture remind us that the world is waiting for the grand finale of history. Isaiah prophesied that God’s people would sing again. Isaiah 51 points to the finale of God’s redemptive story, when his redeemed exiles come home: “And the ransomed of the Lord will return and come to Zion with singing, crowned with unending joy. Joy and gladness will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee” (Isa 51:11).

Christians are a singing people. We always have been, and we always will be. Christian, when God saved you, he retuned your voice. He put a new song in your mouth. However, we are not called to sing alone. We are called to sing in a way that invites others to join in the song. And we know the nations will join in the singing because we happen to have a window into the future. If you ever wonder what will become of the nations that are still shrouded in darkness, without the light of the gospel, Revelation 5 says, “I’m glad you asked.”

When he took the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and golden bowls filled with incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song:

You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slaughtered, and you purchased people for God by your blood from every tribe and language and people and nation. You made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they will reign on the earth.

Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels around the throne, and also of the living creatures and of the elders. Their number was countless thousands, plus thousands of thousands. They said with a loud voice,

Worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing!

I heard every creature in heaven, on earth, under the earth, on the sea, and everything in them say,

Blessing and honor and glory and power be to the one seated on the throne, and to the Lamb, forever and ever!

The four living creatures said, “Amen,” and the elders fell down and worshiped. (Rev 5:8-14)

Missions exists because worship doesn’t. When this age is over and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. (Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad, 17)

Missions exists because worship doesn’t. What kind of church do we want to be? We can live for passing pleasures, or we can spread eternal joy. Christian friend, salvation has retuned your voice. Here’s God’s call on your newfound voice. Sing. Sing a new song. Sing and bless his name. Sing and tell his salvation. Sing and declare his glory among the nations. Sing for he is great and greatly to be praised.

Reflect and Discuss

1. Have you reflected personally on the many commands in Scripture to sing? How are you answering this call both in your personal life and as a member of the local church?
2. How can we demonstrate a passion for God’s glory among the nations? What does that look like practically in your life? In your local church?
3. Think about the connection between joy and global missions. What happens if the Christian loses sight of that and is driven more by duty than delight?
4. When it comes to gathered worship in the local church, are you leaning forward? Are there any words of encouragement that might refresh the hearts of worship leaders and ministers in your church?
5. What are the worthless idols that tempt you the most? When you get your eyes off of Jesus, where are you most inclined to set your hopes? How can you fight this temptation?
6. In what ways are you pursuing a greater knowledge of God? How do you think the spiritual disciplines (prayer, Scripture, local church, evangelism) play a part in the way we see God and the way we live?