Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: Psalm 100 | Date: May 25, 2025 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

Take your Bibles with me if you will, please. Turn to Psalm 100. Very familiar Psalm today. Psalm 100. You’ll notice the superscript says, “A Psalm for giving thanks.” Or we might render this, “A Psalm of grateful praise.”

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, we’re grateful for this, your word. What a privilege we have to open this book as we come together each Lord’s Day to hear from you. This psalm in particular is a very familiar one to us. It has been a favorite of your people for centuries. We pray that you will open our minds and our hearts to hear its message, that we may glory and exult in our great God through Jesus Christ our Lord. We pray in his name, amen.

Well, the superscript tells us this is a psalm of grateful praise. This is a particular genre of psalms that we have seen before. This giving of thanks, as it’s rendered here, is a public ceremony, a community event. You might remember, as we’ve talked about it in Leviticus chapter 7, Moses’ law provided that an individual could have a, what we might call, a Thanksgiving day. That is, he’s moved by what God has done and he wants to give thanks.

You remember this word “give thanks” means to confess or to acknowledge. So come together and acknowledge what God has done. The idea of gratitude is in the air, so we call it grateful praise. They may come to the temple, they can offer a sacrifice, they can meet together with their friends; it would be a community meal together as well as they come and give thanks to God for what he has done for them. By the time of David now, or after the time of David, these events were accompanied by a psalm to be sung at this giving of thanks, at the sacrifice that was given. And this is one of those kinds of Psalms that is written for that kind of event.

So you can imagine here a crowd of worshipers coming together with their hearts focused on gratitude to God, praise to God for what he has done for them. They come, a sacrifice is offered, an offering is given of some kind or another, and they sing together, they eat together, and this is a joyful event.

Well, Psalm 100 is probably the most famous of the psalms of this genre. It’s traditionally sung today at Thanksgiving holidays for the obvious reason. It’s one of five psalms, only five psalms, in the Psalter that has only five verses. It’s a brief psalm. There are only 43 words in the Hebrew text of this psalm. There are only five other psalms in the Psalter that are shorter than this psalm. It’s a brief psalm, and yet it’s wonderfully compressed, connecting to huge and important biblical themes and pulling them together in this wonderful brief expression of grateful praise to God.

This is also one of the most famous Psalms in English hymnody. Most recently, as far as I know, this psalm was rendered into a song that we sing here. It was written by Don Carson: “Shout to the Lord with delight, all ye people.” That’s taken here from Psalm 100. The most famous of the English hymns taken from this psalm is the famous one that’s known by the title “Old One Hundred.” It’s sung all over the English-speaking world. The words were from William Keith, who was, during the Reformation era in England, a friend of John Knox. He wrote the metered psalm for English singing, and now for centuries, churches all over the English-speaking world have sung this to those words and to that tune. All over the English-speaking world for centuries, churches have heard the leader say, “Come, let us sing the old 100th.” We will sing that after the service this morning.

The structure of this psalm is important and I will point it out just briefly here and then we’ll look at it more pointedly as we go through. But we’ve come to expect with psalms of praise that you have both a call to praise and then a cause, a reason for praise. We have that in this Psalm. Verses one to four, you have the call to praise: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, serve the Lord, come into his presence.” Verse four: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, give thanks, bless his name.” All of this is a call to praise. And then we come to verse five and he gives the reason or the cause for praise: “For the Lord is good.”

Now what’s interesting here and important as we go through it—I’ll point it out again as we get there—is that we have seven commands, seven imperatives in verses one through four. You have three in verses one and two, you have another three in verse four, and in the middle we have another one. So there are seven total, and the one in verse three is not quite a call to praise, and it’s not a cause for praise; it’s neither one. And so we’ll have to look and see how that fits in here and why he structures it the way he did.

So we have a call to praise, verses one and two. Then we have this verse three: “Know that the Lord, he is God.” And then we continue the call to praise in verse four. And then verse five, he gets to the reason or the cause for praise. So it’s structured in a way to draw attention to verse three. We’ll see that as we move through.

