Psalm 150
So as you’re making your way
to Psalm 150, remember that the book of the Psalms as a whole,
it’s the collection of Psalms for the people of God. There
are five books, this is the end of book five, and if you think
about it, most of the books ended with some kind of doxology. We
sing the end of one of the books when we sing the end of Psalm
72, now blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, for wondrous
works he has done and glory that excel. Psalm 150 does not end
the whole Psalter or this section with the doxology, so maybe a
little strange. But as you think about Psalm
150, think about how the Psalms began. Blessed is the man who
does not sit, walk, or stand in the way of the ungodly. It’s
like a tree planted by rivers of water. The ungodly are not
so. They don’t prosper, but they’re
like the chaff the wind drives away. So we go from one to 150. So let’s hear Psalm 150 together. Praise the Lord. Praise God and
His sanctuary. Praise Him in His mighty heavens.
Praise Him for His mighty deeds. Praise Him according to His excellent
greatness. Praise Him with trumpet sounds.
Praise Him with lute and harp. Praise Him with tambourine and
dance. Praise Him with strings and pipe. Praise Him with sounding
cymbals. Praise Him with loud clashing
cymbals. Let everything that has breath
praise the Lord. Amen. I think I’ve told. Most of you probably heard that
when I grew up in church, we had all kinds of styles of worship. In fact, for a good bit of my
maybe middle school and high school years, we had every Sunday
a different group lead the service. So one week it might have had
a little, maybe a little country flair. The next week was a little
more rock and roll. We had a classical, kind of a
classical music Sunday. And then we had some things in
between. We had flutes and guitars and
piano. We had a fellow that played drums. In fact, on the front of his
drum set, which all of us young boys envied, it had Psalm 150,
verse 5. Praise him with sounding cymbals. Praise him with loud and clashing
cymbals. I was reminded a couple weeks
ago, I ran into the pastor of the home church, the church that
I grew up in, and he reminded me of a funeral that I did for
the woman that hated the drum set. And I’d forgotten how much
she would hold her ears during church sometimes during that. So we’ll make mention of a couple
worship things tonight. But I want you to keep in mind,
this is not about our preferences, it’s about God’s preferences.
And this isn’t also necessarily about corporate worship in the
New Testament era, the modern era. This is the fitting end
of the Psalter where everything in creation, everything in heaven
and earth, praises God with all they’ve got. So some of you tonight
will probably watch the Boston Pops. Fireworks, you’ll watch
the fireworks on PBS on the National Mall. In both cases, they’ll
play the 1812 overture, the great fireworks appropriate music,
and it builds and builds and builds and builds and builds
and ends. with the drums pounding and the cymbals clashing and
then they, what is it, the bells playing, then they shoot off
the fireworks. So there’s like a grand finale.
The Hallelujah Chorus in Handel’s Messiah is a lot the same way.
Or maybe to put it into secular terms, you go to a concert and
if you, for example, go hear Leonard Skinner, what is it that
everybody wants to hear played? It’s free bird and the crowd
sings with great joy. Or if they’re playing in the
south at Sweet Home Alabama, I think of Duke basketball. When you go to their arena, 10,000
people screaming, yelling, have their face painted. The place
shimmies and shakes and vibrates and you leave there with all
of your senses assaulted and your body vibrates, I think,
for about the next two or three days. This is the idea behind
Psalm 150, all these big buildups to worship. And it’s a psalm
that says, when we worship God, we should let it all hang out.
We should give it all that we’ve got, or to put it in organ terms,
we should pull out all the stops. So the psalm begins, as these
last five have done, 146 through 150, the great Hallels, they
begin and end with praise God, praise Yahweh, hallelujah. These psalms are about worship
in particular, where to worship, who to worship, how to worship
and why to worship. And there’s a lot of repetition,
not repetition just for repetition’s sake, but builds and builds and
builds and builds until the big grand finale. So when we think
about the worship of God, as we’ve looked at it through these
last five Psalms, we’ve got to recognize it to be a significant
event where God is the target audience. So often you hear people
say, well, I go to this church because their worship means something
to me. Well, that’s all wonderful, right?
