Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth! Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing! Know that the Lord, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name! For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.
Let’s bow together for prayer. Our Father, if ever there is or ought to be a Christian holiday, it is this holiday of Thanksgiving. We have so much for which to be thankful. We are wards of divine charity. We confess it in our singing; we confess it in our prayers as well. We are glad to say that we are your people, that this is your doing, that your grace has been active in us, and that you have made us yours. And you’ve blessed us with forgiveness of sins. You’ve blessed us with the pleasure of walking with you. You’ve given us a blessed hope. We’re thankful for what you have done for us, and may every day of our lives be marked by gratitude for what you have done. As we look now into this wonderful psalm, we pray that you will open it up for us, and we pray with the psalmist himself who asked, “Open our eyes that we may behold wondrous things out of thy law.” In Jesus’ name, amen.
You’ll notice the superscription of the psalm here is “A Psalm for Giving Thanks.” That word there is interesting, the “giving thanks,” because particularly in Hebrew, there is no word in the Old Testament to say “thank you.” That sounds odd because here we have a psalm for giving thanks. But in the Old Testament, no one says “thank you” to God. Actually, the word is to confess, or we might say to acknowledge. So rather than saying “thank you” to God, these thank-you psalms are psalms that confess what God has done for them. Now, they’re not confessing sin—that’s one kind of confession—but here they’re confessing what God has done, acknowledging what God has done, or we might even say itemizing what God has done. And so a psalm of giving thanks is a psalm that itemizes what God has done and confesses God’s goodness to the people, and for that, they give him praise. And so I’ve titled this “A Psalm of Grateful Praise.”
In Leviticus chapter seven, where we have the instructions concerning the various offerings that are to be offered in the Old Testament economy, we have the instruction for the thank offering. That’s the word used here, a thank offering. And again, this was an occasion when the worshiper would come to give praise to God for what he has done. This was not a required offering. It could be an offering of animal sacrifice; it could be a grain offering. But the offerer would come to God in worship out of a heart filled with praise for what God has done. And he would come and publicly profess—confess—what God has done, and give public proclamation to what God has done, and offer this offering entirely over to God just out of a heart filled with thankfulness for what he has done. And they would confess what he’s done before the community.
And so when you come to Psalm 100, the superscript tells us we are to think now in terms of the temple. We’re in the temple precincts. That’s why in verse one we have it told us we come into his presence. Or verse four, “come into his gates, into his courts.” This is the temple precincts here. And they’re offering this thank offering to God, confessing what he has done. And now to accompany that thank offering, we have this psalm to be sung.
When we begin our studies next year on the Psalms, one of the things we will look at is how David transformed the Old Testament worship. Moses gave Israel what we call the ceremonial law regarding the sacrifices, the priesthood, the tabernacle, the holy days, and all of that. And all of that was in place for Moses. When David comes along, he transforms it all into an occasion that’s marked by singing as well. And he introduces psalm singing into the temple worship. That’s what this psalm is now. We have a psalm for giving thanks. It takes us into the thank offering now that has been offered. Someone has come and the community is to give praise to God for what he has done for them.
That thank offering, by the way, continues in the New Testament as well. We don’t offer an animal sacrifice; we don’t go to a specific location to offer a grain offering or anything like that. But the author of Hebrews picks this up in Hebrews 13, verse 15: “Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips that acknowledge his name.” So here is our thank offering as we sing the psalm as it was originally used in the temple. We continue to sing our songs of praise, or as we can call it then, a psalm for the giving—for giving thanks.
Now these psalms of giving thanks, these psalms of grateful praise, are a particular genre in the psalms. There are a number of them; there are a number of these psalms like this. Believe it or not, they have a similar structure throughout and you can identify them objectively, how they’re laid out in the structure of the psalm and so on. We’ll see a little bit of that. But this psalm of grateful praise, Psalm 100, is one of the most—this is the most famous of all of the grateful praise psalms. It is one of the most famous of the psalms in English hymnody. You may recognize it in a couple of different versions. Most recently, this was the one that we sing—I think the most recent rendering of this is from D.A. Carson’s rendering of it that we sing: “Shout to the Lord with delight, all you peoples.” That’s from Psalm 100. That’s a rendering of this psalm.