The Call to Praise

All right, first of all then, let’s look at verses one and two and the call to praise here. Verse one sets the tone: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.” This joyful noise is a shout. It’s not singing particularly; it’s shouting. In fact, this word is used several times in Joshua to describe what the soldiers did on their campaigns when they would gather around, say, Jericho. And you remember they would shout. It was kind of a war cry, a victory shout afterwards. That’s the word that’s used here. Obviously here, it’s in the context of gladness and celebrating, so it’s make a joyful noise unto the Lord. The idea then is not simply singing, and we’ll get to that in a minute. The idea is that of cheering. So think maybe in terms of the home team in the stadium when the home team scores, and the stands are the people cheering for what has happened and what’s been done. And that’s why it’s associated then with verse two, with gladness. So cheering, shouting to God with gladness and joy.

Psalm 100 is often referred to as the Jubilate. That is the Latin for “be joyful.” That’s the tone that is set in verse 1 of the psalm. Now the superscript tells us it’s a psalm. A psalm by definition is a song to be sung to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. So, give a shout to the Lord, but let’s sing doing it, and a psalm is a song to be sung to a musical instrument. So it’s let’s break out the band, make lots of noise, turn up the volume, let’s sing loud and cheer for what God has done. So it’s not simply cheering, but it’s a cheerful, enthusiastic kind of singing that’s in view here.

And verse two then continues that: “Serve the Lord with gladness. Come into his presence with singing.” Now, serving the Lord obviously speaks of a devoted loyalty to the Lord God, but it calls us to recognize God as God, to praise Him, and not only to praise Him but to render an appropriate service to God. In Psalms, in particular, serving the Lord often connotes offering sacrifice to God in the temple. So it’s turning away from the other gods, turning to the Lord God, offering sacrifice to Him, worshiping Him, bowing before Him, or more broadly, do homage to this God. In the New Covenant age, serving the Lord has the connotations of prayer, serving the saints, serving the church, giving witness to the gospel.

And this all he says to do with gladness, rejoicing. This word here in verse 2 is a happy kind of gladness—mirth, even. Singing with cheering, happy tones. So it’s an excited kind of gladness, singing without reserve. It’s a wholehearted singing with your heart and your mind fully engaged. And this with shouts of joy, verse one, and then singing. So what we have here is a call to exuberance in joyful praise to God. This terminology he’s using here leaves us with a hand-clapping, foot-stomping, jumping-up-and-down, doing-a-jig kind of happiness because we are grateful for what God has done. So this is not praise that is given in a mere ritual way. This is a praise that comes from the heart, calling for excitement. Praise to this God. We see this often in the Psalms. Praise to this God calls for exuberance and joyful expressions of praise. If the privilege of praising this God doesn’t move you, then you don’t get it. How could we not sing? That’s the idea of these two verses.

Now verse two, at the end of the verse, tells us, “Come into his presence. Come into his presence with singing.” Come before him. That is, then, calling them to the temple in Jerusalem, calling them to come up Mount Zion, enter the temple precincts, and give your praise there to the Lord God. Verse four again, we have the same, by the way: “his gates, his courts.” Come to the temple and worship. It’s, “Yay, it’s temple day! We can come and worship the Lord.” That’s the tone here. So, come to the temple, come and give worship to the Lord God.

And yet, and this is all-important in this psalm, verse 1: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.” All the nations. So the psalmist here is calling the Gentile nations to join him at the temple in giving praise to the Lord God. This is the duty of all people everywhere, all the earth. Come give praise to the Lord God.

Now at this point I think it’d be helpful to note the context in the Psalter of this Psalm. Psalm 100 is often referred to as the doxology of Psalms 93 to 99. You remember in Psalms 93 to 99, we have that consistent theme going through: “The Lord is king, the Lord is king, the Lord reigns.” If we back up a little, you might remember that we have in—this is the beginning of—Psalm 90 begins book four of the Psalter. Book 3 of the Psalter is marked by consistent laments, climaxing in the lament of Psalm 89. It seems that God’s promise to David has fallen and it can’t be fulfilled. Where’s the promise to your servant David? It seems like it’s over. The Davidic dynasty has collapsed. There’s no king in Jerusalem. There’s no temple in Jerusalem. Where’s your promise? End book three.