But who is the target audience? It’s God. And does our worship
mean something to Him? And so worship is a significant
event with God as the target audience, and it ought to be
God-centered, not only in words, but in our speech and in our
songs. And so in our worship, we will
sing, In our worship, we will read, we will pray, we will preach
the word, we’ll focus on God, the exalted Christ, and the person
of the Holy Spirit. Now in a minute, we’ll come to
preferences and those sorts of things, but that is the central
thing we ought to understand about the worship of God. We
are commanded to sing, read, pray, preach the word, do the
sacraments, and focus on God, the exalted Christ. and the person
of the Holy Spirit. So let’s dig into Psalm 150 and
answer the question, who is to be worshiped? Well, who is to
be worshiped is really easy. It’s God, it’s Yahweh. Hallelujah is the verb form of
praise, Hallel, and then you tack Yah onto the end, Yahweh. So God is to be praised, Yahweh
is to be praised. And in this, particular psalm,
there are so many times that it uses the words, and it’s not
really in the English language, it’s more in the Hebrew language,
there are so many times the word praise is used that hardly are
there any other words in the psalm except things that modify
praising God. So praise the Lord three times,
praise God once, praise him nine times. It’s very obvious in these
five or six verses, that God is to be praised. And we remember
Romans 11, 33. Everything is from him, everything
is for him, and everything is to him. That was the doxology,
the praise of God from Paul’s lips after he made it through
11 chapters of wonderful theology. So who should be worshipped? Hands down, it’s God. Why should
God be worshipped or praised? Well, that comes to us in verse
two. So Psalm 150 says, praise the
Lord, praise God in his sanctuary, praise him in his mighty heavens. I forgot to mention a word or
two about that before we jump into why should God be praised?
God is to be praised in his heavenly sanctuary, God is to be praised
in his earthly sanctuary at Jerusalem, but God is also to be praised
in the heavens, the firmament that comes right from Genesis.
The heavens God made are the arena for his glory. But God
is to be worshipped by every Christian who calls on the name
of Jesus. Every person is a temple of the
Holy Spirit. Our lives are a place of worship.
So God is to be worshipped in his sanctuary and in his mighty
heaven. So why should God be praised?
That’s verse two. Well, it tells us very clearly,
we praise him for his mighty deeds and we praise him according
to his excellent greatness. Think of the mighty deeds of
God. Think of how Yahweh has shown himself to be great and
mighty. He’s done it in creation. He’s
done it in redemption. He’s done it in providence. He’s
done it as he makes and keeps promises. Just think about each
of those things for a moment. God made the world and everything
in it by the word of his power in the space of six days and
all very good, our catechism summarizes. He’s redeemed the
world that’s broken by sin. He governs the world, his providence. He orders and orchestrates everything
for his holy ends, for his glory and our good. And then his promises. are yes and amen in Christ Jesus.
So His mighty deeds, they’re done in wisdom, they’re done
in mercy, and they’re done in might. Why else should we praise
God? Not just for His mighty deeds,
but also for His excellent greatness. Our catechism tells us when we
ask the question, what is God? God is a spirit, infinite, eternal,
and unchangeable, and His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice,
goodness, and truth. And so we sing of God’s truth,
His goodness, His justice. We sing of His holiness and His
power and His wisdom. We sing of His perfections. We
sing that these things are eternal. They always have been, always
will be. They don’t change and they are full of wonderful things. If you look in your hymnal, the
way our hymnal is laid out, once you get past the 150 Psalms, You have some hymns about the
Lord’s Day, and then the first little section here is about
God, His perfections, His infinity, His eternity, His wisdom, His
power, His holiness and justice, His sovereignty, His love, His
grace, His faithfulness, His work of creation, and His work
of providence. If you look at a lot of modern
hymnals, A lot of it’s sentimentality.
A lot of it is how I feel. And that’s all wonderful. God
wants you to feel. God wants you to have emotions.
He made you that way. But we must begin first with
who God is, what he’s done, and all of his promises. So who is
to be worshiped? It’s God. Why should we worship
Him? Because of His mighty deeds,
His excellent greatness. So now the $64,000 question,
the trumpets, the cymbals, the flutes, the lutes, all that,
how should God be praised? That’s verses three and four
and five. Well, verse three tells us, praise
Him with trumpet sound. Praise Him with lute and harp.
goes on praising with tambourine and dance, praising with strings
and pipe, praising with sounding cymbals, loud and clashing cymbals. So think about ancient Hebrew
worship. They worshiped in one place.