More famously, and it was very popular in English hymnody for centuries—I think until our generation, we don’t seem to sing it much—but Isaac Watts had a rendering of this psalm that was very, very popular, particularly then after it was adapted and shortened a bit by John Wesley:
“Before Jehovah’s awful throne, ye nations bow with sacred joy. Know that the Lord is God alone; he can create and he destroy. His sovereign power without our aid made us of clay and formed us men. When we like wandering sheep we strayed, he brought us to his fold again. We’ll crowd his gates with thankful songs, high as the heavens our voices raise, and earth with her 10,000 tongues shall fill his courts with sounding praise. Wide as the world is his command, vast as eternity his love, firm as a rock his truth shall stand when rolling years shall cease to move.”
The most famous of the renderings of Psalm 100 in English hymnody is what’s referred to as “Old 100th.” We will sing that after the message this morning at the conclusion of our service. “Old 100th.” It’s named that—actually that’s the tune name—and it’s named that because it’s so famous in the history of English hymnody. Actually that tune comes from the Geneva Psalter, that is, the psalms that were sung in Calvin’s Geneva. I think the tune actually was used first—I think it was Psalm 134 was put to that tune. And during Calvin’s time in Geneva, you remember, John Knox had to flee Scotland during the reign of Bloody Mary, and some associates went with him, and an associate of John Knox by the name of William Kethe took this tune and put the Psalm 100 in meter to fit the tune. “All people that on earth do dwell,” and we’ll be singing that in a little bit. I’d like to sing that after the message before communion, if we can. And in fact, the line “Let us sing Old 100th” has probably been repeated in churches over the centuries in English-speaking churches more than just about any other line.
Now the structure of the psalm—I mentioned there’s a simple structure to these psalms and it will be good to notice it here. Usually in these psalms there’s a call to praise—”Praise the Lord,” calling the people to praise. And then there’s a reason for praise that’s expressed. Why should we praise the Lord? And that’s what we have here.
A Call To Praise
So verses one to four are a call to praise. We have seven imperatives here, seven commands: “Make a joyful noise. Serve the Lord. Come into his presence. Know that the Lord is God. Enter his gates with thanksgiving. Give thanks to him. Bless his name.” Seven commands are given.
A Reason For Praise
Now, then in verse 5, we have the reason for praise, introduced by the word “for.” Make a joyful noise, serve the Lord, come to His presence with singing, enter His gates, give thanks, bless His name. Why? “For the Lord is good. His steadfast love endures forever and His faithfulness to all generations.” Simple structure of the psalm: a call to praise and a reason for praise.
Now verse 3 does not quite fit into that. And we’ll see some reasons for that as we go along—some very important reasons in the way verse three is put into that. It’s a bit different kind of a command. It’s not a call to praise as such; it is not a reason for praise as such, but it’s thrown in for a very important reason that we’ll see as we go along.
But first of all then, notice the call to praise. Let’s begin with verses one and two again: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come into His presence with singing.” So verse 1 sets the tone. “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.” This expression, “make a joyful noise,” can also be translated “shout to the Lord.” It’s used in several different contexts in the Old Testament. It’s used of a war shout, a battle shout. It’s used in the context of Joshua’s attack on Jericho. It can be used of the ram’s horn being sounded in the advance of a battle—that kind of a shout. Obviously, it’s not a military connotation here because it’s associated with singing and joy. So it’s a kind of cheering kind of a shout. So this is a call to come joyfully into God’s presence and raise a noise, make a noise associated with gladness, verse two. It’s a cheering. So when you see this expression, “make a joyful noise to the Lord,” think in terms of a football game and the home team has just scored a touchdown. It’s cheering. “Make a joyful noise to the Lord.” It’s that kind of cheering and rejoicing that’s being called for here in these verses.