Book four opens then with Psalm 90, a Psalm of Moses, where Moses, the man of God, reminds us that God, the Lord, has been our dwelling place in all generations. And he will continue to be that. And with this hint of Moses the deliverer, there’s a note of hope that’s sounded. And then Psalm 91, Psalm 92, both promising the success of God’s king, the Messiah. And then Psalms 93 to 99, hammering away at this theme: “The Lord is king, the Lord is king, he’s robed in majesty, he’s a great king above all gods.” And then on top of that, he’s saying here in a sense that the situation may be dismal, it may seem dismal, but the Lord is king. And so we cap that off now with Psalm 100. Joyful doxology! If the Lord is king, oh, then there’s every reason to be glad. And if the Lord is king over all the earth, then all the nations must come and worship him. And so the psalmist here is calling all the nations, “Join with us Israel, join with us and sing praises to the Lord God.” And in fact come singing and rejoicing and make it a grand joyful entrance as you come into his presence.

Now if that’s the case, and it obviously is then, then calling, verse one, calling all the earth to join them in praise of God has redemptive implications to it. At the time of the writing of this psalm, at the time of the compiling of the Psalter in this arrangement, scarcely anyone in the world outside of Israel would do what this psalm calls them to do. We have the blinded nations who are in darkness. They’ve not heard of the Lord God of Israel. In fact, the nations are what we find set up for us at Psalm 2 at the entrance to the Psalter. They’re in a rage against God and against his anointed. They won’t have his rule. And the call goes out in Psalm 2: God has set his king on Zion, his holy hill. He calls the world, “Kiss the son, do homage to him. Take refuge in him.” You have this opportunity. Take refuge in the son. And if you don’t, you will perish.

And here now we come in Psalm 100. We come with joyful singing. The nations come with joyful singing because—this is presupposed—because they have bowed, they have taken refuge in the son. And that’s why verse four: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving.” They recognize the Lord God, there’s been a redemptive experience, and they come giving praise to the God of Israel, because they too have enjoyed his redeeming work. And so, as we see so often in the Psalter, Psalm 100 is prospective. It’s looking ahead in big picture, and it ties to a huge biblical theme. God had said to Abraham, “In your seed, all the nations of the world will be blessed.” God said to David, “You’ll have a son, and he’ll rule the world over.” We found it in the prophets. We’ve seen it recently in our evening studies in Isaiah and in Micah. And all the nations will come streaming into Jerusalem looking to the king for counsel on how to live and going back to their places with the treasured instruction of the king. And it’s a common theme in the Psalter as well.

And so, the Psalter in this sense has been called, and I think rightly so, a missionary hymnal, calling the world to know and to love and to serve and to rejoice in the Lord God. And so verse four continues the call to praise: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise. Give him thanks. Give him grateful praise and bless his name.” This call for all the peoples of all the earth: “Come, join us in the worship of the Lord God. His saving purpose is universal. Come and offer grateful praise to him with us.”

We’ve been noting as we go through these psalms some implications for our own corporate singing and corporate praise, corporate worship, and there are some of that here as well. I’m always glad to hear from visitors that the singing at RBC is marked by enthusiasm, and of course the reason for that, the reason for the enthusiasm in singing, is because there’s a grateful recognition of who God is and what he has done. But here, there’s an added implication for it as well. Our singing is in anticipation. It’s in anticipation that one day, men and women from every nation and tongue will join us in grateful praise to God.

Know That the Lord, He Is God

Now, I said the structure of the psalm is important. Notice this here. The flow of thought is designed, as I said, to draw attention to verse three. Verses one to four, we have these seven commands, seven imperatives. Three up front, one in the middle, and then three more in verse four. So verses one and two: “Make a joyful noise, serve the Lord, come into his presence.” This is a call to praise. And then the last three in verse four: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, give him thanks and bless his name.” And then lying between those three and three, we have verse three, which is not a call to praise. It’s something different: “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 again, the balance of three and three with the one in the middle draws attention to the one in the middle. But this one in the middle is not the same as the ones on either side. It’s something, it’s kind of an interruption. In poetry, it’s called an intercalation. It’s something thrown in, something different to make a point. It’s not a call to praise. It’s not a reason for praise. So how does it fit? Why is it thrown in here? What’s the point of it all?

Well, in verses one and two, Israel and all the nations are called to enter God’s presence with joyful and cheerful singing. Verse four, he continues to invite them. But verse three, in the middle, this intercalation, it’s a call to do something else. Before you enter, you must acknowledge something. You must know that the Lord, He is God. You must acknowledge that the Lord, the God of Israel, is the true God. He is God. This is a call to repentance. “Turn from your false gods, you nations, and acknowledge the Lord, the God of Israel, is the true God.”

