Psalm 96:1

 I have been spending some weeks in Psalm 95 and 96. For 95 and related passages, I am working on a short study on entering rest. Maybe because I am experiencing fatigue! But my writing motivation is strong and awake, especially on this subject. It will be on Amazon for a very low price when I get it done.

 

Psalm 96 starts with “Sing a new song unto the Lord.” I love to parse something like this.

 

“Sing” – although the musical conventions of the Davidic Kingdom would perplex us and probably not be considered “catchy,” the command to sing has to be so freeing. Not “perform,” but sing.

 

“A new song.” I think we can look at this new song three ways.

 

1.    Due to conversion and growth in Christ, we sing a new song. Not a dirge, but a hymn. Not the blues, but a Broadway showstopper (okay, okay, that second one is a bad analogy; I was trying to think of the opposite.) The context of the rest of the psalm means this new song is celebration, not a dreary, introspective ballad. This is a song based on a fresh experience of grace and all its facets. Sovereign grace, common grace, particular grace, saving grace. Amazing grace.

2.    A new song celebrates creativity. We are free to write and sing something not sung before.

3.    This new song will be the one, or is a foreshadowing of the one, we will sing in the new earth, the redeemed earth. From the rest of the psalm and it’s emphasis on salvation and redemption, I think this is the right one. It makes us turn our attention to Psalm 96 as prophetic.

 

This last interpretation takes the psalm and its meaning out of the personal, private, internal, and individual to the public, prophetic, external, global, corporate, and eternal. I am not singing a new song because I individually experienced the grace of conversion. We are to sing because the planet does and will. It’s not “I am a Friend of God,” or “No One Ever Cared for Me Like Jesus,” (a very nice song, though) but “This is My Father’s World.”

 

The You of the command is plural, not singular. This might bother you as a reader, but I would challenge us to move away and interrogate our insistence on the self as a unique, unconnected unit and begin to think of our full lives in the context of community, the course of God’s history, and the ultimate redemption.  We, us, and our vs. I, me, my.