1 Rejoice aloud, ye righteous, in Jehovah,
For the upright praise is seemly.
2 Give thanks to Jehovah with harp;
With ten-stringed psaltery play unto Him.
3 Sing to Him a new song,
Strike well [the strings] with joyful shouts.
4 For upright is the word of Jehovah,
And all His work is in faithfulness.
5 He loves righteousness and judgment,
Of Jehovah's loving-kindness the earth is full.
6 By the word of Jehovah the heavens were made,
And all their host by the breath of His mouth.
7 Who gathereth as an heap the waters of the sea,
Who layeth up the deeps in storehouses.
8 Let all the earth fear Jehovah,
Before Him let all inhabitants of the world stand in awe.
9 For He, He spoke and it was;
He, He commanded and it stood.
10 Jehovah has brought to nothing the counsel of the nations,
He has frustrated the designs of the peoples.
11 The counsel of Jehovah shall stand for ever,
The designs of His heart to generation after generation.
12 Blessed is the nation whose God is Jehovah,
The people He has chosen for an inheritance for Himself.
13 From heaven Jehovah looks down,
He beholds all the sons of men.
14 From the place where He sits, He gazes
On all the inhabitants of earth:--
15 Even He who forms the hearts of them all,
Who marks all their works.
16 A king is not saved by the greatness of [his] army,
A hero is not delivered by the greatness of [his] strength.
17 A horse is a vain thing for safety;
And by the greatness of its strength it does not give escape.
18 Behold the eye of Jehovah is on them who fear Him,
On them who hope for His loving-kindness,
19 To deliver their soul from death,
And to keep them alive in famine.
20 Our soul waits for Jehovah,
Our help and our shield is He.
21 For in Him shall our heart rejoice,
For in His holy name have we trusted.
22 Let Thy loving-kindness, Jehovah, be upon us,
According as we have hoped for Thee.
This is the last of the four psalms in Book I. which have no title,
the others being Psalms i., ii., which are introductory, and x. which
is closely connected with ix. Some have endeavoured to establish a
similar connection between xxxii. and xxxiii.; but, while the closing
summons to the righteous in the former is substantially repeated in
the opening words of the latter, there is little other trace of
connection, except the references in both to "the eye of Jehovah"
(xxxii. 8, xxxiii. 18); and no two psalms could be more different in
subject and tone than these. The one is full of profound, personal
emotion, and deals with the depths of experience; the other is devoid
of personal reference, and is a devout, calm contemplation of the
creative power and providential government of God. It is kindred with
the later type of psalms, and has many verbal allusions connecting it
with them. It has probably been placed here simply because of the
similarity just noticed between its beginning and the end of the
preceding. The reasons for the arrangement of the psalter were, so far
as they can be traced, usually such merely verbal coincidences. To one
who has been travelling through the heights and depths, the storms and
sunny gleams of the previous psalms, this impersonal didactic
meditation, with its historical allusions and entire ignoring of sins
and sorrows, is indeed "a new song." It is apparently meant for
liturgical use, and falls into three unequal parts; the first three
verses and the last three being prelude and conclusion, the former
summoning the "righteous" to praise Jehovah, the latter putting words
of trust and triumph and prayer into their mouths. The central mass
(vv. 4-19) celebrates the creative and providential work of God, in
two parts, of which the first extends these Divine acts over the world
(vv. 4-11) and the second concentrates them on Israel (vv. 12-19).
The opening summons to praise takes us far away from the solitary
wrestlings and communings in former psalms. Now
"The singers lift up their voice,
And the trumpets make endeavour,
Sounding, 'In God rejoice!
In Him rejoice for ever!'"
But the clear recognition of purity as the condition of access to God
speaks in this invocation as distinctly as in any of the preceding.
"The righteous" whose lives conform to the Divine will, and only they
can shout aloud their joy in Jehovah. Praise fits and adorns the lips
of the "upright" only, whose spirits are without twist of self-will
and sin. The direction of character expressed in the word is
horizontal rather than vertical, and is better represented by
"straight" than "upright." Praise gilds the gold of purity and adds
grace even to the beauty of holiness. Experts tell us that the
_kinnor_ (harp, A.V. and R.V.) and _nebel_ (psaltery) were both
stringed instruments, differing in the position of the sounding board,
which was below in the former and above in the latter, and also in the
covering of the strings (_v._ Delitzsch, Eng. transl. of latest ed.,
I. 7, n.). The "new song" is not necessarily the psalm itself, but may
mean other thanksgivings evoked by God's meditated-on goodness. But,
in any case, it is noteworthy that the occasions of the new song are
very old acts, stretching back to the first creation and continued
down through the ages. The psalm has no trace of special recent
mercies, but to the devout soul the old deeds are never antiquated,
and each new meditation on them breaks into new praise. So
inexhaustible is the theme that all generations take it up in turn,
and find "songs unheard" and "sweeter" with which to celebrate it.
