Psalm 47 - Call and Response
Hello, and welcome back to Tabernacle Talk. We are in Psalm 47 today, and a little bit shorter Psalm, and it is a good one.
So I'm excited for us to hop in. The inscription for the Psalm says this, for the Choir Director, a Psalm of the sons of Korah. So here another inscription saying, here's the music group that's doing it.
Here's the person that I want leading this music group in it. And the Psalm says this, Clap your hands, all you peoples, shout to God with a jubilant cry. For Yahweh, the Most High, is awe-inspiring, a great king over the whole earth.
He subdues peoples under us and nations under our feet. He chooses for us our inheritance, the pride of Jacob whom he loves, Selah. God ascends among shouts of joy, Yahweh with the sound of trumpets.
Sing praise to our God. Sing praise. Sing praise to our King.
Sing praise. Sing a song of wisdom, for God is King of the whole earth. God reigns over the nations.
God is seated on his holy throne. The nobles of the peoples have assembled with the people of the God of Abraham. For the leaders of the earth belong to God.
He is greatly exalted.
Some people have connected Psalm 46, 47, and 48, all with the same account of God's deliverance of the southern kingdom of Judah from Assyria that we talked about yesterday, where God came through and he devastated the Assyrian army and he brought
the king of the Assyrians. I believe it was King Sinatra, if I remember correctly, where he sent him back to Assyria, where he ended up actually getting assassinated in a military power grab.
That God worked that out, that Jerusalem that was besieged, God's people that were hopeless, that were not going to make it out, that they did because of the work of God.
And so because of this, we can read in verse number one, what's the reaction that we have to God working? It says, clap your hands, all you peoples. I grew up in a specific type of church.
It wasn't necessarily like all the churches that maybe carried some of the same beliefs that our church did. Not everyone had this belief, but you couldn't clap. You couldn't move at all, maybe if you were singing, if you were leading singing.
Clapping was just not really something that you ever did in church. Like maybe if you were congratulating your pastor or something on an anniversary or something like that, maybe you could clap.
Or perhaps if someone was getting baptized, you could clap. But clapping had nothing to do with music.
And frankly, just over and over and over again in the Psalms, we are commanded one of our actions, one of our responses that we do in our worship of God. As here, the choir director leads the Psalm of the Sons of Korah as part of the song.
They're singing Clap Your Hands. And there's a song that I learned as a little kid. I've linked it in the show notes.
Clap Your Hands, All You People, Shout unto God with the Voice of Triumph. Clap Your Hands, All You People, Shout unto God with the Voice of Praise.
Or here, as the Christian Standard Bible has it, with a jubilant cry that God's work in our life is deserving of not just our vocal cords getting involved, not just the smile on our face getting involved. It involves our hands getting involved.
As other Psalms would have it, it involves our feet and our legs getting involved. Frankly, I feel on Sundays, I lead worship with or I lead the music, the praise portion of our service with a guitar.
And so to one extent, like I get to be physically involved with everything that I'm doing, that with my left hand, I'm doing all the cords and stuff. And with my right hand, I'm either strumming or picking, and I'm singing.
And those of you that have seen me during like music practice or soundcheck, normally I just I get into it with my legs because God is deserving of all of our praise with our whole being, with our whole body. We ought to praise the Lord.
So it says, hey, here's what I want you to do. I want you to clap. I want you to shout.
I want you to be loud. It's a natural expression to clap when we love something. If you see someone get engaged at a ball game, you might clap for them.
You might go, whoo, you know, something like that. And certainly, if we do that for just little earthly things, let's do it for the God of heaven. And that's what verse two tells us.
It says, for Yahweh, the most high is awe-inspiring, that God wows us with who he is, with his actions, what he has done. And then in verses three and four, this psalmist writes in particular what God had done that was awe-inspiring for him.
He says he's a great king over the whole earth, that there is not like, you know, maybe the king of Kazakhstan, who is in opposition to God, God is the one true king, and any other, like, under king, they are just doing it for as long as God wants
them in that place. That the powers that be in our world are those that are ordained, set there, placed there by our God. That's what Romans 13, among many other places in Scripture, would tell us. God is the one who is the king.
And verse 3, we can see how he exhibits that, that he subdues peoples under us, this is what the psalmist here says.
He says, like, we're just little Israel, like, we're not a great world power like Babylon, like Assyria, like later in world history, Greece or Rome. And he says, we're not anything great, but God has defeated people, has Israel fought against them.
But he knows, like, this didn't come from the greatness of Joshua, didn't come from the greatness of David or Hezekiah. Any victories that Israel has won has been because God subdued people.
It's kind of like as I look at my shoe, I might say that my shoe crushed a ant or something, but the shoe in and of itself is powerless to move. It's only as my foot, as my leg moves it, that it has any impact on an ant.
