As preached by Timothy O'Day.
The church calls all people to worship...
1) By reciting God's great act of salvation (v.1-4).
2) By seeing and savoring the Lord (v. 5-7).
3) As sons and daughters (v.8-9).
The Glorious Duty of Praise
Psalm 47
September 1, 2024
I adore my wife. We’ve been married for 13 years and each year of marriage is better than the last. We have walked through good times and hard times, but through it all my affection and delight in her has only grown. Loving her has made me a better man and I am edified to see that my love for her has helped her grow into a woman who loves the Lord more today than she did before we met. I love her and, when we got married, I promised to love her. In fact, here is what I vowed:
“I, Timothy, take you, Haley, to be my lawfully and spiritually wedded wife. By God’s infinite and matchless grace, I promise to forsake all others and be satisfied in you alone. I promise to love, honor, and cherish you from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, till God separates us by death. Called by God to be your husband, I promise to love you as Christ loves the church. I promise to give my life for you as he gave himself for her. I promise to labor for your sanctification, purifying you by the power of God’s Word, that you might be holy and blameless. Loving you as my own body, I promise to live with you in an understanding way, honor you as my fellow heir of God’s grace, and thereby, keep my prayers unhindered. I fearfully and prayerfully assume the responsibility of spiritual leadership in our family and home. Embracing God’s design for marriage, I promise, by his grace, to labor in honoring these vows that the gospel may be clearly seen, the church strengthened, and above all, God glorified.”
While I have struggled to live up to these vows at times, I have never once regretted them.
Now, perhaps you think this is a weird way to begin a sermon, or you might think that I am in the doghouse and this is some strange attempt to win back her approval, but it isn’t. It is just one of the most fitting ways I can think to communicate to you all that while loving my wife is a duty I swore, it is not drudgery. It is a glorious duty in which I delight.
And this is what Psalm 47 is about. In these verses, you and I get to see the glorious duty of praise. In this psalm, God’s people take up this duty with delight and call all people to join in. And this fits with the context of the Psalms that we have recently looked at. If you recall, Psalms 42-44 were lament psalms in which the speaker called out and pled with God to act in accord with his covenant promises. Psalm 45 was the answer to this call as it depicted God’s anointed king taking his bride, which is a picture of Christ coming to claim his bride, the church. Then Psalm 46 turned to the people of God standing confident on the day of judgment because they knew that Christ had claimed them and would give them victory and rest.
But, as I said last week, that final day of judgment has not yet come. Christ has come and has guaranteed our victory, but we still await that final day in which the New Jerusalem, the New Heavens, and Earth, are ushered in. What are we to do in the meantime while we wait? Psalm 47 is the answer. While we wait, we have the glorious duty of praising God and calling others to join this fitting praise. But don’t just take my word for it, let’s walk through the Psalm together to see how this is the case. I’ve got three points I want to show you from this Psalm, and all three begin with the phrase, “The church calls all people to worship…”
The church calls all people to worship
By reciting God’s great act of salvation (1-4)
The Psalm opens with what I have already pointed out: all people in the world are called to worship God. Look down at verse 1, “Clap your hands, all peoples!” This Psalm is not just calling those who belong to God to praise him; it projects the voice of all of God’s people crying out to those who do not know him to come and join with them in the giving of praise and celebration.
Why do we, God’s people, make this call? Why is it fitting? Verse 2, “For the LORD, the Most High, is to be feared.” The word LORD in all capital letters is how the divine name, YHWH, is written in most English Bibles. The Psalmist is shouting out and calling all of God’s people to shout out to the world that their God is the one true God and he should be feared over and above all others.
Do you remember when we studied through the book of Proverbs and saw how integral the fear of the Lord is to a wise life? Fearing God is not simply cowering before him. Fearing God means you are filled with an awe and respect for God as you encounter his glory, excellence, and worth. As you glimpse him, all of your thinking, feeling, and living are reoriented around who he is. To fear God is for your mind to be preoccupied with him instead of what the world promises and instead of what your flesh desires.
Fearing God is key to worship, so this psalm calls all people not simply to clap their hands for God; it calls all people to know this God and so fear him.
Experiencing God leads to fearing him and fearing him leads to adoring him in praise. So how are others to experience God? Verses 3-4 give us the answer.
