Psalm 95:6

“O come” translates a form of yâlak, the everyday Hebrew verb for walking or going. Here it is a command addressed to a whole company of people, and the psalmist includes himself in it: “let us sing”, “let us make a joyful noise”, “let us come”. Worship in this psalm is something God’s people get up and go to do together, with their voices and their bodies as well as their hearts.

The singing is directed “unto the LORD”, the covenant God of Israel, and the Hebrew behind “let us sing” speaks of a ringing cry of joy. The second line says the same thing more strongly. “Make a joyful noise” is the verb rûwaʻ, which means to shout or cry out and is also used for sounding an alarm. In worship it is the glad shout of a people who delight in their God, and Psalm 100:1–2 gives the same call to all the earth.

The psalm was very likely sung in Israel’s temple worship, perhaps as the people went up in procession on a Sabbath or at one of the great feasts. Israel’s praise was loud and full of music. When David brought the ark to Jerusalem there was shouting and the sound of the trumpet (2 Samuel 6:15), and he appointed Levites as singers with instruments to raise the sound of joy (1 Chronicles 15:16).

Verse 3 begins with “For”, and that small word gives the reason for everything in the first two verses. We sing and shout because of who the LORD is.

Three words carry the verse. “The LORD” is Yᵉhôvâh, the personal name of the God of the covenant, made known to Moses with the words “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14–15). The great God of this psalm is the one who exists of himself, who bound himself to Israel and who acts in history. “Great” is gâdôwl, an adjective for greatness of size, age, status or intensity, and here it speaks of his power and majesty. “God” is ʼêl, a word that means god and above all the true God, and carries the sense of strength and might. Scripture loves to say this of him: “Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised” (1 Chronicles 16:25, Psalm 145:3).

The verse says “great” of him twice, once as God and once as King. As King he actively rules. He governs, he judges and he carries out his will over every realm and every creature. His greatness is his own and depends on nothing outside him, which is why worship is the right response to him and belongs to him alone.

Verses 4 and 5 show how far his kingship reaches by walking through the world he rules.

“In his hand” uses yâd, the ordinary word for a hand, which in Scripture regularly stands for power, possession and active control. The “deep places” are mechqâr, a recess or deep place. The word comes from the idea of something searched out, so it suggests the hidden parts of the earth that people can barely explore, such as caverns and the depths under the sea. What is out of our sight and beyond our reach is known to God and held by him. David says the same of himself, that there is nowhere he could go, in heaven, in the grave or across the sea, where God’s hand would fail to hold him (Psalm 139:7–10).

From the lowest places the verse turns to the highest. “The strength of the hills” uses tôwʻâphâh, a word whose senses include toil, plenty and strength, and here it describes the towering might of the mountains. Israel knew a land of deep ravines and caves in the Judean wilderness and of great heights such as Mount Hermon and the hills around Jerusalem. The psalm says that the most immovable things we can see belong to God. By naming the depths and the heights together, the verse claims everything between them for him.

Verse 5 does the same with sea and land. The sea is yâm, the word for the sea or any great body of water, and the nations around Israel often feared the sea as a wild power and even treated it as a god. The psalm answers in a few plain words: “The sea is his, and he made it.” His ownership rests on his having made it. The stories of the nations told of gods who fought one another before the world could be ordered, while Scripture knows one sovereign God who made all things with no rival and no struggle, from its first line onward: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).

Other Scriptures say the same of the whole world. “The earth is the LORD’s, and the fulness thereof” (Psalm 24:1). Isaiah pictures God measuring the waters in the hollow of his hand (Isaiah 40:12) and names him the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth (Isaiah 40:28). Job speaks of the hand of God in every living thing (Job 12:7–10), and when the LORD answers Job out of the whirlwind he lays the whole natural world before him as his own work (Job 38–39). In heaven he is praised as worthy because he created all things (Revelation 4:11).

Verse 6 opens with the same summons as verse 1, “O come”, and this time the call is to go down. Three verbs describe it. “Worship” is shâchâh, which means to bow oneself down, to prostrate oneself in homage before a king or before God, and it is the most common Old Testament word for worship. “Bow down” is kâraʻ, to bend the knee. “Kneel” is bârak, to kneel, a word that is also the root of the Hebrew for blessing. Together they picture the whole body brought low before God.

