The Lord’s Day Evening
Psalm 100
“Hymns of the Faith (8): All People That on Earth Do Dwell”
Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III
On your handout is a breakdown of Psalm 100 in the English Standard Version, according to the flow of thought that the narrative of the song, with the six imperatives highlighted that occur in the song. And then immediately under that I have the metrical version, the first three stanzas which we’ve just sung, and what I’ve tried to do is parallel for you the phrases in the metrical version that you’ve just sung with the phrasing of the Psalm as it stands in the ESV. One of the things that will become very readily apparent to you is this is an almost perfect metrical rendering of Psalm 100. It’s very, very hard to put into rhyme and meter Hebrew poetry. It’s just very, very hard to do. And very frankly, if you’re a student of Psalms and of Psalters, sometimes the Psalters struggle a bit to try and capture the sense and flow of the Psalm in the original. But this one is almost perfect.
Psalms 95-100 are all about worship. They teach us various things about worship, and so Psalm 100 is a culminating Psalm.
This Psalm – Psalm 100 – is not only the Psalm on which All People That on Earth Do Dwell is based, it is also the basis of Isaac Watts’ great paraphrase, Before Jehovah’s Awful Throne (or as we often sing it, “Before Jehovah’s Awesome Throne,” because awful – the meaning of that word has changed over the years). Sam Hensley told me once that when Queen Anne was being taken in to St. Paul’s Cathedral after it was completed (she was, I think, given a personal tour by Christopher Wren, the architect) and she was asked what she thought of Sir Christopher’s creation, St. Paul’s Cathedral. And she said, “Awful and artificial!” Now at that point, if you’d been the architect you would have killed yourself, but she meant it as a compliment. What she meant was, “It is awesome, and it demonstrates a mastery of artistry, of artifice.” But those words have changed, so occasionally we’ll change words in very old hymns because the way we use those words is a little different. In fact there’s another place in the song where that happens. If you’ll look down in the description of the metrical version and look in the third line: “Him serve with fear…,” William Keith, who we think wrote this particular paraphrase, wrote originally, “Him serve with mirth….” Now what he was trying to capture, you’ll see: “Make a joyful noise…serve the Lord with gladness…Him serve with mirth.” He’s meaning to convey joy, but mirth means something a little bit different to us today. Normally we associate it with a humor that’s not a deep humor or a deep joy – it’s a superficial joy. Mirth… “I got mirth from watching that practical joke,” or something like that. And so in later Psalter versions that word was changed from mirth to fear, losing, I think, just a little bit of what William Keith was trying to get at.
This is a glorious Psalm. Charles Spurgeon said of the metrical version, the old Scottish metrical version of Psalm 100, that “nothing can be more sublime this side of heaven than the singing of this noble Psalm by a vast congregation.” And I think he’s right. Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle would be filled to the gills, and you can imagine them singing this Psalm with gusto and it being a glorious thing.
Now as we get ready to study the Psalm together, let me draw your attention to a few things which I hope will enhance your appreciation for the truth of this passage. First of all, look on the top of your sheet or in your Bible at Psalm 100 in your translation, and you’ll notice that there are six imperatives at the beginning of the Psalm. If you look from verse 1 down to verse 4, you will find six imperatives or commands or directives. The first imperative is “make a joyful noise.” Make. First comes the command from God to make something – a joyful noise. I’ll tell you what that means in just a minute.
Then in verse 2 comes the second imperative: serve. Then again in verse 2 comes the third imperative: come. So, make, serve, come. Then in verse 3 we get the fourth imperative, know. Then in verse 4 we get the fifth imperative, enter, and the sixth imperative, give. Now each of those imperatives is designed to reinforce something about worship: Make a joyful noise; serve with gladness; come into His presence; know the Lord; enter His gates; give thanks. They stress different aspects of what it means to worship God. The psalmist is teaching you about worship and to worship by describing worship with six command verbs in an imperative form in order to reinforce in your mind what it means to worship God. It’s a wonderful way of teaching. You say the same thing six different ways in order to help you grasp the truth of what worship is.
Notice again as we work through this Psalm that the Psalm doesn’t just call us to worship, it gives us reasons why we ought to worship. That’s very, very explicit in verse 5. I love the way the metrical Psalm starts that verse off by saying, “For why?” Because why? For what reason should we enter into His courts with praise? And it gives you three answers. But you don’t even have to wait till verse 5. Back up in verse 3 the Psalm is already giving you reasons for worship. This is so important because it has been common in evangelical praise for about forty years now to sing about worshiping God, or to express worship to God in a song which is not anchored in a reason for why we are doing it. Have you ever sung a song where over and over and over you’ll sing the language, “I want to worship You, O Lord…I want to worship You, O Lord,” and then you’ve sung this song for however many minutes you’ve been singing it, and at the end you’ve never been given a reason why you ought to do that – other than you just want to do that?
