The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): The God of Israel is ruler over all. Today on the Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, we're studying Psalm 47, which is a song of praise and a call to worship the one true God who reigns over all. Yes, our God, the God of the universe, raises up nations and brings them down again.

Guest (Male): Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. God is God, and he is sovereign and in control over all the earth, whether man acknowledges him or not. Turn to Psalm 47. Let's hear more about our sovereign God.

Dr. James Boice: I think it would be possible for someone who didn't know the Bible real well and was reading through the Old Testament rather quickly and perhaps superficially to get the impression from some passages that the God the Bible speaks about is the Jewish God almost exclusively. That is, that he is the God of the Jews as opposed to being one of the gods of the other nations.

You even would get that impression from some of the major portions of the Old Testament. From the Ten Commandments, for example. The beginning of the Ten Commandments challenges the people this way: says that you shall have no other gods before me. Almost implies that there are other gods, but you shall not put any of them in the place that I should occupy. It's almost giving the impression that although there are many gods, the Jewish God is simply the most important of them all.

Now, that would be a great misconception, of course. And that's why I say if you get that impression, you're reading through the Old Testament superficially and too quickly. There are passages in Isaiah, for example, in which Isaiah mocks these other so-called gods. He says, here's a man who's out in the fields and he cuts down a tree and takes a piece of wood home, and then he cuts it in two and he uses half of it to make a fire and cook his meal. And with the other half, he carves an idol.

Well, the very thing that he burns up to feed his stomach is what he worships as a god. And then he quotes God as saying, "There are no gods, no other gods besides me." That's what the Bible teaches. Now, we get a great statement of that in Psalm 47. Not all of the Psalms speak in this way, but this is a shining example of it. And what it is teaching us is this: if, as the Bible teaches when we understand it well, there is no God but one, and all of the other so-called gods are only idols, then this one true God is God of all the earth.

He is the Lord of all the nations, whether the nations acknowledge it or not. And Psalm 47 says that. It's a great appeal to people to come and worship the God of Israel, who is also at the same time the true God. It's even more than that, however. It speaks in a past tense, but as we move on in the psalm, we find it speaking in a future tense.

And when we find it speaking toward the end in the future tense, what we have is prophecy of that day when all the nations will, in fact, actually bow down and worship the true God. In other words, here in the Old Testament in the middle of the Psalter, we have a psalm that anticipates that climactic scene that we find in the Book of Revelation, where people from all tribes and nations and all places on the face of the earth bow down before the Lord, acknowledging the Lord and of His Christ.

And the text says the kingdom of this world has now become the kingdom of our God and of His Christ. Well, this psalm, although it's a short one, only nine verses, actually anticipates all that. Now, we ought to make a few observations on it. And let me just do that as we introduce the psalm. First of all, there is a connection between this psalm, Psalm 47, and the one that's gone before.

In the psalm preceding, there had been praise to God for some great deliverance on behalf of the people. When we were studying that, I pointed out that it was either presumably from the armies of Ammon, Moab, and the mountain of Seir, a deliverance that took place in the days of Jehoshaphat, or it was the better-known deliverance from the armies of Sennacherib from Assyria that took place in the days of Hezekiah.

The psalm seems to speak of that, and after it has spoken of the deliverance, the psalmist quotes God as saying, "Be still and know that I am God." He's speaking now to those nations. God has demonstrated His power by His victory. Now He says, "Be still, quiet down, shut up, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth."

And now in this psalm that follows immediately after that one, the psalmist picks up on that and begins to encourage the people to do exactly what God has told them to do. So the psalm begins by saying, "Clap your hands, all you nations. Shout to God with cries of joy. How awesome is the Lord Most High, the great king over all the earth." So there's a tie between this psalm and the one before, and it's put in that order in the Psalter undoubtedly for that reason.

Some scholars think that there's also another connection because in the reference to God ascending amid shouts of joy that you find in verse five, they see a reference back to that same deliverance that you have in the previous psalm. So they think these two were written about the same time. I'm not at all sure about that, but it may be the case.

There's something else that needs to be said by way of introduction and observation, and that is in these three psalms, Psalm 46, 47, and 48, we have what are called Songs of Zion. There are other Songs of Zion in the book of the Psalms, but these are three of them, and they're tied together by their references to the city of Jerusalem, which is what makes them a Song of Zion.

You see in verse four of Psalm 46 a reference to the city of God. Verse one of Psalm 48: "Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise in the city of our God." Verse two: "The city of the great king." You find it again in verse eight: "The city of our God." So those two are explicitly Songs of Zion. And although the psalm we're studying doesn't mention the city of our God or Jerusalem explicitly, it's assumed that that's what's involved when God is described as ascending, going up to Jerusalem, and sitting upon His throne, which in a figurative way is understood to be there. So those three psalms are tied together.

Now, if you say, "What about an outline for this psalm?" It's rather hard to give it an outline. Some people look at that word "Selah," which you find over in the right margin after verse four, and they say, "Well, that is obviously a break after the first section." And so they would say, "Well, what we probably have here are two stanzas of equal length, verses one through four and verses five through eight, and then there's a final verse, that's the prophetic verse that's tacked onto the end." And so they'd outline it that way.