In Israel and among the nations, people bowed and knelt before kings to show homage and submission. To do it before the LORD was to confess with the body that he is the King of verse 3 and that we are his subjects. So the psalm’s praise has two movements, and both are needed. The joy of verses 1 and 2 is real, and it comes to rest in reverence.

The reason given is in the last two words: he is “our maker”. The word is ʻâsâh again, the verb used of the sea in verse 5. The God who made the sea and shaped the land made us too. The creation account tells how he did it (Genesis 1), making man in his own image (Genesis 1:27), and through Isaiah he says, “I have made the earth, and created man upon it” (Isaiah 45:12). We owe him our life and breath, we belong to him, and kneeling is the fitting posture of a creature before the one who gave it being.

These six verses belong to the first half of the psalm, which runs on into verse 7, where the LORD is our God and we are the sheep of his hand. In the middle of that verse the tone changes, and the rest of the psalm is a solemn warning: “To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your heart” (Psalm 95:7–11). It looks back to Meribah and Massah, where Israel quarrelled with God over water (Exodus 17:1–7, Numbers 20:1–13), and to the generation that saw his works and still refused to trust him, and so was shut out of the land (Numbers 14:22–23).

The two halves belong together. The people who sing to the rock of their salvation are the people who must listen when he speaks, and praise from the lips is meant to go with a heart that obeys. The letter to the Hebrews takes up this warning for the church (Hebrews 3:7–11) and speaks of a rest that remains for the people of God (Hebrews 4:9–11).

The New Testament shows us that the Rock, the King and the Maker of this psalm is made known in Jesus Christ.

Paul says of Israel in the wilderness that they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, “and that Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). He is the rock on which the wise man builds his house (Matthew 7:24–27), the giver of living water (John 4:10–14) and the stone the builders rejected that became the head of the corner (1 Peter 2:7). The salvation we sing of is his work. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), and he has obtained eternal redemption for us (Hebrews 9:12).

He has also opened the way into God’s presence. Under the old covenant the approach to God was through priests and limited to the holy place. When Jesus died, the veil of the temple was torn in two (Matthew 27:51). He is Emmanuel, God with us (Matthew 1:23), and through him we have access by one Spirit to the Father (Ephesians 2:18). So the invitation of verse 2 is now, “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (Hebrews 10:19–22), and the church still comes with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs (Ephesians 5:19).

He is the great God and the great King. The Word was God, and all things were made by him (John 1:1–3), and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). He is the image of the invisible God, all things were created by him and for him, and by him all things hold together (Colossians 1:15–17), so the deep places, the hills, the sea and the dry land of this psalm are his handiwork. In him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (Colossians 2:9). He showed his rule over the sea by stilling a storm with a word (Mark 4:39) and by walking on the water (Matthew 14:25). All power in heaven and on earth has been given to him (Matthew 28:18), at the cross he triumphed over the principalities and powers (Colossians 2:15), he holds the keys of death (Revelation 1:18), and his name is King of kings and Lord of lords (Revelation 19:16).

The kneeling of verse 6 points forward to him as well. He humbled himself and became obedient to death on a cross (Philippians 2:7–8), and God has highly exalted him, so that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:9–11). Heaven already sings that the Lamb is worthy to receive power and honour and glory and blessing (Revelation 5:12). When we kneel before our Maker now, we join a worship that will one day fill all creation.

This passage gives us reasons for praise that hold whatever our circumstances are, because every one of them is about God. He is our rock, so the ground under our worship stays firm when everything else shifts. He is the King above all gods, so no earthly power, spiritual force or hard circumstance can overturn his purposes or his care for his people. And every rival for our deepest loyalty, whether money, status, comfort, fear or self, stands under him.

The verses about creation come close to home as well. The God who holds the hidden depths of the earth holds the hidden things in us too, including the fears and struggles we keep out of sight. The strength of the hills is his, so the obstacles that tower over us are small before him. And since the sea and the land are his, the world we live in is his property entrusted to our care.

The psalm also shows us two sides of a whole response to God. There is gladness that sings and shouts and gives thanks, and there is humility that kneels because he made us and we are his. We are made by him, wonderfully and on purpose, and that is reason enough both to rejoice and to bow.