And they had all these teams of folks to assist and lead and
provide for worship. You had the priest, you had the
Levites, you had the temple servants. There were people who chopped
wood. There were people who kept the fires going. There were people
who slaughtered the animals. There were those who kept the
treasury. All the temple cult was a huge,
massive undertaking. And so in Hebrew worship, they
had a ton of resources. Think about it this way. So we’re
a little old church in a pretty small American town. But you
go to most major cities, you’ll find some pretty large churches.
And you’ll find in those large churches, you’ll find an orchestra. You’ll find a choir of 100 people. You’ll find paid musicians on
staff probably to the tune of millions of dollars. You’ll find
that they have the resources to put on something pretty big
and pretty significant. But what about us average does?
We’ve got it pretty good now. I’ve been around the block. I’ve
been in other churches where they’re suffering to find a piano
player every week. I remember Several years ago,
some of our pastoral interns preached in the church where
before each hymn, they would have to walk up to an electronic
machine and punch in the hymn number and a digital machine
would play the hymn. They did not have live accompaniment. And so there’s all sorts of ways
that music gets accomplished. And we got to be careful to get
our theology of how worship ought to be accompanied. from this
passage. Sometimes we need to differentiate
between what’s descriptive and what’s prescriptive. If every
country church in rural parts of the world had to have all
these things, they might have more instruments than they had
people in attendance. So you get the problem. We have
to be careful to say this is how it ought to be everywhere.
But how should God be praised? Well, with the trumpet, the lute,
the harp, the tambourine, the dance, pipe, strings, and cymbals. So the trumpet would be the shofar,
that funny animal ram’s horn kind of thing, that was their
war horn. And when it is blown, it is an
awful, shaking, scary sound. The lute was a guitar-like thing
with ten strings. The harp was probably a hand
harp. Remember David played one to
soothe Saul’s fits of anger and wrath. Tambourines would be some
kind of hand drum with bells. It would be very lively. Hebrew
worship is very lively and full of rhythm and dance, so
to speak. Their dances would have been circular dances. One
time visiting Israel, some of us went out one night to the
local YMCA to hear or to see a Hebrew religious kind of dance
program. And it was very, very lively,
full of tambourines and lutes and harps and different things.
It was very outgoing and loud and lively. The pipe would be
the flute. The strings would be some kind
of mournful, even awful sounds. The cymbals would be the little
castanets or the loud clashing cymbals, possibly both. So think
about these music instruments in light of the mood of worship. Some of these instruments are
happy. Some are soothing. Some are triumphant. Some give
agonizing sounds or sounds of fear. And does that not represent
the whole of the Psalter? Is everything in the Psalter
happy? Is everything in the Psalter sad? No, there’s every single
mood displayed in the Psalms and our music says something
about the song. We’ve said this before, when
you go to the dentist and you’re going to have a little tooth
work done. You want classical music playing.
You want easygoing music playing. You don’t want to hear Jaws,
right? You probably don’t want to hear
death metal. You want to hear something pretty good. Did you
know, I think I’ve heard this said and I think it’s been tested,
you could sing a lot of hymns to the tune to Gilligan’s Island. But would that be appropriate?
So Jay and I at Presbyterian a couple months ago, we were
asked to stand and sing a hymn and it was to the tune of the
Old Lang Zine, May All Acquaintance Be Forgot. And that just disturbed
me. It was a great song and the tune
worked. But what do you think of when
you think of that tune? You think of New Year’s Eve and
hugging your buddies and another year past, another year ahead.
So music needs to accompany the words. And so the history of
hymnody, the history of psalmody has worked very hard to produce
the right music with the right words. When we were in college,
we had to take a music appreciation class with Mrs. Landrum, the
old church organist from the Episcopal Church. and she ran
us through the ringer. You took tests in her class that
you could fail without trying. They were super duper hard. But
she would take us to her Episcopal sanctuary where she played the
organ every Sunday and she did what we called an organ crawl.
