Psalm 96:2

Psalm 96 belongs to a group of psalms that celebrate the LORD as King over all the earth, usually counted as Psalms 93 and 95 to 99, and it stands with Psalms 97 and 98 as three psalms of his universal reign. These psalms join the memory of what God has already done in creation and salvation with the hope of the day when his rule is known and confessed everywhere. Psalm 96 moves the same way. It begins with this summons to worship, gives the reason in God’s greatness over the idols of the nations (Psalm 96:4–5), and ends with heaven, earth, sea, field and trees rejoicing before the LORD, “for he cometh to judge the earth” (Psalm 96:11–13). The whole of Psalm 96 grows out of the call in its first three verses.

Scripture records one occasion on which these words were sung. When David brought the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, Israel celebrated with a song of praise (1 Chronicles 16), and the words of this psalm form part of it (1 Chronicles 16:23–33). The ark stood for God’s presence among his people, and its coming made Jerusalem, already the nation’s capital, the centre of Israel’s worship. Israel’s worship was shared by the whole people and was often tied to great national events, to the feasts, and to times when God had delivered them.

The call for all the earth to sing stood out in that world. The nations around Israel thought of their gods as belonging to a particular land or people. Israel knew the LORD as the one true God, who made the heavens and rules every nation, and so the praise that is his due comes from everywhere. Verse 5 says it plainly: “For all the gods of the nations are idols: but the LORD made the heavens.”

The psalm opens, “O sing unto the LORD a new song”. The verb shîyr simply means to sing, to give words a tune, whether a set one or one made up on the spot. The adjective châdâsh means new or fresh, used of something recently made or of something different from what came before. A new song is fresh praise for fresh reasons. It may be a newly written song, and above all it is praise that answers a new act of God, a deliverance he has just given, or a clearer sight of his greatness. Psalm 98, which shares this opening line, gives the reason outright: “O sing unto the LORD a new song; for he hath done marvellous things” (Psalm 98:1). The same call to sing a new song comes in Psalm 33:3, and Isaiah calls for a new song to the LORD and his praise from the end of the earth (Isaiah 42:10).

The LORD is the living God who keeps acting in history and in the lives of his people, so they always have new reasons to praise him, and their worship stays alive and heartfelt. The new song also looks ahead. In Revelation the redeemed sing “a new song” to the Lamb who was slain (Revelation 5:9–10), and that is where this call finally leads.

The one who receives the song is “the LORD”, Yᵉhôvâh, the covenant God of Israel, called by his own name, who alone has the right to his people’s worship. The words “sing unto the LORD” stand twice in verse 1 and open verse 2. The repetition presses the command home and keeps the one being praised in front of us.

“All the earth” means every nation and every person, because the LORD’s rule reaches all of them. The noun ʼerets can mean a single land or country, and here, with “all” (kol ha’arets), it means the earth at large and everyone who lives on it. The singers are widened at once from Israel to the whole world.

The phrase is also a promise of what is coming. The prophets describe a day when the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9), and Paul writes of the day when every knee will bow to him (Philippians 2:10–11). Through Isaiah God calls all the ends of the earth to look to him and be saved (Isaiah 45:22). So the call of verse 1 says two true things together: the whole earth already owes the LORD its praise, and the whole earth will one day give it.

Verse 2 repeats the call to sing and adds “bless his name”. The verb bârak is tied to kneeling, and when it is directed to God it means to praise him in humble reverence, acknowledging his goodness, his power and his authority. His name, shêm, stands for who he is: his character, his reputation and his authority. To bless the LORD’s name is to honour all that he has made known of himself, gladly and with a bowed heart. Psalm 145 makes the same promise of praise that never stops: “Every day will I bless thee” (Psalm 145:1–2).

Then the psalm turns outward: “shew forth his salvation from day to day.” The verb bâsar means to bring good news, to announce glad tidings. It is used for news of a victory, a deliverance or a king’s arrival, the kind of announcement a herald runs to carry. Those who sing to the LORD become his messengers, like the one whose feet are beautiful upon the mountains because he brings good tidings (Isaiah 52:7).

