95 Oh come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
3 For the Lord is a great God,
and a great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
5 The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.
6 Oh come, let us worship and bow down;
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
7 For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.
Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
9 when your fathers put me to the test
and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
10 For forty years I loathed that generation
and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart,
and they have not known my ways.”
11 Therefore I swore in my wrath,
“They shall not enter my rest.”
Section Overview
This psalm summons the congregation singing it to learn from the rebellion of a previous generation and to commit itself to heeding God’s “voice” faithfully. The psalm can be called a “prophetic hymn,” joining Psalm 81 (which also remembers Meribah; 81:7) and Psalm 82, as it echoes themes found in the prophets. Or it can be called a historical psalm, along with Psalm 78 (esp. vv. 7–8), as it draws a lesson from the history of Israel. (There is a fine line between the two categories.)
The combination of Meribah (“Quarreling”) and Massah (“Testing”) shows that the psalm draws its lesson from the Israelites’ grumbling against Moses because they had no water (Ex. 17:1–7). However, this event did not lead to God’s decisive oath found in the psalm. That oath came later, after the people listened to the report of the ten faithless spies and refused to enter the land to take it (Num. 14:21–35). The Lord swore (“as I live”; Num. 14:21, 28) that not one of those who grumbled in disbelief “shall come into the land” (Num. 14:29–30); the forty days of spying would yield forty years of wandering (Num. 14:34). That is, those who in unbelief refused to obey God’s voice (Num. 14:11) would be removed from the people, and there would be a delay in the people’s carrying out their calling to occupy the land. Later in Numbers we read of another water incident, at a place that also receives the name Meribah; as a result of this event, Moses is not allowed to lead the people across the Jordan (Num. 20:3–13). Many scholars suppose that these two water incidents are versions of the same event, but within the Pentateuch itself it seems more likely that the second Meribah is named to recollect the first. Hence, when the second Meribah is in view, it can be called “Meribah of Kadesh” (Num. 27:14; Deut. 32:51; cf. Ps. 106:32). That is, the worshiping congregation, with the Pentateuch as their publicly read Scripture, would have thought of two events, and the poetic Psalm 95 should be interpreted as a song, with a view toward the rhetorical effect of its manner of speaking. Here the simplest explanation is that the psalm takes the incident at Meribah and Massah as an early installment of the persistent unbelief of the exodus generation, which culminated in its refusal to enter the land.
Hebrews 3:7–11 uses Psalm 95:7b–11, placing its audience in a situation analogous to that of the Israelites in the wilderness. For these Jewish Christians to abandon their explicit faith in Jesus in order to return to the safety of “ordinary” Judaism would be like the rebellion of Israel in the wilderness—a mark of unbelief. As does the psalm, Hebrews makes every day a “today” that calls for renewed faithfulness.
The psalm has two parts. The first, which divides into two subsections, celebrates God’s kingship and the privilege his people enjoy as they worship him (vv. 1–7a). The first subsection speaks of God’s universal kingship over all creation, and thus his right to be worshiped (vv. 1–5). The second subsection narrows the focus to the Lord’s particular kingship over his people, Israel, who should then revel in their astounding opportunity (vv. 6–7a). This subsection uses the image of the people as the Lord’s flock and the Lord as their shepherd; the king as shepherd over his people is imagery found elsewhere in the ancient Near East. The second overall section provides a warning not to repeat the rebellion of the singers’ ancestors (vv. 7b–11).
The first section explains why the psalm appears with Psalms 93–99 and also serves to highlight the folly of any kind of rebellion in the face of such a breathtaking privilege.613 The logic of the psalm follows the overall narrative of the Pentateuch, with the Creator as the universal King, who then calls Israel, over whom he is shepherd (Gen. 48:15; 49:24); the generation of Israel that followed Moses then rebelled, which gave shape to Israel’s stay in the wilderness. Hence there is no reason to find disunity in the psalm, as some do.
Section Outline
I. The Lord Is King (95:1–7a)
A. Universal King (95:1–5)
B. Israel’s King (95:6–7a)
II. We His People Must Heed His Voice (95:7b–11)
Response
The opening words of Psalm 95 sound the call to worship (cf. Psalm 100). The psalm turns, however, to the serious note of how a previous generation failed to give true belief toward God, with a warning for the worshipers not to repeat this evil (reminiscent of Psalms 78; 81). This is a kind of admonition found in the prophets, speaking of privilege and responsibility and addressing the corporate life of the whole people. This should enable the congregation to enter worship both joyfully and earnestly. Each member of the people participates in an interlocking web of connection to the other members (solidarity) and contributes to (or detracts from) the well-being of the whole with his or her own piety (or unfaithfulness). The goal of this psalm is to establish a shared aspiration toward and prizing of faithful response to the great God who has revealed himself to Israel.
Christians should share this same aspiration and seriousness, having seen the revelation in Christ that builds on the revelation to Israel; they can use Psalm 95 to do so. Since the time of Benedict of Nursia (d. AD 547) the Liturgy of the Hours has included Psalm 95 as part of its opening.618 Some churches include in their liturgies a song called Venite, exultemus Domino (“Come, let us exult in the Lord,” the opening words of one Latin version of our psalm), which combines our verses 1–7a with other texts (96:9, 13). The notion of impending divine judgment (96:10) can offer some of the seriousness that pervades Psalm 95.
The book of Hebrews appears to be written to a specific group of Hellenistic Jewish Christians619 who had endured some troubles for their Christian profession (Heb. 10:32–33; 12:4) and were becoming tempted to give up the struggle in exchange for the seemingly easier path of “normal” Judaism (Heb. 10:23, 35–39; 12:3; 13:10–16; cf. 6:1–12). The author is supplying reasons to ground his exhortation for them to persevere, the only way in which they can receive the benefits of God’s promises (Heb. 11:25–26; 12:9–11, 25) and of genuine membership in the heavenly people of God (Heb. 11:39–40; 12:18–24). We can infer that the recipients’ argument involves a claim that God had instituted the sacrifices in the first place, so we might expect him to be happy if his people continued to use them; this explains why the author would insist that these things do not work in any kind of automatic fashion (Heb. 10:1–4). From this we can see that Hebrews is not a treatise on salvation, perseverance, or apostasy in general; it is addressed to the needs of a particular group of Jewish Christians facing a particular set of challenges. This writer desires his audience to see its temptation as the same sort of thing the ancient Israelites faced and, like the singers of the psalm, not to repeat this unbelief. That is, he is using the passage in a way that accords well with the ancient function of the psalm.620Psalm 95
Psalm 96