Psalm 24:2

The psalm begins with the covenant name of God. “The LORD” stands for Yᵉhôvâh, the sacred name often rendered “Jehovah”, the name by which God bound himself to Israel. So the owner of the whole earth is the same personal, self-existent and unchanging God who made a covenant with his people, and his rule over the world is the reign of one who knows those he rules.

David names what belongs to the LORD in two pairs. First comes “the earth”, ʼerets, the land and the ground itself, “and the fulness thereof”. The word for fulness, mᵉlôʼ, means that which fills something, its contents. Everything the earth holds is included: its resources and wealth, its produce and its living creatures. Then comes “the world”, têbêl, a word for the earth as the inhabited globe, the part of it where people live, “and they that dwell therein”. The second pair says the first again in other words, as Hebrew poetry often does, and it carries the claim from the ground under our feet to every human being and every creature living on it. Everything that exists lies within what the LORD owns.

The rest of Scripture says the same. At Sinai the LORD tells Israel that they shall be his treasure, “for all the earth is mine” (Exodus 19:5). Moses reminds the people that heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to the LORD, “the earth also, with all that therein is” (Deuteronomy 10:14). In Psalm 50:12 God himself says, “the world is mine, and the fulness thereof”, and Psalm 89:11 says to him, “as for the world and the fulness thereof, thou hast founded them.” David’s prayer of praise confesses that “all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine” (1 Chronicles 29:11). Behind all of these stands the first verse of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The one who made everything owns everything, and he owns it by right.

Verse 2 begins with “For”, and it gives the reason the earth is the LORD’s: he made it. The “it” is the earth of verse 1. “He hath founded it” uses yâçad, which means to set, found or establish, the word for laying a foundation. “Established it” uses kûwn, to set up, prepare or make firm, so that something stands in place, ready for its purpose. The two verbs say the same thing twice, in the same parallel pattern as verse 1, and together they speak of an earth that God has set in place and made firm.

The earth stands “upon the seas” and “upon the floods”. The word behind “floods” is nâhâr, a river or current, so the second line adds moving, rushing waters to the wide seas of the first. In Scripture the dry land is gathered out of the waters, when God says, “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear” (Genesis 1:9–10). Before that, darkness lay upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters (Genesis 1:2). Another psalm praises God as “him that stretched out the earth above the waters” (Psalm 136:6). The same picture of God laying the earth’s foundations comes back in the LORD’s questions to Job about creation (Job 38:4–11) and in Wisdom’s words about being present when the world was made (Proverbs 8:27–29).

The nations around Israel told of the first waters as powerful, unruly forces that even their gods struggled to subdue. The psalm speaks of one God who stands above all he has made and sets the land upon those waters as a builder lays a foundation, with ease. The seas look like the least steady ground there could be, and that is where he set the earth. It stands because he made it firm, and he gives his creatures a secure place to live.

Psalm 24 is a psalm of David, and it was most likely written for a great act of worship, the procession that brought the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6). It may also have been sung by pilgrims going up to the temple. The nations round about worshipped gods tied to one place or one people. To sing “The earth is the LORD’S” in Jerusalem was to say that Israel’s God is the Creator and rightful ruler of every land and every nation, and that the city where his ark came to rest was the capital of the King of all the earth.

The opening verses set up everything that follows. Because the LORD owns the whole earth, the psalm asks next, “Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place?” (Psalm 24:3–6), and it describes the purity of heart and life required of those who come before him. Then it calls on the everlasting doors to open so that the King of glory may come in (Psalm 24:7). The psalm moves from the God who owns all creation, to the people who may approach him, to the King himself entering in triumph.

The New Testament shows us that the earth belongs to Christ, because the Son is the one through whom it was made. “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). Paul writes that “by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible … all things were created by him, and for him” (Colossians 1:16), and that “by him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17). Hebrews says that he upholds all things by the word of his power (Hebrews 1:3). The Son through whom God founded the earth upon the seas keeps it standing today.

When Jesus arose and rebuked the wind and said unto the sea, “Peace, be still” (Mark 4:39), the waters obeyed him. The authority over the seas that this psalm gives to God was present in the boat on the Sea of Galilee.

In the King of glory of verse 7 we see Christ himself, whom the New Testament calls “the Lord of glory”. Having finished his saving work on the cross and risen from the dead, he ascended to his place of rule over all things. God “hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth” (Philippians 2:9–11). He who founded the earth also builds his kingdom, bringing order out of the chaos of sin and death and preparing an eternal home for his people. The earth and its fulness are his by creation, by his upholding of it, by redemption and by inheritance, and Scripture looks ahead to the day when “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).

If the earth and its fulness are the LORD’s, then so is everything we hold: our possessions, our abilities, our time, our relationships and our lives. We hold them as stewards, to manage by his will and for his glory. That makes us humble, since all we have came from his hand, and it moves us to worship the Lord of all.