Worship and Warning, A Meditation on Psalm 95

To casually read through Psalm 95 you would think that there were two separate psalms that were spliced together. The first half seems to have a far different character from the second half. It begins with a call to worship our Creator God for his goodness, his sovereignty, and his salvation. Yet, beginning in verse 8, the psalm turns to a dire warning of judgement. I will not suggest that these were two documents that were spliced together haphazardly. Rather, the psalm does cohere together. It make sense as it is.

Throughout the book of Psalms, there are often two ways presented. Beginning with Psalm 1, the psalmist contrasts the way of the blessed man whose delight is in the Law of God and the way of the wicked who will not stand in the judgement. This theme flows throughout the book of Psalms. I believe that we can look at Psalm 95 through this lens and the pivotal verse is verse seven.

  Psalm 95:1 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."

Verse 7 causes me to struggle. Now I know that the verse divisions were not original, so it doesn't really bother me that in the English translation it appears that there is a sentence that begins in verse 7 and ends in verse eight. Originally the text would have been purely consonantal, and it would have run together without even spaces dividing the words. I'm thankful for the way our modern language has made it easier to read things with spaces, vowels, and punctuation. However, when I look at verse 7 in the Hebrew text, the verse is one whole sentence, separate from verse eight. This was a judgement call. The Masoretes, who gave our current Hebrew texts the vowel pointing and accent system appear to have thought that the end of verse seven belonged with the beginning. This does not necessarily mean that the Masoretes were right. The Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Old Testament--the one which was often quoted by the New Testament authors--clearly took the end of verse 7 along with verse eight.

What's the difference? If verse 7 is to be taken as a whole it says, "He is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the sheep of his hand, today, if you hear his voice." There's a subtle difference here, isn't there? I'm not going to suggest that this is definitely the right way to read this text. The commentaries I've looked at do not take it this way, and a friend of mine who is finishing his PhD in Old Testament isn't convinced either. However, I will say that it has at least alerted me to the idea that the end of verse 7 is a transition between the worship and the warning of the overall psalm.

The two ways are contrasted in the Psalm. It begins with a call to worship. It calls us to give a cry for joy--like a war cry that is triumphant in battle to the LORD, the God of our salvation. It calls us to worship him because he is above all other gods, and he created all things, and he holds all things in his hand. It calls us to bow down and prostrate ourselves in front of the face of our Maker, BECAUSE He is OUR God, and we are the people of His pasture. Herein lies the reason for praise. These are the things that the psalmist is saying to the righteous. However, he transitions with a conditional clause. IF you hear his voice. This reminds me of when Jesus said, "my sheep here my voice." We are his sheep, and we are the ones being called into his worship--IF we hear his voice.

In contrast, if we don't hear His voice, it is our own fault--it is because we have hardened our heart. Here the psalmist warns the people of God not to be like the generation that died in the wilderness. We must persevere, and not harden our hearts. We must believe on him and not put him to the test (maybe with our grumbling like the rebels at Meribah). He warns that that generation had a heart that wandered, and I too feel, like Robert Robinson the author of Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, that I am often prone to wander, and "prone to leave the God I love." Here the psalmist gives us a warning not to be like that, and the consequence is that we may not enter his rest.

So, to boil this down I would say it all hinges on our response to God's voice--which we hear in the Bible. When we hear his word, does it cause us to rejoice? Does it cause us to worship? Or, do we respond with hardness? Do we come up with reasons why we think it isn't a big deal? Do we justify and rationalize reasons why it doesn't apply to us.

Today, let us hear the warning from the psalmist. Listen to his voice, and you are his sheep. Harden your heart, and he never knew you.