1 Sing to Jehovah a new song,
Sing to Jehovah, all the earth.
2 Sing to Jehovah, bless His name,
Publish the glad tidings of His salvation from day to day.
3 Recount among the nations His glory,
Among all peoples His wonders.
4 For great is Jehovah, and to be praised exceedingly,
Dread is He above all gods.
5 For all the gods of the people are Nothings,
And Jehovah made the heavens.
6 Honour and majesty are before Him,
Strength and beauty are in His sanctuary.
7 Give to Jehovah, ye families of the peoples,
Give to Jehovah glory and strength.
8 Give to Jehovah the glory of His name,
Take an offering and come into His courts.
9 Worship Jehovah in holy attire,
Tremble before Him, all the earth.
10 Say among the nations, "Jehovah is King,"
Yea, the world is set fast [that] it cannot be moved,
He shall deal judgment to the peoples in equity.
11 Let the heavens rejoice and let the earth exult,
Let the sea thunder and its fulness,
12 Let the plain rejoice and all that is in it,
Then shall all the trees of the forest ring out joyful cries,
13 Before Jehovah, for He comes,
He comes to judge the earth,
He will judge the world in righteousness,
And peoples in His faithfulness.
The praise of Jehovah as King has, in the preceding psalms, chiefly
celebrated His reign over Israel. But this grand coronation anthem
takes a wider sweep, and hymns that kingdom as extending to all
nations, and as reaching beyond men, for the joy and blessing of a
renovated earth. It falls into four strophes, of which the first three
contain three verses each, while the last extends to four. These
strophes are like concentric circles, drawn round that eternal throne.
The first summons Israel to its high vocation of Jehovah's evangelist,
the herald who proclaims the enthronement of the King. The second sets
Him above all the "Nothings" which usurp the name of gods, and thus
prepares the way for His sole monarchy. The third summons outlying
nations to bring their homage, and flings open the Temple gates to
all men, inviting them to put on priestly robes, and do priestly acts
there. The fourth calls on Nature in its heights and depths, heaven and
earth, sea, plain and forest, to add their acclaim to the shouts which
hail the establishment of Jehovah's visible dominion.
The song is to be new, because a new manifestation of Jehovah's
Kinghood has wakened once more the long-silent harps, which had been
hung on the willows of Babylon. The psalm is probably a lyric echo of
the Restoration, in which the prophet-singer sees the beginning of
Jehovah's world-wide display of His dominion. He knew not how many
weary years were to pass in a weary and God-defying world, before his
raptures became facts. But though His vision tarries, His song is no
over-heated imagining, which has been chilled down for succeeding
generations into a baseless hope. The perspective of the world's
chronology hid from him the deep valley between His standpoint and the
fulfilment of his glowing words. Mankind still marches burdened, down
among the mists, but it marches towards the sunlit heights. The call
to sing a new song is quoted from Isa. xlii. 10. The word in ver. 2_b_
rendered "publish glad tidings" is also a favourite word with Isaiah
II. (xl. 9, lii. 7, etc.). Ver. 3_a_ closely resembles Isa. lxvi. 19.
The second strophe is full of allusions to earlier psalms and
prophets. The new manifestation of Jehovah's power has vindicated
His supremacy above the vanities which the peoples call gods, and
has thereby given new force to old triumphant words which magnified
His exalted name. Long ago a psalmist had sung, after a signal
defeat of assailants of Jerusalem, that God was "great and greatly
to be praised" (Psalm xlviii. 1), and this psalmist makes the old
words new. "Dread" reminds us of Psalm xlvii. 2. The contemptuous
name of the nations' gods as "Nothings" is frequent in Isaiah.
The heavens, which roof over all the earth, declare to every land
Jehovah's creative power, and His supremacy above all gods. But the
singer's eye pierces their abysses, and sees some gleams of that
higher sanctuary of which they are but the floor. There stand Honour
and Majesty, Strength and Beauty. The psalmist does not speak of
"attributes." His vivid imagination conceives of these as servants,
attending on Jehovah's royal state. Whatsoever things are lovely, and
whatsoever are august, are at home in that sanctuary. Strength and
beauty are often separated in a disordered world, and each is maimed
thereby, but, in their perfection, they are indissolubly blended.
Men call many things strong and fair which have no affinity with
holiness; but the archetypes of both excellences are in the Holy
Place, and any strength which has not its roots there is weakness,
and any beauty which is not a reflection from "the beauty of the Lord
our God" is but a mask concealing ugliness.
The third strophe builds on this supremacy of Jehovah, whose
dwelling-place is the seat of all things worthy to be admired,
the summons to all nations to render praise to Him. It is mainly
a variation of Psalm xxix. 1, 2, where the summons is addressed
to angels. Here "the families of the peoples" are called on to
ascribe to Jehovah "glory and strength," or "the glory of His name"
(_i.e._, of His character as revealed). The call presupposes a new
manifestation of His Kingship, as conspicuous and earth-shaking
as the thunder-storm of the original psalm. As in it the "sons of
God" were called to worship in priestly garb, so here, still more
emphatically, Gentile nations are invited to assume the priestly
office, to "take an offering and come into His courts." The issue
of Jehovah's manifestation of kingly sway will be that Israel's
prerogative of priestly access to Him will be extended to all men,
and that the lowly worship of earth will have characteristics which
assimilate it to that of the elder brethren who ever stand before
Him, and also characteristics which distinguish it from that, and
are necessary while the worshippers are housed in flesh. Material
offerings and places consecrated to worship belong to earth. The
"sons of God" above have them not, for they need them not.
The last strophe has four verses, instead of the normal three.
The psalmist's chief purpose in it is to extend his summons for
praise to the whole creation; but he cannot refrain from once more
ringing out the glad tidings for which praise is to be rendered. He
falls back in ver. 10 on Psalm xciii. 1, and Psalm ix. 8. In his
quotation from the former psalm, he brings more closely together the
thoughts of Jehovah's reign and the fixity of the world, whether
that is taken with a material reference, or as predicting the calm
perpetuity of the moral order established by His merciful rule and
equitable judgment. The thought that inanimate nature will share
in the joy of renovated humanity inspires many glowing prophetic
utterances, eminently those of Isaiah--as, _e.g._, Isa. xxxv. The
converse thought, that it shared in the consequences of man's sin, is
deeply stamped on the Genesis narrative. The same note is struck with
unhesitating force in Rom. viii., and elsewhere in the New Testament.
A poet invests Nature with the hues of his own emotions, but this
summons of the psalmist is more than poetry. How the transformation
is to be effected is not revealed, but the consuming fires will
refine, and at last man will have a dwelling-place where environment
will correspond to character, where the external will image the
inward state, where a new form of the material will be the perpetual
ally of the spiritual, and perfected manhood will walk in a "new
heaven and new earth, where dwelleth righteousness."
In the last verse of the psalm, the singer appears to extend his
prophetic gaze from the immediate redeeming act by which Jehovah
assumes royal majesty, to a still future "coming," in which He will
judge the earth. "The accession is a single act; the judging is a
continual process. Note that 'judging' has no terrible sound to a
Hebrew" (Cheyne, _in loc._). Ver. 13_c_ is again a verbatim quotation
from Psalm ix. 8.