The Psalms almost never do that. The Psalms almost always give us reasons why we ought to worship God. That’s very important because many of us come to worship God unready to worship God. Our hearts are just not ready to worship Him, for whatever reason. We may be in a very difficult spot in life. Things may be so heavy for us it may be hard for us to concentrate on anything else, and God is so kind to supply us gobs of reasons for why we ought to worship Him in order to help us worship Him…in order to help us not just go through the motions, but really to worship Him.
Notice also that this Psalm doesn’t simply exhort us to worship, but it instructs us in our heart attitude and in our focus on worship. So it repeats language like joyful…gladness …thanksgiving …give thanks…bless His name.” So it tells you what the composition of your heart ought to be…what the attitude of your heart ought to be when you come to the worship of God, and then it focuses your worship on Him: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord…serve the Lord…come into His presence…know that the Lord, it is He who is God…He made us…we are His…we are His people, the sheep of His pasture…enter His gates…His courts…give thanks to Him…bless His name. So all of the focus is God-ward. The focus is on the Lord God.
Now we’re back to that interesting phrase, “Make a joyful noise.” I’m glad that this Psalm starts that way because it encourages people that cannot carry a tune in a bucket to try and sing anyway. You’ll notice in the metrical version, if you’ll look at the second line of the metrical version, “Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.” That’s the rendering of “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.” And it’s a perfectly fine rendering, but it does say it “sing.” And I think it’s helpful to remember “Make a joyful noise.” I sat next to a pastor who has ministered to millions of people this past week while we were singing, and he could not carry a tune in a bucket. He was terrible! But, bless his heart, he was singing, and it reminded me of my Dad (who couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket) who would be in church trying to sing as best he could. He was making a joyful noise. Well, I love that language because it encourages people who aren’t good at singing to try and make at least some kind of a noise.
But of course the term doesn’t just mean make a noise. What it means is this. When a king was visiting your city or coming back from a victorious conquest, people were called to give him homage shouts. You’ve seen the old movies where the king comes back to England after some glorious conquest on the fields of battle in France or somewhere else, and what do the people say? “Long live the king!” Or, they shout some exclamatory phrase of joy because the king is in their midst. Well, that’s what’s going on here. It’s an homage shout. It’s a shout for joy. It’s a joyful noise. It’s an homage shout to a king, so the psalmist is saying give an homage shout to the Lord; acknowledge that He is the true King and Lord and God, and do it with joy.
Notice also the connection between worship and service. This particular Psalm speaks of serving the Lord with gladness, and there’s a play on words there, isn’t there? To serve the Lord is to worship Him. We even call our gatherings here on Sundays – what do we call them? Worship services. Now that’s an interesting combination because it’s combining two biblical ideas: to worship the Lord and to serve the Lord. And so we call them worship services. The whole point of our gathering together in these particular meetings is to serve the Lord with worship, to serve the Lord by giving Him the glory due His name, by declaring His worth.
That’s the kind of service that we’re going to give, but that’s not the only kind of service that we’re called to give in the Christian life. In fact, it is one of the very important truths that Jesus stresses that one of the ways that we obey the first commandment, the first great commandment, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and might…that one of the ways that we obey the first commandment is to obey the second great commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, so that even when we are doing deeds of kindness and showing love and care and concern and mercy for our neighbor, our motivation is to be to what? To worship the Lord. They’re tied together, and very often the New Testament says there will be people who claim to worship the Lord but they’re not loving their neighbor, and that shows that they really don’t worship the Lord. Because you can’t love God and hate your brother. You can’t love God and hate human beings that He’s made in His image, so that our service in all of life for our neighbor, for our brother and sister, is an expression of our worship to God. And you even get a little bit of that play on language in verse 2, “Serve the Lord with gladness,” although all of these imperatives seem to be tied to corporate worship…coming into the presence of the Lord with a particular goal of worshiping Him.
In Hebrew as in English, service is indivisible. It is a word which leaves no gap or choice between worship and work. Derek Kidner says, “We find this confirmed incidentally in practice in that praise and prayer go stale in isolation, and activity goes sterile.” So our worshiping the Lord with His people is connected to our worshiping the Lord in all of life, and our worshiping the Lord in all of life, especially in keeping the second commandment, is connected to our worshiping the Lord by keeping the first commandment.
One last thing—“All the earth.” Here…did you catch that in the very first line? “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.” This verse claims the world for God. The whole world. And it ought to be thought-provoking to sing it.
Well, let’s read God’s word, and before we do, let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank You for this Your word. We ask that You would help us as we consider it, that You would move our hearts to the right attitude and posture as we express the truth of this Psalm, and that You would put a song of joy in our hearts in gratitude to You for the gospel. This we ask in Jesus’ name.