One commentator calls it an “homage shout.” That is something like when a beloved king comes into the stadium and everybody shouts, “Long live the king!” It’s a joyful shout of that kind that’s involved here. With the superscription, “A Psalm of Grateful Praise,” a psalm by definition is a song to be sung to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. So let’s break out the band, cheer, and make this joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.
Verse two continues, “serve the Lord with gladness, come into his presence with singing.” Now the word “serve” calls us not simply to praise, not to recognize God only and to praise him only, but to bow in obedient service to him. In the Psalms in particular, this word “serve” takes on the connotations of worship. You don’t worship other gods; you don’t serve them. You come to the temple and you offer sacrifice to this God. Serve the Lord. Worship the Lord. More broadly, give homage to the Lord. In the New Covenant age, we don’t offer sacrifices, but we do serve the Lord in terms of our labors in prayer, and labors for the church, and labors for the advance of the gospel. That’s the idea here.
And he says, “serve the Lord with gladness.” And again, the idea here is just a—it’s almost, almost a giddy kind of gladness. Now it’s not “giddy” because that has connotations of shallowness, but it’s an excited, an exuberant kind of praise. This word is used of mirth, that kind of happiness. It’s not just an inward joy that he’s talking about here. He’s calling for an exuberant expression of joy in grateful praise. So we might say this is a hand-clapping, foot-stomping, jumping up and down, doing a jig kind of praise that he’s calling for here. Make a joyful noise, come before him with thanksgiving and with a heart full of praise that shows itself externally as well in shouts of praise.
That is to say, lifeless, formal, staid worship is not appropriate for this God. Worship of this God calls for exuberance and joyful celebration and with enthusiasm. If the privilege of worshiping this God doesn’t move you to external expressions of joy, the psalmist would say then you just don’t get it. Now there are lament psalms, and we sing them too. We’ll learn about those when we take up the psalm study later. But this is no lament here, and this is no funeral dirge. He’s calling for excitement and heightened emotions as we confess what God has done for us. The psalmist here as much as says, “How could we not sing joyfully in the presence of this God?”
So that’s the atmosphere then that he sets at the beginning of the song. Now notice again verse two: “serve the Lord with gladness.” And now notice the second line: “come into his presence with singing.” “Come into his presence” or “come before him”—that presupposes the temple. That’s verse four: “come into his gates, his courts.” Speaking of the temple in Jerusalem. So come into his presence in the temple with singing.
And yet, and this is what I want you to see: verse 1, “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, O Israel.” That’s not what it says, is it? “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.” Here the psalmist is calling the nations to come into God’s presence in the temple and offer him praise. It’s a stunning thing. Are they even allowed? And what the psalmist is pointing to here, I think, is a very important point that crops up very often in the Psalms, and that is that the praise of this God is not only the privilege of Israel; it is the duty of all people everywhere to praise this God. He is God over all. And so here in Israel, the king is calling all the nations to come join Israel in the presence of God and offer him praise.
You know, I have a liking for the hymns of Isaac Watts. He has a rendering of all of the psalms in meter to be sung, some of them paraphrased as well. And one thing that often pops up in Watts’s paraphrases of the psalms that we’re to sing is this word “pay.” It’s just fascinating the way he uses it. I think it’s a brilliant insight into what the psalmist is saying. He’ll speak of paying your honors to God, paying thanks to God, paying your praise to God, and he does that in his rendering here of Psalm 100. He writes, “Enter his gates with songs of joy, with praises to his courts repair, and make it your divine employ to pay your thanks and honors there.” That this God is God over all, and he deserves the praise of all peoples everywhere. And in fact, it is the duty of all to give him praise. And so the psalmist is in Israel, referring to the temple, calling all the world: come and offer praise and sing to this God.