The New International Version obviously does it differently. They think there are three stanzas because they've divided it up: verses one through four, five and six together, and then seven, eight, and nine at the end. I think in this case, the specific outline, at least so far as the verses go, isn't all that important because what is important is the flow of the thought.

And the flow of the thought, as I understand it, is like this. The psalmist begins by talking about God as king of all the earth. All of the nations fall under His rule. That is the great given, the principle from which he starts. He wants everyone to recognize that. Then as a particular example of that, he speaks about how God has been the God of Israel. And so the middle portion of the psalm deals with that. I suppose that would be verses three through six and perhaps even a little bit later.

But then having, as it were, stepped down a note in order to talk about the rule of God over Israel and what God has done for the Jewish people, he moves back at the end up to that high level again and begins to talk about God as the God of all the earth, but now bringing forward the things that he had already said earlier and looking to the future when all of that will be true in a most exalted sense.

It's almost the sort of thing that you would have in a musical composition. You'd have a first movement, a second, and then you would have a final movement that ties the theme of the first two together but pushes it up a note. You understand how that would operate? I think that's what he does. So we look at that first portion. What he does in verse one is to invite all of the nations, all of the peoples of the earth, to come and acknowledge God as the great God he really is.

God is the ruler. The tragedy, of course, is that the nations don't recognize that. The nations go their own way. They worship their own gods. They do their own thing, just as our own nation is doing. And yet, though they do that, God is the ruler nonetheless. That's what the psalmist wants us to see.

God demonstrates His rule over the nations by raising them up and bringing them down according to His own good pleasure. And no nation is able to stand for long by itself, which is what history shows. Arnold Toynbee has written the most exhaustive treatment of the nations of the world so far as I know in any language. It's in 12 volumes. It's called A Study of History.

And in it, he tries to write a universal history of all the peoples of the earth so far as we know their existence. And in that particular book, he talks about 34 distinct civilizations. He says that 13 of them are independent civilizations, 15 are satellite civilizations, six are abortive civilizations. He's very exhaustive. And yet the story of that book, those volumes if you study them in any care, is this: there have been times in history when one people has risen to a pinnacle of power and seems to be so powerful that its rule is going to go on forever.

And yet when that nation exalts itself and takes pride in itself and falls into sin and wickedness as nations do, God brings the nation down. And He exalts another in its place. You think back in history and you think of Egypt. Once Egypt was the great dominant power of the world, and it exercised that power for thousands of years. But eventually Egypt fell, and Egypt is a weak nation today.

Or you think of Babylon, the great capital of the Assyrian empire and the Babylonian empire. And great Babylon has fallen. Or you think of Rome or Greece or any of the nations of the world. At this present moment in history, the United States is standing at the pinnacle of world power. The Soviet Union with its trouble has declined. It would seem as if the only power on earth today sufficient and able to establish peace is that of the United States. And the United States is unchallenged at the moment in its power.

And yet God will bring the United States down, just as He has brought down all the nations before, if the United States will not acknowledge Him, which it is not doing. The Bible says righteousness exalteth a nation. And if a nation won't live in righteousness and acknowledge God, well, then God will do what He has done with all the others.

I suppose the book in the Bible that teaches us more than any other is the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament. And it is teaching it because the setting is the setting of Babylon, not Jerusalem. It's a foreign land. Jewish people have been transported there and they have to bear a witness for the true God in the midst of this godless environment. And the story of the book is the struggle of the kings of the earth against God and His anointed.

The first great story is the story of Nebuchadnezzar. He takes the glory of God to himself. He looks out over Babylon and he says, "Oh, look at this great Babylon that I have built. I've done it by my power and it's for my glory." I've always said that's the best statement in the Bible of what we today call secular humanism. It's saying everything revolves around man. It all has to do with me. Look what I've accomplished.

And God looks on Nebuchadnezzar and says, "No more of that." And He takes away his sanity and Nebuchadnezzar ends up out in the fields with the animals behaving like an animal because, of course, that's what happens when you won't have the true God. You behave in a beast-like manner, just like people do today.

Somebody said the other day when we were talking about some of the problems in the city, "They're just like animals out there." Used to be that people would steal, but that would be all. Now they steal and they kill you anyway, just because they enjoy killing. Somebody said they behave like animals. Well, yes, that's exactly the way we are behaving in America today. And the reason is true: if we will not have God, we will behave like animals.

If we won't get our sense of identity and well-being from God in whose image we are made, if we turn our back on God, the only place we will be able to understand what we are is by looking to the animals, and we'll act like them. And that's what happened to Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar had a son. His name was Belshazzar. And the next major story in the Book of Daniel has to do with Belshazzar.

Belshazzar had a great banquet in which he brought to the banquet hall the temple vessels from Jerusalem, which had been captured by his father Nebuchadnezzar in the conquest of 586 BC, to defile the temple vessels. And while they were there in the midst of the banquet hall, a hand was seen writing on the wall. And everybody was frightened, of course.