She showed us the room where the air was generated for the
pipes. She showed us how the organ worked
and all the rest. and she had this funny little
trick for a probably 80 maybe 90 year old something lady where
she would send all the boys into the pipe room and have us looking
at it and then she with a chuckle would blast the organ and it
shook you to death but what she taught us about the organ was
that over the centuries since one had been invented it was
a very versatile instrument it was a one-man orchestra It can
produce all the swells and the shakes and the volume and the
pace and all the appropriate accompaniment. And so that’s
why so many churches over the years have used them. But maybe
you’ve been in a church where the building is a stone structure
and it’s very cavernous. Sometimes it takes, as they call
it, the king of instruments to produce enough noise to be heard
in the back. We all worship in small spaces
now. where everything is controlled by sound systems and all the
rest. So we’re living in a different era. But for centuries, the organ
was seen as an instrument that could do literally everything
that Psalm 150 says. So one last thing about music. So we’re commanded to do certain
things in scripture, read the word, sing the word, pray the
word, preach the word. see the word, taste the word, touch the
word in the sacraments and see it in baptism, that kind of thing.
How we worship is left to the wisdom of men and it ought to
be according to principle. But one thing that ought to be
said about the songs we choose in worship, they ought to be
biblical and they ought to be singable. So something I do every
week, usually Monday and Tuesday, and sometimes I’m burning the
midnight oil. Those of you that get my email with the songs for
the week, very often see that it comes very late on Tuesday
night. But I dig into the passages for morning and evening, and
then I dig through the hymnal. And I try to pick, as best I
can, songs and hymns for the day that match the theme. I don’t
just pick the top ten or everybody’s favorites. And sometimes I pick
a dud, and sometimes I pick ones we don’t know. sometimes green beans and mushrooms
and vegetables are good for us. And, you know, when people will
say sometimes, well, I’ve never heard that one before. Well,
there was a time when you never heard anything before. So there’s
a first time for everything. And so it’s good to be stretched
on occasion, but it’s good for a song to be biblical, relevant
for the day and be singable. The other thing, I think that is important, is
it should be fitting for the service. So we pick a adoration-type
hymn at the beginning, and I’m thinking of Sunday morning now,
a hymn of adoration for the first hymn, it’s a God-centered one.
After we do our creed, we generally sing the Gloria Patri or some
Trinitarian doxology. If you’re going to affirm your
faith in God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit,
it’s good to sing a Trinitarian praise. and our hymnal is full
of good ones. And then after our confession
of sin, we sing a hymn of redemption, something about the cross, the
blood, our sanctification, that sort of thing. And then at the
end of the service, we sing something about doing what we just heard
we ought to go and do. Sometimes the doing is praising
God. Sometimes the doing is serving God in a specific way, but we
try to do that. And then today, as we added the
Lord’s supper, we sing a hymn that prepares us for the supper
and one that commits us to leave the supper and live for Christ
who has given his life for us. So, Enough of that. Fourth thing, who should worship
God? Verse six tells us, let everything that has breath praise
the Lord. God has put his spirit in us.
He’s given us life. Remember when he made Adam, he
breathed into him life. That is seen as God giving us
a soul, so to speak. And so we worship God because
he has given us life and that life was given not for our own
sakes, not for our own glory. but it’s given so that we might
serve him and worship him. And so with our sincere, our
inmost feelings, we should love God with our mind, our heart,
our soul, and our strength. We should use all of our senses
before God in worship. Think of David when he brought
the ark to Jerusalem for the first time. The ark was the mercy
seat of God. It was where God dwelled in the
midst of his people. The ark represented God’s covenant
faithfulness. When the ark was present, it
brought favor upon the place and the surroundings. And remember
for a time it had been stolen and captured by the Philistines,
but it also had been kept in one man’s house for safekeeping.
And David saw that that man was blessed. They failed at bringing
the ark the first time. Remember, they didn’t stick the
poles through it. They stuck it on a cart. Uzzah touched it
and died. So later, after they all got
over that, they stuck the poles in and the Levites or whoever
carried it as was appropriate. But David danced before the ark. He was fired up, as we might
say, that God’s presence would be with him and the people in
Jerusalem. So we ought to give it all we
got. We come to church thinking through who God is, what he’s
done. We come with feelings for who God is and what he’s done.