Now interestingly, Psalm 100 is interesting in the way it is placed in the Psalter as well. There’s a group of Psalms, Psalm 93 to 99, that bring Book Three of the Psalter to a close. There are five collections of Psalms called Books of Psalms in the Psalter, and Psalm 89 brings Book Three to a close. Psalm 89 is a lament, lamenting the collapse of the Davidic Covenant. It would seem God has forgotten his promise to David. There’s no king. This thing is gone. “Lord, where is your promise? What has happened? It’s over.” And then you have this collection following it at the opening of Book 4 of the Psalms called Enthronement Psalms. These Psalms praise the kingship of Yahweh, and he is king over all the earth. A prominent theme in these enthronement psalms, as they’re called, is he’s king over all the earth, and it envisions his future reign over all of the nations. And then Psalm 100 comes, and it’s widely recognized as a doxology for that collection of enthronement psalms, because now in Psalm 100, we’re calling all the nations to come before this God who rules over all and offer him praise and sing to him.
And I think we should see more than that in this—that is, when he calls all the earth, verse one, “all the earth” to make this joyful noise to God. There’s something prospective about it. He’s looking beyond the temple in Jerusalem, and this ties to a huge theme in the Old Testament. Genesis chapter 12, God’s promise to Abraham: “and in you, all the families of the world will be blessed.” That theme picks up in the Psalms very often—of the nations coming to offer God praise. And that’s what he’s calling them to do here in Psalm 100. Notice what he says here: “Come into his presence,” verse two, “come into his presence with singing.” A joyful entrance into the presence of God. Join us, Israel, and sing with us the praises of our God.
There are redemptive implications to that. So for example, in Psalm 2, he will call the rebellious nations to come and fear and tremble before this God. He’ll call them to take refuge in his son, the king. And here we get to Psalm 100. The prospect is they have done that. They have bowed and kissed the son, to use the words of Psalm 2. They have taken refuge in Him, and now they rejoice in His presence. We’ll have more of that in a little bit, but in that sense, then, the Psalter is a missionary hymnal calling the world to come and praise and serve the Lord God of Israel.
Again, Isaac Watts: “Ye nations round the earth rejoice before the Lord your sovereign king. Serve him with cheerful heart and voice. With all your tongues his glory sing.” And so in verse four, as we’ve already mentioned, he continues his call to praise: “enter into his gates with thanksgiving, into his courts with praise. Give thanks to him,” or give him grateful praise, “and bless his name.” And the expression “bless his name” has a bit more of a sense of warmth to it than just “praise.” Again, I think there are redemptive implications to it. Salvation has been received and now they sing joyful praise to God who has saved them.
So the psalmist calls the whole earth to join in praise because God’s saving purpose is universal in scope. I think that’s another lesson that we can have for our own corporate worship: that our collective praise ought to be marked by a sense of anticipation of the day when our Lord will receive universal praise from all the nations of the world together. You’ve heard me at times pick on our Trinity Hymnal for some of the tunes that it has—sometimes a little staid for me, a little difficult to sing. The Trinity Hymnal has some hymns in it that just aren’t in any other hymnals that I can find, and I would hate to be without them. And one of them in particular I enjoy every time we sing it because it’s this theme exactly here: “How Sweet and Awesome is the Place.” Remember that? We’ve sung that here many times. I love it when we get to that stanza:
“Pity the nations, O our God; constrain the earth to come; send thy victorious word abroad and bring the strangers home. I long to see the churches full, that all the chosen race may with one voice and heart and soul sing thy redeeming grace.”
That’s the prospect here. They sing this psalm in the temple and there’s a sense of prospect to it, that one day all the nations will join.