There is no religious pluralism here. Our culture is dominated with that thinking of pluralism, that you enter the way you want, you approach God on your own terms, he’ll have us all. The whole notion of pluralism today is that of inclusivism. Bring it all together, and however you approach him, he’ll have you. We’re reminded here that we find everywhere in the Bible that the Bible is exclusivistic through and through. You come, and the only praise that is welcome here, the only praise that will be accepted, is one that acknowledges the Lord as the true God. So come into his presence, come joyfully, enter his gates with thanksgiving, but know this: he is God.

And then we have at the end of verse three, he’s expanding on this: “Know that the Lord, he is God.” What does that mean? “Know that the Lord, He is God. It is He who made us. And we are His people. We are His. We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.” Now, briefly here, a note on the translation. If you’re using the King James or the New American Standard here, it reads something like, “He has made us and not we ourselves.” And that’s the way—similar to that is the way it’s rendered in the song that we’ll sing at the end of the service. It’s a translation note: how should this particular word be taken? At the end of it all, the difference is really very slight. The point is here, twofold. One, he made us; he made us. We didn’t contribute to this; he made us. And number two, he made us his. He made us; we are his sheep. He made us all by himself.

So it’s an affirmation of divine sovereignty and specifically an affirmation of sovereign grace. The “us” here, the “we,” that’s Israel. He made us; he made us his. And it’s pointing back to the call of Abraham: “I’ll make a nation out of you, a great nation.” It’s harking back to the Exodus, bringing them out of Egypt to make them a nation. It’s harking back to Sinai, where God entered into covenant relationship with them, making them his people. It is a hark back to bringing them into the land and giving them all that he has promised. So just as at the beginning, God made us and made us all by himself, so also he has made Israel his own people. And he did this because of nothing on our part, all from his side. It’s like Deuteronomy chapter seven, where God reminds Israel, “I loved you. I have loved you, but not because of anything about you. I loved you because I loved you.” The divine logic: “I loved you because I loved you.” It’s all from my side. You have not contributed to this. And I have made you my people.

And that, of course, is the church’s testimony exactly. It’s a testimony of sovereign grace. God has made us all by himself. This is what John says: “What kind of love is this? That we, we should be called the children of God.” We are God’s favored people. Being God’s favored people gives us joy in giving him praise. And so with the intercalation of verse three behind him, verse four, he resumes the call to praise. Three more imperatives: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and bless his name.”

The Cause for Praise

Why? For what reason should we give God grateful praise? Verse five, he finally gets to that. Why is it that the praise and service of this God should be marked by such enthusiastic joy? Verse five: “For the Lord is good. His steadfast love endures forever and his faithfulness to all generations.”

So Psalm 100 now has made two affirmations about God. One in verse 3: He’s God. And he expands on that: He made us and he made us his. But now in verse 5, he makes another affirmation about God. And here’s the reason for praise: He’s good. And again, he expands on what that means. He’s good in his character and in his actions. He’s good. He made us, after all. He made us his. His is a good God.

By the way, you should know, in all of the literature of the ancient Near East outside of Israel, lots of worship literature that archeologists have, worshiping the pagan gods around Israel—in all of the worship literature around Israel in the ancient Near East, there is nothing resembling this: “Worship him joyfully because he’s good.” There’s nothing of that in the ancient literature outside of Israel. Their gods are fickle. They’re unpredictable. They’re arbitrary. They’re sometimes outright evil, cruel. But here’s Israel: “Give joyful praise to our God because he’s good.”

Then he expands on it. What does it mean that God is good? Well, what it means specifically and most importantly for us is, “His steadfast love endures forever.” This is a—that word we come across so often in the Psalter. Some of you, I’ve not mentioned the Hebrew word here, but some of you have found it on your own and have mentioned it to me. It’s that word chesed. It’s H-E-S-E-D, but you kind of—it’s a guttural, so you say it from the back of your throat like you’re clearing it. Chesed. Steadfast love. We don’t have an exact equivalent word for this in English, and so we have to use two words to translate it: “steadfast love.”