The news is “his salvation”, yᵉshûwʻâh, a word for deliverance, rescue and victory. Scripture uses it for rescue brought about through people, as when Jonathan “hath wrought this great salvation in Israel”, and it traces every such rescue to the LORD in the end. Here the salvation is his own: his mighty acts of rescue, from the deliverance of Israel out of Egypt to the deliverance of his people from sin. Israel was entrusted with the knowledge of these saving acts, and God’s purpose for his people reached past their borders, as when he says of his Servant that he will give him for a light to the Gentiles (Isaiah 49:6).

“From day to day” (miyom l’yom) uses yôwm, the ordinary word for a day, and means day after day, with no gap between. Praise and the telling of God’s salvation belong to every day, the way Israel received manna each morning in the wilderness and offered the morning sacrifice at the temple. God’s mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3:23), and the praise that answers them is as daily as his faithfulness.

Verse 3 names what is to be told and where. The verb çâphar means to count or number, and in its intensive form to recount, tell and declare, which is its sense here. Its participle is the word for a scribe. To declare God’s glory is to tell it over carefully and in full, like someone counting out what he has seen.

What is told is “his glory”, kâbôwd, a word for glory, honour and splendour. Used of God it speaks of his majesty and perfect character, his holiness, power, wisdom and love, and the showing of these in ways that move people to awe and worship. Alongside it come “his wonders”, from pâlâʾ, a root that may first have meant to set apart and that came to mean what is great, hard to do, or wonderful. His wonders are his marvellous deeds in creation, in his care for the world and in redemption, works that only he could do. The heavens themselves already declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1), and his people are sent to say in words what creation shows.

The hearers are “the heathen”, gôwy (plural goyim), the nations other than Israel, who worshipped other gods and idols. The second line widens it to “all people”, ʻam, a people, a body of people joined together, from a root meaning to associate. The two lines say one thing in two ways, glory beside wonders and the heathen beside all people. Together they give the whole message, who God is and what he has done, and the whole audience, every people on earth. Isaiah gives the same call, to give glory to the LORD and declare his praise in the islands (Isaiah 42:12).

This verse shows that God’s heart has always been set on the nations. Long before the Great Commission, Israel sang of a God whose glory belongs in every land, and the reason is the one the psalm itself gives: the gods of the nations are idols, and the LORD made the heavens. He is Creator and Judge of all, and his claim to the worship of all peoples is right.

These verses come to their fullness in Jesus Christ. The LORD to whom all the earth sings is made known in the New Testament as Jesus himself, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world (John 1:29), and the King of kings and Lord of lords (Revelation 19:16). Worship of God now comes through him, for no one comes to the Father except by him (John 14:6). God has given him the name which is above every name (Philippians 2:9).

The salvation the psalmist told day after day was fully accomplished in Christ’s life, his atoning death and his resurrection, which deliver us from sin and death, for “the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). His Hebrew name, Yeshua, is close kin to the word for salvation in verse 2, and his coming was the good news, the gospel (euangelion), proclaimed to the world. In him all the promises of God are yes (2 Corinthians 1:20). He is also God’s glory made visible, the image of the invisible God by whom all things were created and hold together (Colossians 1:15–17), and his death and resurrection are the greatest of God’s wonders.

The call to declare all this among the nations became the church’s mission. Christ broke down the wall between Jew and Gentile and made peace between them, so that both come to the Father by one Spirit (Ephesians 2:14–18). The risen Lord sent his disciples, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19–20), and “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). By the Holy Spirit his people carry the message to the uttermost part of the earth, and every time the good news of Jesus is told, the command of Psalm 96 is being obeyed. Revelation shows the end of it all: a great multitude of all nations, kindreds, people and tongues standing before the throne and crying, “Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9–10).

These verses give us a God who is worth singing to and worth telling about. He keeps acting, so the song stays new. He saves, so there is always good news to carry. He is King of all the earth, so the news belongs to every people. The worship of a single congregation and the mission of the church to the world turn out to be one work, the same praise spoken first to God and then about him to others. And because the psalm asks for this “from day to day”, the ordinary days count as much as the feast days, each one another day of his mercies and another day to tell of them, until the whole earth sings the new song together.