Acknowledging The Lord
Now at this point I think I want to stop and point out verse 3 and notice the structure of the psalm. And I want to show how the psalm is structured in a way to throw some attention in verses 1 to 4 to verse 3. I mentioned that we have seven imperatives or seven commands. We have three of them in verses one and two: “Make a joyful noise, serve the Lord, come into his presence with singing.” We have three more in verse four: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, give thanks to him, bless his name.” So we have three and three. Those three and three parallel each other in some important even verbal ways in the original Hebrew. But we have three and three, which are a call to worship.
And then verse three, thrown in the middle, is a command, but it’s a command of a different order: “Know that the Lord, He is God. It is He who made us, and we are His. We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.” So we have these three and three balancing each other out, and we have this one in the middle that really is a command, but it doesn’t really fit with what goes before; it doesn’t fit with what goes beyond. Why did he put it here? How does verse three fit into this call to praise in verses one and two, and this call to praise in verse four, with three commands in each?
Well, in verses one and two, we have Israel and all the nations called to enter God’s presence with joyful praise and worship. Verse four continues to call the nations to come into the presence of God with joyful worship. And verse three, stuck in the middle, is to say that before they may enter, they must acknowledge something. You see that? “Know that the Lord, he is God. It is he who made us and we are his and we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.” That is, he’s calling the nations to come, but before you come—and he throws this in in the middle to get your attention—before you come, you’ve got to acknowledge two things.
Number one, know that the Lord is the true God. “Know that the Lord, he is God.” There’s no religious pluralism here. No other gods allowed. And only those who acknowledge the Lord God alone may, in verse four, enter his gates and his courts with praise. No other praise is welcome, except as you acknowledge that the Lord is God and He’s God alone.
You have to acknowledge something else here as well. Verse 3: you must acknowledge the true God, and two, you must acknowledge God’s people. Verse 3b: “It is He who made us and we are His. We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.” The “we” and the “us” here—that’s Israel. And they have to acknowledge then that God has made Israel uniquely his people as the medium of making him known to all of the nations. He uses the language of creation. We shouldn’t miss the emphasis here on sovereign grace. He uses the language of creation: “He has made us.” I don’t think here he’s referring back to Genesis 1. “He’s made us, Israel.” He’s referring back to Genesis 12, Abraham. He’s referring to Exodus, calling them out of their slavery in Egypt. He has made us his people, created this nation out of nothing as it were.
This is a theme that’s mentioned often in the Old Testament. Deuteronomy chapter 7 is famous for it: God didn’t call you because you were the strongest or the most numerous of all the people. You were nothing when God made you. He made you his own and he made it out of his own power and his own grace. And that, of course, is the church’s testimony exactly. God has made us. He’s done it all by himself. And we contributed nothing and we owe our existence as his people to his grace alone. That’s the testimony of the church.
And so he says, right in the middle of this call to praise, he throws in this caution, this condition: Acknowledge the true God. Acknowledge Israel as his people. And then with that condition or that caution behind him, verse four, he calls to praise again: “Enter His gates with thanksgiving and into His courts with praise. Give thanks to Him and bless His name.”
And then finally, verse 5, we have the reason for praise. Why is it that all the nations should praise this God? Why is it we should serve this God? And why is it the praise and the service of this God should be marked by such joy and exuberation? Why? Verse 5: “Because the Lord is good. His steadfast love endures forever. His faithfulness to all generations.”
Three things here: his goodness, his steadfast love, his faithfulness. Let’s look at them all quickly. “The Lord is good.” That is his character as well as his actions. He behaves always in a way that is good. That’s who he is. And this is stunning in its historical context because you will never find anything approximating this in any of the religions of the ancient Near East outside of Israel. Never do you see of the pagan gods it ascribed to them that they are good. They’re cruel. They’re whimsical and fickle. They’re unpredictable. And they’re cruel. But our God is good.