Reciting God’s Work of Salvation
Look at verses 3-4 with me, “He subdued peoples under us, and actions under our feet. He chose our heritage for us, the pride of Jacob whom he loves.”
Simply put, you call others to fear God by reciting his work of salvation. The psalmist is calling all people to worship God by fearing him as they see how God redeemed Israel out of slavery in Egypt, sustained them in the wilderness, and delivered them to the Promised Land just as he said he would. He subdued the Egyptians and the Canaanites. He chose the land of Canaan and gave it to Israel, here called the pride of Jacob, as their heritage. And why did he do this? Deuteronomy 7:8 tells us. There the Lord says to Israel through Moses,
“Because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors, he brought you out with a strong hand and redeemed you from the place of slavery, from the power of the Pharaoh king of Egypt.”
That is to say, God keeps his promise even when it looks like things are too hard for the Lord to accomplish.
Your Glorious Duty of Reciting God’s Great Work of Salvation
If you are in Christ, you have the glorious duty of declaring to the world God’s great act of salvation.
Israel cries out for the world to come and learn to fear the Lord as they declaring his glory through the Exodus and their deliverance to the Promised Land, but we have something even greater to declare. The Exodus and God’s covenant faithfulness to give the land to Israel was just a foretaste and a picture of the great salvation he would bring through Jesus Christ.
In the Exodus, God delivered from human slavery, but in Christ, God delivers from the guilt and power of sin. In giving the Promised Land, God gave Israel a pleasant land to dwell in and commune with him through the Tabernacle, but in Christ God promises to give to us a New Heaven and a New Earth and presently dwells with us by his Holy Spirit.
This is the message that the world needs but doesn’t want. In reciting God’s great act of salvation in Jesus Christ, we cry out to the world that they should come and fear God. Why? Because they are sinners who sit under his judgment and, as we read in Psalm 46, all who rebel against the Lord will be destroyed on the day of judgment. Apart from Jesus Christ, your fate is eternal Hell. Eternal Hell is the fate for all who embrace the shackles of sin. But here is the glorious news that makes the duty of praise a delight: even though we were sinners, God gave his Son to die for us. God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, took on human flesh and lived as a man, living a life of perfect obedience unlike us. As such, he does not deserve death and God’s wrath, but he willingly accepted it when he went to the cross. On the cross, Jesus did not die a mere physical death. Rather, he absorbed the wrath of God for all who would trust in him. This means that if you place your faith in Jesus Christ, coming to him as your Lord and Savior, then all of your sin is counted as paid and atoned by him. Not only that, but he rose from the dead showing that your sin is completely atoned. No penalty remains.
This is God’s glorious act of salvation and it is what the world needs even if they call it foolish or offensive. Church, don’t back down from this glorious duty of declaring this news. Evangelism is your worship, which leads us to our second point.
The church calls all people to worship…
By seeing and savoring the Lord (5-7)
One of the reasons the church is to call other people to fear the Lord is because of what we read in verse 5, “God has gone up with a shout, the LORD with the sound of a trumpet.” This is a declaration that the Lord is going into battle. God fights for his people and, since we ourselves know that we do not deserve the mercy that God bestows on us, we call out to others to receive God’s mercy.
As sinners saved by grace and made new by his power alone, he pleaded with others, “Be reconciled to God.”
The Church’s Call to Battle
That’s our call to battle. As the Lord rushes forward, do you see what the church is to do? Look at verses 6-7 and focus on the imperatives, the commands, given to God’s people: “Sing praises to God, sing praises! Sing praises to our King, sing praises! For God is the King of all the earth; sing praises with a psalm!”
That’s five commands, which are really just one repeated, with one ground as to why we should do it.
Here is what we should take from this: God doesn’t need our help. He is the King of all the earth. As the peoples of this earth in rebellion against God plot against him and his anointed Lord Jesus Christ, he does not fret. Psalm 2 says that he laughs. Rebellion against him is futile. After King Nebuchadnezzar is humbled for his pride in thinking that he is the greatest, he makes this confession about the one true God,
‘For his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation; all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, ‘What have you done?’” (Daniel 4:34b-35).
Keep in mind the context of this statement. Israel is in exile, the temple is destroyed, and according to all earthly measurements, the Lord looks powerless. But God was actually in control of it all, having used Babylon to fulfill his promise of a curse for Israel if they rebelled against him.
Don’t fall into the trap of looking at the state of the world and getting into a panic. Don’t think about God’s kingdom and his victory in worldly standards.