Each new rising of the old sun brings music from the lips of Memnon,
as he sits fronting the east. The facts of revelation must be sung by
each age and soul for itself, and the glowing strains grow cold and
archaic, while the ancient mercies which they magnify live on bright
and young. There is always room for a fresh voice to praise the old
gospel, the old creation, the old providence.
This new song is saturated with reminiscences of old ones, and deals
with familiar thoughts which have come to the psalmist with fresh
power. He magnifies the moral attributes manifested in God's
self-revelation, His creative Word, and His providential government.
"The word of Jehovah," in ver. 4, is to be taken in the wide sense of
every utterance of His thought or will ("non accipi pro doctrina, sed
pro mundi gubernandi ratione," Calvin). It underlies His "works," as
is more largely declared in the following verses. It is "upright," the
same word as in ver. 1, and here equivalent to the general idea of
morally perfect. The acts which flow from it are "in faithfulness,"
correspond to and keep His word. The perfect word and works have for
source the deep heart of Jehovah, which loves "righteousness and
judgment," and therefore speaks and acts in accordance with these.
Therefore the outcome of all is a world full of God's loving-kindness.
The psalmist has won that "serene and blessed mood" in which the
problem of life seems easy, and all harsh and gloomy thoughts have
melted out of the sky. There is but one omnipotent Will at work
everywhere, and that is a Will whose law for itself is the love of
righteousness and truth. The majestic simplicity and universality of
the cause are answered by the simplicity and universality of the
result, the flooding of the whole world with blessing. Many another
psalm shows how hard it is to maintain such a faith in the face of the
terrible miseries of men, and the more complex "civilisation" becomes,
the harder it grows; but it is well to hear sometimes the one clear
note of gladness without its chord of melancholy.
The work of creation is set forth in vv. 6-9, as the effect of the
Divine word alone. The psalmist is fascinated not by the glories
created, but by the wonder of the process of creation. The Divine will
uttered itself, and the universe was. Of course the thought is parallel
with that of Genesis, "God said, Let there be ... and there was...." Nor
are we to antedate the Christian teaching of a personal Word of God, the
agent of creation. The old versions and interpreters, followed by
Cheyne, read "as in a bottle" for "as an heap," vocalising the text
differently from the present pointing; but there seems to be an allusion
to the wall of waters at the passage of the Red Sea, the same word being
used in Miriam's song; with "depths" in the next clause, there as here
(Exod. xv. 8). What is meant, however, here, is the separation of land
and water at first, and possibly the continuance of the same power
keeping them still apart, since the verbs in ver. 7 are participles,
which imply continued action. The image of "an heap" is probably due to
the same optical delusion which has coined the expression "the high
seas," since, to an eye looking seawards from the beach, the level
waters seem to rise as they recede; or it may merely express the
gathering together in a mass. Away out there, in that ocean of which the
Hebrews knew so little, were unplumbed depths in which, as in vast
storehouses, the abundance of the sea was shut up, and the ever-present
Word which made them at first was to them instead of bolts and bars.
Possibly the thought of the storehouses suggested that of the Flood when
these were opened, and that thought, crossing the psalmist's mind, led
to the exhortation in ver. 8 to fear Jehovah, which would more naturally
have followed ver. 9. The power displayed in creation is, however, a
sufficient ground for the summons to reverent obedience, and ver. 9 may
be but an emphatic repetition of the substance of the foregoing
description. It is eloquent in its brevity and juxtaposition of the
creative word and the created world. "It stood,"--"the word includes
much: first, the coming into being (_Entstehen_), then, the continued
subsistence (_Bestehen_), lastly, attendance (_Dastehen_) in readiness
for service" (Stier).
From the original creation the psalmist's mind runs over the ages
between it and him, and sees the same mystical might of the Divine
Will working in what we call providential government. God's bare word
has power without material means. Nay, His very thoughts unspoken are
endowed with immortal vigour, and are at bottom the only real powers
in history. God's "thoughts stand," as creation does, lasting on
through all men's fleeting years. With reverent boldness the psalm
parallels the processes (if we may so speak) of the Divine mind with
those of the human; "counsel" and "thoughts" being attributed to both.