Next, “his steadfast love endures forever.” Now this Hebrew word translated here “steadfast love”—we have to use two English words to translate this Hebrew word. It’s really a difficult word. We don’t have an exact English equivalent for it, so we have to use an adjective and a noun to describe it. You’ll find this word, this Hebrew word, translated in some versions—in the King James, I think it was “his loving kindness” or “his tender mercies.” That’s one aspect of it. This word here has two different connotations. One, God’s love, his affection, his kindness. And the other has to do with his committedness. It’s used particularly of God’s love with regard to his covenant. He has covenant commitments to his people, and it’s a commitment that is made in love and in kindness. So the best way to translate it is use two words, and so you come up with something like “unfailing love.” Steadfast love is what’s in view here. And notice it says God’s steadfast love endures forever. That’s almost redundant. It’s steadfast; of course it endures. But he wants to drive the point: “His steadfast love endures forever.” It’ll never fail. Like God himself, his steadfast love is eternal. That’s one aspect of his goodness. The Lord is good. How so? His steadfast love endures forever. He’s committed to us, and it’s not just a legal obligation. He’s committed to us in kindness and in love. The Lord is good. His steadfast love endures forever.
And then finally, “his faithfulness to all generations.” Faithfulness. The word has to do with steadfastness. It’s firm. It’s stable. It has to do with God’s fidelity. He keeps his word. His truth endures. God is not fickle. He’s not like the pagan gods who are given to moods and he might be cruel or might be kind, depends on the mood he’s in. God says what he will do and he keeps his word always. He’s steadfast, he’s firm, he’s faithful. And it says his faithfulness is to all generations. And you see again, that’s a little redundant. If you’re faithful, it continues; that’s what faithfulness is. But he wants to drive the point: “His faithfulness to all generations.” Spurgeon has a wonderful comment here. He says, “Our fathers found him faithful, and so also will our sons and their seed after them forever.” His faithfulness is to all generations. He’s trustworthy, he’s dependable always. He acts always as he has pledged to act.
Both of these—the steadfast love and his faithfulness—are aspects of his goodness. God is good. The Lord, the Lord God of Israel is good. How so? His steadfast love endures forever and his faithfulness to all generations. And this is why all the earth should give him praise.
And I think before we close, we should look at this in light of the rest of the canon of scripture as well—that this song of grateful praise has an eschatological ring to it. When this psalm was written, only a very few people relatively—very few people on earth—did what this psalm calls them to do: come into his presence, come to the precincts of the temple and worship Israel’s God. But this psalm calls the whole world, all the nations, to come into his presence and worship him. And I want to say the world will never be right until it does. And this psalm then functions as a missionary call to all of the nations of the world, and it looks beyond the temple in Jerusalem. It looks to something much greater than that.
In fact, the church’s task all through this age has been to take the message of this God to the world and say, “Know this God. Know that our God is God. Come and know him through his son as he has revealed himself in him, the Lord Jesus Christ, who has made him known and who has bought us to himself in his blood.” And undergirding this call to the nations to come and worship God is the distinct prospect that one day they will. Isaiah chapter 11, verse 9: “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” Psalm 66, verses 22 and 23: “for as the new heavens and the new earth that I make shall remain before me, says the Lord, so shall your offspring and your name remain. From new moon to new moon and from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me, declares the Lord.”
Again, Watts’s paraphrase captures this well here: “We’ll crowd thy gates with thankful songs, high as the heavens our voices raise, and the earth with her 10,000 tongues shall fill thy courts with sounding praise.” The New Testament writers themselves assure us that in the end, God has purposed in the end to gather all of his people from all over the world to himself in Jesus Christ. And there, through him, with all of the nations of the world, we’ll join together and offer grateful praise in the sanctuary of the new heaven and the new earth, in the presence of our God. And I suspect that when that day comes, no one will need to exhort us, as this psalm does, to come and sing with joy.
Revelation chapter 7 tells us that. Revelation 7, verses 9 to 11: “After this, I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all the tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes and palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.’ And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God saying, ‘Amen, blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and praise and might be to our God forever and forever. Amen.'”