He Doesn’t Need Us, But He Gives Us the Privilege of Praise
The gospel doesn’t spread by the sword, a political strategy, or cultural transformation. It spreads through worship. The Lord doesn’t need the church to accomplish his ends, but he does give us the privilege of contagious praise. That is to say, the way we do battle is by seeing and savoring our Lord and then proclaiming his excellencies as we behold him.
Evangelism is not sharing facts, or correcting people. Evangelism is worship. It is delighting in who God is and what he has done and sharing that with another out of joy. It is experiencing the excellencies of God and then declaring those excellencies.
Or as the song O, Church Arise puts it in speaking as the church,
“Our call to war, to love the captive soul,
But to rage against the captor
And with the sword that makes the wounded whole
We will fight with faith and valor
And even as we might look around and think, “This glorious duty of praise is hard,” we remember that God is the King of the earth and he has control of all. Our job is to praise him, it is his job to save and judge. As the song continues,
When faced with trials on ev’ry side,
We know the outcome is secure,
And Christ will have the prize for which he died
An inheritance of nations.
The Assembly of the Saved
The church is not the assembly of the saviors. The church is the assembly of the saved. That’s why we always point to Jesus and not ourselves; we hope in Jesus’ power and not our own; we follow Jesus’ ways and not the worlds; we delight in Jesus’ plans and not our own; and we tell others about how glorious Jesus is instead of talking about ourselves.
Christian, your first glorious duty is not apologetics, evangelism, preaching, teaching, or serving. Your first glorious duty is worship. It is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And from this worship will flow everything else.
Make the aim of your life growing in seeing and savoring your Lord.
As you do this, you will have the joy a corresponding joy, which is laid out in our last point.
The church calls all people to worship…
As sons and daughters of the King (8-9)
As you worship, God will use your voice to gather in his lost sheep. Israel was God’s chosen people in the Old Covenant, but as the Bible unfolds we see that he has people from every tongue, tribe, and nation. As verse 8 says, he is not just the God and King of Israel. “God reigns over the nations…” As his people praise him, God uses their voice to call in those who belong to him from every nation.
As we read earlier in Isaiah 66:19, God will send out his messengers and, as we read there,
“They shall declare my glory among the nations.” He continues in verse 20, “And they shall bring all your brothers from all the nations as an offering to the LORD, on courses and in chariots and in litters and on mules and on dromedaries, to my holy mountain Jerusalem, says the LORD, just as the Israelites bring their grain offerings in a clean vessel to the house of the LORD. And some of them also I will take for priests and for Levites.”
Do you hear what Isaiah is foretelling? We are living in it. God is calling people from every tongue, tribe, and nation and bringing them in as his own. As he does this, he gives them a new identity so that they are actually able to serve as priests before him.
This is in line with what we read in verse 9, “The princes of the people gather as the people of the God of Abraham,” which is to say that God is going to call his own from the nations and they will be counted as God’s people just as Abraham’s offspring are counted as God’s people. You see, God promised that all of the nations of the earth would be blessed through Abraham. As the Bible unfolds, we see how. From Abraham comes the Messiah, who bears the penalty of sin that we deserve on the cross. Through his work, all who unite to him by faith will be counted as children of Abraham, receiving a new identity. As 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “If any is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold the new has come.”
The Gift of Christ and the Joy of Praise
If you come to faith in Jesus, you are a new creation because you receive the Spirit of God, which makes you a child of God. As you come to God in Christ, then, you do not come as a stranger. You come as a child.
As you recount God’s great act of salvation in Christ, seeing and savoring your Lord, you do not call people into God’s Kingdom to be second-class citizens. You cry out to them that they, too, can belong to the family of God.
But this will only be seen as a gift if you know who you are. You are a sinner who deserves death and hell, but in Jesus Christ, you are offered life everlasting with the God who himself is joy and peace. If you do not know Jesus as Lord, join with his people in seeing and savoring his glory.
Church, we have a glorious duty to praise God by remembering his faithfulness to us, his awesome character, and our inclusion in His Kingdom. And if you are here today and you do not know Jesus as Lord, you have the glorious opportunity to place your faith in Christ so that you may forever behold his beauty as you enter his Kingdom as God’s child. That’s what we, as God’s people, turn to celebrate now as we come to the Lord’s Table.
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