Hear the word of God:
A PSALM FOR GIVING THANKS.
“Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!
Serve the Lord with gladness!
Come into His presence with singing!
“Know that the Lord, He is God!
It is He who made us, and we are His;
We are His people, and the sheep of His pasture.
“Enter His gates with thanksgiving,
and His courts with praise!
Give thanks to Him; bless His name!
“For the Lord is good;
His steadfast love endures forever,
and His faithfulness to all generations.”
Amen. And thus ends this reading of God’s holy, inspired, and inerrant word. May He write its eternal truth upon all our hearts.
Four brief things about this Psalm before we sing its final stanza together in the metrical version.
1. Our worship ought to be joyful, glad, and willing.
The first thing that this Psalm makes clear to us is that our worship ought to be joyful, glad, and willing. Have you noticed how this Psalm all through it is about joy and gladness and freely offered gratitude and thanksgiving for who God is and for what God has done for us? There’s nothing of the grudging, rote, demanded, unwillingly offered worship that so often happens in the churches in this Psalm. You know, very frankly sometimes we come dragging to church. We come dragging to church, and there’s nothing willing and joyful and glad about our praise. And this Psalm is all about gladness in our praise. Why is it…why is it that we are sometimes so unwilling and grudging in our worship and praise together, when in fact we ought to worship God very often with tears of thanksgiving running down our faces? There ought to be times when we are having to do everything in our Presbyterian power to resist the temptation to shout out acclamations to God in the middle of the worship service, like “Praise to the Lord!” But why is it that we don’t come that way?
Well, sometimes it’s our fault. Sometimes it’s just that we’ve not done the adequate things that we need to do to prepare for corporate worship. When you’re in a choir you practice and you prepare a long time before you get ready to sing. And if you’re on a baseball team, you practice. You practice a long time before you finally get to the game, and by the time you get to the concert or you get to the game you’ve been practicing so long that you can’t wait to do what it is that you’ve come there to do. But we don’t often prepare ourselves to worship, do we? We don’t spend time to prepare ourselves to worship.
Sometimes the reason that you may come to worship without joy in your heart and gladness on your lips and gratitude in your very bones and marrow of your being, and a willingness to worship Him, may be something that’s not your fault. Maybe you’re going through something that’s so hard, so difficult that it’s distracting or it’s depressing you. But the heart of a believer essentially is set on this default mode: “I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord.” That’s our default mode, friends. And I want to say that our corporate worship ought to express that more. There ought to be more of that gladness, that willingness, that desire, that gratitude, that joy in our corporate worship. Our worship ought to be joyful and glad and willing because of who God is. Listen again to the language: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord…serve the Lord with gladness…come into His presence with singing.” Christians have been made glad by God in the gospel, and therefore we ought to be glad in our worship. That’s the first thing I want you to see.
II. Our worship out to center on God.
The second thing is this. Our worship ought to center on God. It ought to center on the celebration of His person, and especially on the goodness that He has done for us in the gospel. Listen again to the language of the song: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord…know that the Lord, He is God…it is He who made us, and we are His…we are His people and the sheep of His pasture.” The Lord is good, the Psalm says. The psalmist is focusing us on God.
We’ve got hymns that do that. Many of you love the anthem that our choir sings from time to time, the anthem that was composed by Jane Marshall, a very famous American choral author. It’s set, I think, to a text by Christina Rossetti, “My Eternal King.” Do you remember how that text goes? “My God, I love Thee,” and then it’s a series of “not so much for all these things,” and it concludes with this: “But solely because Thou art my God and my Eternal King.” It’s Christina Rossetti’s version of Jonathan Edwards’s emphasis that we love God ultimately not because He gives us stuff, but just because of the beauty of who He is. The old Irish hymn that we sing, Be Thou My Vision, makes the same point, doesn’t it?
“Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me save that Thou art.”
The whole song is about how the Lord Himself is the greatest beauty that we have ever seen, and He is the greatest desire that we have ever had or ever will. “Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart.” And this Psalm makes that very point.
Our worship ought to center on the celebration of who God is. That’s so important in this world because the great battle that we have been fighting since Eden is the battle about whether we’ll worship God or anything else. And any time there’s anything else – yourself, your stuff, your money, your power, your ambition, your pleasure – any time there’s anything else that displaces the priority of God in your desires, you’ve become an idolater and you’re worshiping something else other than God. And so in worship one of the things that’s so centering for us as believers is we get the opportunity to spend an hour just saying to ourselves and to the Lord, over and over, “No, God; it’s You that I value more than anything else.”
