Scripture Daily

Context No. 335 of 4322 · Psalms

Context · Reflection

Psalms 95:1-11: in context

1Oh come, let’s sing to the LORD. Let’s shout aloud to the rock of our salvation! 2Let’s come before his presence with thanksgiving. Let’s extol him with songs! 3For the LORD is a great God, a great King above all gods. 4In his hand are the deep places of the earth. The heights of the mountains are also his. 5The sea is his, and he made it. His hands formed the dry land. 6Oh come, let’s worship and bow down. Let’s kneel before the LORD, our Maker, 7for he is our God. We are the people of his pasture, and the sheep in his care. Today, oh that you would hear his voice! 8Don’t harden your heart, as at Meribah, as in the day of Massah in the wilderness, 9when your fathers tempted me, tested me, and saw my work. 10Forty long years I was grieved with that generation, and said, “They are a people who err in their heart. They have not known my ways.” 11Therefore I swore in my wrath, “They won’t enter into my rest.”

This psalm is one of the great invitations to worship, and it starts with pure exuberance. Come, let us sing to the LORD, it says, shout aloud to the rock of our salvation, come into his presence with thanksgiving. It piles up reasons: the LORD is a great King above all gods, the depths of the earth and the peaks of the mountains are in his hand, the sea is his because he made it. Come, worship, bow down, kneel before our Maker, for we are the sheep of his hand. It is the kind of full-throated praise you would expect to end on a high note.

And then the psalm turns, sharply, on a single word: today. Today, if you would hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as your ancestors did at Meribah and Massah, where they tested God in the wilderness. Suddenly the song becomes a warning, recalling the generation that God says grieved him for forty years, the ones who would not enter his rest. The turn teaches something the two halves are meant to hold together: real worship is not only singing about God's greatness. It is also hearing his voice and keeping the heart soft enough to obey it. And the psalm assumes you can do the first while failing the second, that a person can sing the whole hymn at full volume and quietly harden his heart at the same time.

The hinge word is the one that will not let the warning be postponed. Today. The voice is speaking now, and the softness or the hardness is a present choice, not a someday one. As I sing and pray and praise, is my worship also a real listening that keeps my heart soft today, or have I learned to make the sounds of worship while quietly hardening against the one thing God is actually asking of me?

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