But how different the issue of the solemn thoughts of God and those of
men, in so far as they are not in accordance with His! It unduly
narrows the sweep of the psalmist's vision to suppose that he is
speaking of a recent experience when some assault on Israel was
repelled. He is much rather linking the hour of creation with to-day
by one swift summary of the net result of all history. The only
stable, permanent reality is the will of God, and it imparts derived
stability to those who ally themselves with it, yielding to its
counsels and moulding their thoughts by its. "He that doeth the will
of God abideth for ever," but the shore of time is littered with
wreckage, the sad fragments of proud fleets which would sail in the
teeth of the wind and went to pieces on the rocks.
From such thoughts the transition to the second part of the main body
of the psalm is natural. Vv. 12-19 are a joyous celebration of the
blessedness of Israel as the people of so great a God. The most
striking feature of these verses is the pervading reference to the
passage of the Red Sea which, as we have already seen, has coloured
ver. 7. From Miriam's song come the designation of the people as God's
"inheritance," and the phrase "the place of His habitation" (Exod. xv.
17). The "looking upon the inhabitants of the earth," and the thought
that the "eye of Jehovah is upon them that fear Him, to deliver their
soul in death" (vv. 14, 18), remind us of the Lord's looking from the
pillar on the host of Egyptians and the terrified crowd of fugitives,
and of the same glance being darkness to the one and light to the
other. The abrupt introduction of the king not saved by his host, and
of the vanity of the horse for safety, are explained if we catch an
echo of Miriam's ringing notes, "Pharaoh's chariots and his host hath
He cast into the sea.... The horse and his rider hath He thrown into
the sea" (Exod. xv. 4, 21).
If this historical allusion be not recognised, the connection of these
verses is somewhat obscure, but still discernible. The people who
stand in special relation to God are blessed, because that eye, which
sees all men, rests on them in loving-kindness and with gracious
purpose of special protection. This contrast of God's universal
knowledge and of that knowledge which is accompanied with loving care
is the very nerve of these verses, as is shown by the otherwise
aimless repetition of the thought of God's looking down on men. There
is a wide all-seeingness, characterised by three words in an ascending
scale of closeness of observance, in vv. 13, 14. It is possible to God
as being Creator: "He fashions their hearts individually," or "one by
one," seems the best interpretation of ver. 15 _a_, and thence is
deduced His intimate knowledge of all His creatures' doings. The
sudden turn to the impotence of earthly might, as illustrated by the
king and the hero and the battle-horse, may be taken as intended to
contrast the weakness of such strength both with the preceding picture
of Divine omniscience and almightiness, and with the succeeding
assurance of safety in Jehovah. The true reason for the blessedness of
the chosen people is that God's eye is on them, not merely with cold
omniscience nor with critical considering of their works, but with the
direct purpose of sheltering them from surrounding evil. But the
stress of the characterisation of these guarded and nourished
favourites of heaven is now laid not upon a Divine act of choice, but
upon their meek looking to Him. His eye meets with love the upturned
patient eye of humble expectance and loving fear.
What should be the issue of such thoughts, but the glad profession of
trust, with which the psalm fittingly ends, corresponding to the
invocation to praise which began it? Once in each of these three closing
verses do the speakers profess their dependence on God. The attitude of
waiting with fixed hope and patient submission is the characteristic of
God's true servants in all ages. In it are blended consciousness of
weakness and vulnerability, dread of assault, reliance on Divine Love,
confidence of safety, patience, submission and strong aspiration.
These were the tribal marks of God's people, when this was "a new
song"; they are so to-day, for, though the Name of the Lord be more
fully known by Christ, the trust in it is the same. A threefold good
is possessed, expected and asked as the issue of this waiting. God is
"help and shield" to those who exercise it. Its sure fruit is joy in
Him, since He will answer the expectance of His people, and will make
His name more fully known and more sweet to those who have clung to
it, in so far as they knew it. The measure of hope in God is the
measure of experience of His loving-kindness, and the closing prayer
does not allege hope as meriting the answer which it expects, but
recognises that desire is a condition of possession of God's best
gifts, and knows it to be most impossible of all impossibilities that
hope fixed on God should be ashamed. Hands, lifted empty to heaven in
longing trust, will never drop empty back and hang listless, without a
blessing in their grasp.