The word as it’s used in the Old Testament, it connotes several ideas. One, God’s love, his affection, his kindness, but also his committedness, his constancy in it all. And so again, we don’t have a word that says all that, so we use two words: steadfast love. In the King James, it’s often “tender mercies.” We’re trying to capture all that it connotes. In the Old Testament, when this word is used, it often has the picture, the situation of a weaker person and a stronger person, and the stronger one has entered into covenant language. There’s the committed aspect of it. He’s entered into a committed relationship with these people. He loves them. He has affection for them. And because he loves them, he has affection, he’s kind to them. And it’s a committed kind of kindness. All of this is involved in the connotations of this word. And often the situation, the one who is weaker, finds himself in some kind of a plight. He’s in danger. He’s failing or he’s hurting. And the one who is in the stronger relationship—in this case, God himself—comes to help. And he comes to help not because he’s got some obligation that he doesn’t like. He comes because he has love and affection. Because he has love and affection, he’s kind to them. And he’s committed to them. And so he brings the help that was promised. All of this is a connotation of this term, his steadfast love.

And then he says the Lord’s steadfast love endures forever. Now once you understand the connotations of the words “steadfast love,” then “endures forever” is redundant. Because what it means to have steadfast love is that it continues forever. But he’s underlining that aspect of it—that this is what God’s steadfast love is like. It will never fail. Like God himself, his steadfast love is eternal. This is one aspect of his goodness.

So also then, next: his faithfulness. “His steadfast love and also his faithfulness to all generations.” His faithfulness. A word that has the meaning of firm, that which is true and solid, that which is then trustworthy, is the idea here. The idea is that God is not a fickle God. He’s not given to moods like the pagan gods around Israel. But if God says he will do something, he’ll do it. He’s faithful. And then it says, his faithfulness is to all generations. Well again, that’s kind of redundant. What it means to be faithful is to be faithful continually. If you’re not faithful continually, you can’t be—it’s not really faithful. But he underlines it here: “his faithfulness to all generations.” His word, his promises are always sure. Spurgeon had a wonderful description of this in a quaint way that he often will give: that our fathers found him faithful, our sons will too. His faithfulness endures to all generations. He is trustworthy. He’s dependable. He always acts in a way that he has pledged to act.

Now both of these then, God’s steadfast love and his faithfulness, these show the goodness of God. And this is why all the earth is called to give him jubilant praise. Now we look at all of that then, in the context of the whole Bible, and you can’t miss that it has a gospel ring to it. It has an eschatological ring to it. It points us to the end. As I mentioned, when this psalm was written, comparatively few people on the face of the earth would do what the psalm calls them to do: enter the precincts of the temple and worship Israel’s God. When the Psalter was collected and these Psalms arranged in the order that they were given, inspired editors show their faith in it because at that point—this is a point when they put all of this together in this arrangement—there was no Davidic King. There’s no temple in Jerusalem. It had been laid waste. And yet this psalm calls the whole world to come and worship. Come and worship Israel’s God.

So it looks beyond the temple itself, the one in Jerusalem, to something greater. And on one level, this is the church’s task under the Great Commission. Verse three is the gospel call: “Know that the Lord is God.” And know that you can know him through his son who has come, who has died in place of sinners and offers now forgiveness that we may have fellowship with this God. Until the world learns to bow before God, the world will never be right. It’s the whole trouble with our world today. But underlying and undergirding this call to the nations to worship God is the distinct prospect that one day they will.

I never tire of saying it: one day—I can’t wait—one day the world will give to God the honor that he deserves. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Our world today marked by blasphemy and revolt and rebellion against God. One day, they’ll give him the honor he deserves. God himself has said it. He set it out on a purpose to do that. Isaiah 45: “To me, every knee will bow and every tongue will swear allegiance.” God has promised David a son who will rule the world over. We come to the New Testament; the New Testament writers assure us that God’s great purpose in the end is to gather all of his people from all the world together in Christ. And then through him all the nations will enter the gates of the sanctuary of the new Jerusalem, the new heaven and the new earth. And then all of us together from all the nations, with one voice, we’ll offer our own sacrifice of praise to the Triune God.

That is the prospect of this great psalm. And so as we’ve seen so often, this is the theme of the Psalter. This is the hope of the church. We come back to it over and over again. The Psalter drives us to say with the Apostle John, “Even so come quickly, Lord Jesus, hasten the day.”