Psalm 95 Commentary

We’ve all heard about stories, plays, TV shows, or movies that conclude with the proverbial “happy ending.”  Probably because we prefer happy endings, we gravitate to story lines that provide one.  I myself have never heard of anyone speaking about an “unhappy ending” and you get the feeling that this is because filmmakers and novelists resist wrapping stories up that way as it might put viewers or readers off.  Of course, there are stories or movies that have something bad happen at the end, especially if they are a re-telling of actual historical events.  When in the 1990s director James Cameron made Titanic, he had no choice but to make the climax of the film the unhappy event of the ship sinking and many people dying.

But . . . of course, Cameron did not let the sinking be the actual ending.  Instead he shows the primary character of Rose—who survived the sinking as a young woman—dying peacefully in her sleep at a ripe old age and then we see Rose in the great Titanic of the hereafter, reunited with all the passengers who died and most certainly reunited with Rose’s lover who sacrificed himself to help make sure Rose survived.  So guess what?  Even a movie about a great tragedy had a happy ending after all!  Cameron could not let the final word on his movie be someone like Rose sadly shaking her head and saying, “It was all just so sad and you just never get over it” just before the end credits rolled.  That does not send theatergoers out the door with warm feelings toward the movie.

Psalm 95 begins in great joy.  The psalmist summons us to worship the God of our salvation, to extol this great God with all the thanksgiving we can muster.  Then this song moves on to celebrate the fact that God is the great Creator of all things.  Mountaintops, the depths, the sea, the dry land: it all belongs to Israel’s great God.  And all who know this are described as the sheep of God’s pasture.  It’s all upbeat and celebratory.  End this psalm at verse 7 and, voila, a happy ending.

But then in verse 8 there comes a turn.  Israel is reminded of places of spiritual failure out in the wilderness following the exodus from Egypt.  They rebelled and grumbled and complained at places with the names of Massah and Meribah, words associated with quarreling and testing.  And then as the psalm that began with such joyful and worshipful fervor comes in for a landing, God’s anger against his people makes a sudden appearance.  This then leads to Psalm 95’s unhappy ending as God banishes that generation from the Promised Land of milk and honey with the words. “They shall never enter my rest.”  Not a typical movie ending for sure.

In past sermon commentaries on this psalm I have mentioned a hymn based on Psalm 95 titled “Now with Joyful Exultation.”  It’s a decidedly jaunty tune that well matches the exuberance with which the psalm opens.  But that is why it can feel a bit disjointed when the congregation sings the final line to this same upbeat music as we sing “Never in my rest shall share.”  (If you want to hear the tune, click here.)  That last line of music seems perversely celebratory as the song concludes with the dire judgment spoken in God’s voice that some people “Never in my rest shall share.”

Have you ever noticed how good organists or pianists handle the somber words of one of the stanzas of the hymn “In Christ Alone”?  When the congregation sings “There in the ground, his body lay.  Light of the world by darkness slain,” some musicians slow the music down and play it in a very soft, somber tone before ramping it up once again with the next line, “Then bursting forth . . .”  But that does not happen typically with the music at the end of the Psalm 95 hymn.  It’s still upbeat music but with chilling words.  But that clash of lyrics and music highlights how surprising it is that this otherwise happy psalm really does conclude on a sad and tragic note of judgment.

Why did this psalmist make that move in the end?  Why not keep the tone of praise and worship and make it last throughout the whole song?  What made the writer decide to end with a warning not to repeat the sins of past generations?  There may be many reasons, of course, and perhaps we cannot ever know with precise certainty the psalmist’s reasoning.  But at the very least we could maybe observe that at any given moment, we are all of us tempted to move from worship of our great God to a de facto denial and betrayal of all that we may celebrate in church on any given Sunday.

Who knows what all could lead to this disjunction between joyful worship and some kind of disobedience or rebellion or other moral failures.  Maybe the psalmist was remembering that in the Book of Exodus, only one chapter separates the joyous exultation of the Israelites after passing through the Red Sea and then their grumbling and complaining to Moses about how miserable it was in the wilderness and couldn’t they go back to Egypt where at least they had food to eat and water to drink.  In fact, that set up a long and sickening pattern for Israel in the wilderness: God comes through and the people are thankful only to turn right around and complain all over again.

In our own lives the situation might not always be that stark or that dramatic.  But we know it’s easy to praise God when times are good and easy to refuse to worship when times get tough.  Or it’s easy to promise all the right things in worship on Sunday but just as easy in the week ahead after going to church to cut some moral corners if not outright to just lapse into some pretty rotten behavior in thought, speech, or action.  Maybe the warning of Psalm 95 is not as strange as we might at first think following the shank of the song’s celebration of all that is good about God and the salvation God provides.

The history of Israel is a cautionary tale in many ways.  Their repeated failure to hold up their end of the covenant bargain is also why in the end God had to send his only begotten and beloved Son at long last to get both ends of the covenant bargain upheld.  But now that Christ Jesus our Lord has done this and performed so great a salvation, we have all the more reason to not want our joyful exultation to be followed by behavior or attitudes that cut against the grain of all that.  Yes, our God in Christ has more than sufficient grace to forgive us over and over when we fail but that is no reason to be casual about whether or not we live up to the things we say and promise in worship.

In the end, it is not only on a Sunday morning that we want to come before our great God with shouts of joy and singing.  It is every day as we lean into the power of the Holy Spirit to lead us down paths of daily worship and praise and service.

[Note: For the Year A Season of Lent and leading up to Easter, CEP has, in addition to these weekly sermon commentaries, a special Lent and Easter Resource Page with links to whole sermons, commentary on Lenten texts, and more.]

Illustration Idea

In a memorable sermon titled “Have You Ever Heard John Preach?” Fred Craddock had a lovely line that so well sums up where most of us find ourselves as often as not, and possibly this is something that reflects the larger tension we find in also Psalm 95:

“In my mind I serve God. But there’s another force in my life, and I say ‘I’m going to do that.’I don’t do it. I say, ‘I’ll never do that.’ I do it. Crucified between the sky of what I intend and the earth of what I perform. That’s the truth.”

Between the sky of our intentions and the earthly reality of our actions. Crucified between them. That’s the truth. And if it’s no fun to remind ourselves of our past failures, it’s also no fun to never remember them so as only to repeat them over and over. And over.