III. We worship God by serving Him.
Third, this song beautifully emphasizes that we worship God by serving Him. “Serve the Lord with gladness.” Turn with me in your Bibles to Jonah, chapter one. It’s real interesting that when Jonah is on that ship on the way away from Nineveh and towards Tarshish (in other words, the Lord has said, “Jonah, go to Nineveh,” and he says, “I don’t want to go to Nineveh”) and he gets on a boat and starts heading to Tarshish, which is the opposite direction from where the Lord told him to go. And you remember they get into the big storm, and the sailors are trying to figure out whose fault this is. They figure somebody on this ship has done something really bad. And they were right. It was Jonah! And they nab him and they ask him, ‘Hey, where do you come from? Who are your people?” Look at it in verse 8, they say that: “Who are your people?” And here’s how Jonah answers (Jonah 1:9): “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”
Now some of your Bible translations may say, “I serve the Lord.” Some of your Bible translations may say, “I worship the Lord.” All of those are perfectly fine translations of the passage, but here’s the point I want to make. When Jonah identifies himself as a person who fears the Lord, he doesn’t just mean that he fears the Lord in a worship service every Friday night at the synagogue, okay? He doesn’t just mean ‘I go to worship meetings on the Sabbath day.’ What he means is that in all of life he fears God. He worships God. He serves God. Now the irony of course is when is he saying this? He’s saying this in the middle of a big storm while he’s on a boat going in the opposite direction from where the Lord told him to go! So there’s a huge irony in this. When you read this in Jonah 1:9, you’re supposed to go, “Yeah, right!” And then you’re supposed to remember, “Oh, yeah. I do this same thing all the time. I say that I worship God. I say that I serve God. I say that I fear God, and then I don’t.” And this Psalm reminds us that we worship God by serving Him; that is, by acknowledging Him as Lord not just with our lips, but with our lives.
On Wednesday night some of our youth staff and Nate and some others along with me got to hear Ajith Fernando. Have you ever heard Ajith Fernando preach? He’s preached at Urbana many times. He’s from Sri Lanka…incredibly articulate. Sri Lanka is where the Tamil Tigers have been killing people left and right; Sri Lanka is where Christians have been under constant persecution. He’s the head of Youth for Christ in Sri Lanka, and in the legislature of Sri Lanka right now there is a law pending action that outlaws sharing the gospel with someone under eighteen years old. The penalty is eight years in prison for this. Now let me just repeat: Ajith Fernando is the President of Youth for Christ. So, there’s a question: Is he going to worship the Lord? Is he going to fear the Lord? Is he going to reverence the Lord? Is he going to serve the Lord? And here’s what he said. One of his youth staff came to him and he said, “Well, I understand that this law may pass that if we share the gospel with someone under eighteen years old we’ll be put in prison for eight years. I guess it’s time for us to start doing some social work in the prisons so that we can fix them up before we’re there.” He wasn’t joking. He wasn’t joking at all. They are ready to happily go to prison for sharing the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. My friends, that is serving the Lord. That’s worshiping the Lord. That’s fearing the Lord not just with your lips, but with your life.
IV. This Psalm is anchored in the Gospel.
One last thing. This song is anchored in the gospel. Look at the end of the song. Why are we to do all this? Why are we to make a joyful noise, and serve the Lord, and come into His presence and know that He is God, and enter His gates and give Him thanks? For (three things) the Lord is good, His steadfast love endures forever, and His faithfulness to all generations. Notice the things that he draws attention to: the goodness of the Lord; the covenant mercy of the Lord; and the faithfulness of the Lord to do what He says when He promises to save us.
In other words, we are to worship Him because of the gospel. He’s shown us His goodness in His grace. He has shown us His love in His mercy, and He has shown us that the gospel is Yea and Amen in Jesus Christ, because His faithfulness endures throughout all generations.
In other words, the reason why you’re going to sing with joy, the reason why you’re going to celebrate who God is, the reason you’re going to serve Him is because of the gospel. And I think that one of the reasons that we don’t worship with adequate gladness whether we’re together or we’re apart is that we haven’t appreciated the gospel as much as we ought.
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, thank You for yourself, for Your love, for Your gospel. Grant that when we sing, when we pray and when we praise, we would do so with gladness of heart because of the goodness of Your grace to us in Jesus Christ in the gospel. This we ask in His name. Amen.
“All people that on earth do dwell,
sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;
Him serve with fear, His praise forthtell,
Come ye before Him and rejoice.
“The Lord ye know is God indeed;
without our aid He did us make;
we are His folk, He doth us feed,
and for His sheep He doth us take.
O enter then His gates with praise,
approach with joy His courts unto;
praise, laud, and bless His name always,
for it is seemly so to do.
“For why? The Lord our God is good,
His mercy is forever sure;
His truth at all times firmly stood,
and shall from age to age endure.”