We come with a voice. You know, we’re not clappy people.
We’re not, you know, we don’t sway and we don’t do much, but
we do stand and sit. We’re the frozen chosen, you
might say. But we do worship God with all our being. All right,
the last thing, the fifth thing, where should God be praised? Well, verse one tells us, in
his dwelling place, heaven, the tabernacle, the temple, the hearts
of his people, wherever God is enthroned, that’s where he should
be worshiped. When we gather on Sunday, we
think of Hebrews chapter 10, that we have not come just to
this building, just to this place, but we’ve come to Mount Zion.
We’ve come to the New Jerusalem. We worship with the spirits of
the saints who’ve gone before us, their souls made perfect.
They surround the throne of God. We worship with people all around
the earth. who call on the name of the Lord.
We worship with the angels and the heavenly beings. So worship
is wherever God dwells. But we also worship in the mighty
heavens. The mighty heavens were the dreaded
place of the ancients. They dreaded the heavens and
the sea. They didn’t understand either. Shipwrecks gave them
great fear. They’d never flown in planes
or drones or hot air balloons or anything at that time, but
they didn’t understand the heavens and they didn’t understand the
depths of the sea. So God is to be worshiped in
his mighty heavens. heavens. Think of two people
who actually got to see into God’s heaven from earth. There
was Isaiah. Remember Isaiah chapter 6? I saw the Lord, saw his train
that filled the temple, and he pronounced woes upon himself.
Woe to me, I’m a man of unclean lips. Do we come to worship?
Do we enter the sanctuary that way? And how about John? John
was an old man on the Isle of Patmos in the book of Revelation.
And when he needed encouragement and needed to see these visions
in order to write them, to encourage the persecuted church, he saw
into the throne of heaven. He saw into the mighty place.
And was he casual about it? No, he said, it says, I fell
over as though dead. So thankfully we have a sanctuary,
a place where God is worshiped. It’s a place that’s set apart
and special. Most churches in the ancient
days, they had a kind of an antechamber. When you went into the sanctuary,
what was your posture? It was quiet, right? Maybe you’ve
been to Duke Chapel and it says at the sign in the narthex, please
observe silence. And they have a docent there
who will tell you to hush or to leave. So they probably would
not like our 30 minutes before church when we’re in the sanctuary
just chit-chatting it up. But we don’t have an antechamber
that can hold us all. Plus we have to go in and stake
our claim and make sure nobody takes our Presbyterian seats. So we have it a little different.
But we do draw a line. We draw a line at the end of
the announcements after we’ve heard the business or the life
of the church. We take a moment and we draw
a line and say, let’s take a moment and pray and ask for God’s help
and blessing as we prepare to meet with them. It’s a sacred
curtain dropped between the world and the sanctuary. And it’s important
for us to have that posture, both physically, and spiritually. And so we do well to enter God’s
presence with solemnity, in quiet, and ready, both in heart and
speech and behavior, to meet with God. There’s a sign on a
local church I saw in the last couple years and the sign on
the church says, Grandma says it don’t look like a church.
And I’m assuming this little church was poking fun at all
these newfangled churches. You know, you go to churches
now, they’re like a nightclub. You go inside and the walls are
black, the ceiling’s black, the lights are out, the stage is
lit, and everything is about what takes place on the stage.
Remember Sinclair Ferguson told us in our study a couple years
ago about the modern church, that’s very medieval. It’s very
medieval for a church to be performed and we sit and do nothing. But
thanks be to God that he calls us to worship because we are
made to worship. And yes, we’ve fallen in sin
and we have been redeemed to worship. But what this psalm
reminds us of is the eschatological, the end times view of the church,
or of God’s goal for human history. Philippians chapter two, verse
10, So let’s pause and give thanks to God. all of our mind, all of our strength.
And we pray that we would come to worship intelligently and
emotionally and even physically to be in your presence and to
sing your praises and to give it all that we’ve got. We thank
you for the blessings we have here in our congregation as we
worship you week by week. In Christ’s name we pray, amen.