It's the only way that it moves. And here, God, he subdues the people under his chosen ones. He subdues the nations under their feet, kind of a call back there to Genesis 3.15, where God told Satan, the snake, the serpent, the demon.
He told him that the descendant of the woman, the offspring, the seed of the woman, would crush the head of this serpent. And here the psalmist says, God, we have seen you do this.
You have crushed, you have subdued the nations under our feet, even as I've referenced before in Romans 16, where the apostle Paul writes to the churches in Rome that he says, the God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly.
That God wants to do his work and he does it through his people. Today, God's not interested in, you know, overthrowing a particular nation or in crushing anyone. He is looking for his ambassadors that will bring people into the kingdom of heaven.
That as we do that, we do crush Satan. Our enemy is not other people. Our enemy is the devil, the demons, the principalities and powers.
So he says, he chooses for us our inheritance, the pride of Jacob whom he loves, that God has selected what he wants to work through. Here at this time, it was Israel.
Nowadays, it is his church, and it is primarily Jesus who, in one sense, is the pride of Jacob, the lion of the tribe of Judah.
He is the one that is the Messiah of Israel, and he is the inheritance that we have, and we are his inheritance, that what he gets for his work on the cross, for his righteousness, for his conquering of death, we are the prize that he gets, and he is
the prize that we get. What a wonderful trade that is.
Then verse number five, God sends among shouts of joy, Yahweh, with the sound of trumpets, that God is lifted up, that people view him as lofty and as holy and as in control, and that is done through the praise of God's people, that as we lift him
up, people consider, what would cause, you know, what would cause my mechanic, what would cause this realtor, what would cause this health care worker to sing about a 2,000 year old Jewish carpenter? Why would that be?
And it proclaims who our God is, that he really did rise from the dead, that he was truly everything that he said that he was. And so, we are called to sing praise to our God, verse 6. Sing praise, sing praise to our King, sing praise.
Sing a song of wisdom for God is King of the whole earth. Some people kind of view the singing time as, oh yeah, this might be a time where I listen to other people, I'm not really going to participate. Can I encourage you?
We have like so, so many commands to sing in scripture. And here in this, in just this very short chapter, we're given the command to clap our hands. That's one.
Shout to God. That's number two. We're to bring shouts of joy in verse five.
That's three. We're to praise the Lord with the sound of trumpets. That is four.
In verse six, sing praise to God, sing praise, sing praise to our King, sing praise. Verse seven, sing a song of wisdom. So that's nine different commands to sing, to clap, to shout, to praise him with trumpets.
If just in this one chapter, God gives us that command that many times, don't you think that you should probably get in on it?
And one of the ways that we try to equip our people here at Tabernacle to be able to sing is every single week, I post the songs that we're going to be singing that coming Sunday.
And I put it on our church YouTube page, a playlist of those songs so that you can learn the words, you can learn the tune if you don't already know it.
And I want to make it so that God's people, they know what they're going to be singing to the Lord and that they can sing it together.
Because when we do that, we are learning Scripture, we're declaring God, He is lifted up, He's exalted, and it all happens as a result of the praise of God's people because we are responding to what God has done.
Then verse 8, God reigns over the nations, God is seated on His holy throne. Being seated is a position of power. That God's not worried, He's not pacing the floor on what He's going to be doing.
God is seated. He is absolutely sovereign. And so we don't have to worry.
Here for these Israelites, though they had been worried about the siege that was coming against them from Assyria, that these enemies were outside the city, God wasn't concerned.
And He didn't need to call 10,000 angels, He didn't need to call a mighty 300. He sent one angel down and that one angel accomplished all of God's purpose. And if even a lowly angel can do that, think about what God Himself is able to do.
Verse number 9, The nobles of the peoples have assembled with the people of the God of Abraham, that the actions of the Lord draw people that had not previously been people of God.
It draws them into His presence to want to worship with the people of God.
So declare on your Facebook, declare in your conversations what God has done for you, how He has redeemed you, how He is working in your life, how He is comforting you, how He has provided for your needs.
And let your declaration and your praise and your singing of God, let it draw others to want to know the God that you worship. And it says in the end of verse 9, for the leaders of the earth belong to God. He is greatly exalted.
Many of us can worry about leaders and different organizations and things, and we can question, okay, are we going to be all right? Is there safety? Are we going to make it?
Know that the leaders of the earth belong to God. He is the one that as soon as He says, all right, King of Assyria, you're out, someone else is in, it happens.
Know that as soon as God says, hey, this nation that's been attacking, I'm going to decimate their army. He does that. He is the God that is sovereign so we can rest in Him.
What's our response? Sing, clap, play an instrument, declare His greatness because He is worthy of all of it. Thank you for tuning in today and look forward to studying Psalm 48 with you tomorrow.
I do want to say, I also in addition to Clap Your Hands, All You People, I also linked in the show notes Psalm 47 Clap Your Hands written by Shane and Shane. It's a great song that will help you to learn this chapter of scripture.