And then the words were left that the hand had written. Nobody understood what the words meant. And so they sent for Daniel, who was able to interpret such things. And Daniel came and he did interpret them. The words you know. They were these: mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. Those words mean this: mene, mene means measured, measured. Tekel means weighed, and upharsin means divided, parsed as we might say when you use it grammatically.

Well, what that meant was God had numbered the days of Belshazzar's reign and brought them to an end. Belshazzar himself had been weighed in the balances of God's judgment and found wanting. And finally, God had divided his kingdom, taking it from him and giving it to the Medes and the Persians. Daniel explained all that, and then he explained why the judgment was coming. And here are these important words. I quote exactly from Daniel five.

"The Most High God gave your father Nebuchadnezzar sovereignty and greatness and glory and splendor." Daniel, you see, was a member of the conquered people, but he was telling this great king that his father, the great Nebuchadnezzar, had been given the power he had by Jehovah, the God of the Jews. He continued: "But when his heart became arrogant and hardened with pride, he was deposed from his royal throne and stripped of his glory."

"He was driven away from people and given the mind of an animal. He lived with the wild donkeys and ate grass like cattle, and his body was drenched with the dew of heaven until he acknowledged that the Most High God is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and sets over them anyone he wishes. But you his son, O Belshazzar, have not humbled yourself, though you knew all this."

That night the city was overthrown. The walls were breached. Belshazzar was killed, and Darius the Mede sat on his throne instead. God is the king of all the earth. And if we will not acknowledge Him, He will bring down nations, just as He also sets them up.

Now, in the second section of this, we come to what I said earlier was in a sense a step further down. It is almost as if having begun on this high and exciting note, it now moves into an adagio or quiet movement. This is talking about the work of God on behalf of the Jewish people, and it mentions several things. It's not an exhaustive treatment. Later on in the Psalms, we're going to find psalms that rehearse the whole history of the people in a didactic way, almost to say, "Remember this. We're going to sing it now so you won't forget it."

That's not done here. This is done very simply. Several things. He subdued nations under us, people under our feet. That probably refers to the conquest. You have the description of that in the first half of the Book of Joshua. Then secondly, he chose our inheritance for us, the pride of Jacob whom he loved. The pride of Jacob is the land. That's the inheritance. So what this is saying is he gave us the land in which we live.

Now, we look at that, we might think of it in an inverse relationship. We would say, "Well, first of all, he gave them the land and then they went in and conquered it." And that is true, of course, because the division of the land was already described by Moses before the conquest. But I think what is involved here is a reference to Joshua. And he's thinking of the sequence of that book. First they conquered it, and then they divided it up.

And so just like the first half of the Book of Joshua deals with the conquest, the second half deals with the division of the land. Those are the first two things. Then number three, a more recent deliverance, which was the occasion of the previous psalm and probably the occasion of this one as well: "God has ascended amid shouts of joy, the Lord amid the sounding of trumpets."

Now, that's a bit difficult to interpret because it's not explicit. And the reference to God's ascending has been taken in two ways. Some of the scholars, I suppose this is the dominant view today, think that what this means is the bringing of the Ark of the Covenant back from battle up to the mount of Jerusalem where it was placed once again within the temple enclosure.

I don't know of any example of that actually happening, though the reference would be to Second Samuel, the sixth chapter, when the Ark was brought into Jerusalem for the first time during the reign of David. Certainly the presence of God was associated with the Ark of the Covenant. And so you can see that if the Ark was carried up into the city, you could say, "Well, God has ascended and taken His place upon His throne in Zion." Most scholars think of it that way.

The difficulty, of course, is that that description of the moving of the Ark in the sixth chapter of Second Samuel does not involve a battle. And as far as we know, the Ark was not taken into battle. And as a matter of fact, the only time it was taken into battle when they went out against the Philistines, God didn't like it and it was captured by the Philistines.

And then, of course, God humbled them, and eventually they put it on a cart pulled by oxen, and the oxen took it back to the Jewish land where it belonged. And that's where it remained until David brought it up to Jerusalem. But nevertheless, that's one possible interpretation. I think, however, that it's something else.

This idea of God ascending is associated many times in the Old Testament with the rising up of the cloud of glory, the Shekinah glory, which the Old Testament in many, many places talks about as residing over the Ark during the years of the people's wandering. You know they had a big camp and they had the temple enclosure in the middle of the camp. And then they had the holy place and the Holy of Holies. And the Ark was in the Holy of Holies.

And the Shekinah glory, the cloud of God, the glory cloud of God stayed over that place as a symbol of the presence of God among His people. And the way He led them was this: they would be camped out there sometimes for years at a time. But then on an occasion, the cloud would be seen to be rising up from the tabernacle and beginning to move off into the distance.

And when the cloud moved, the people would understand that as a sign of God's moving. And so they would pack up all their belongings, and the priests would pack the Ark and the temple enclosure. It was a portable thing. And off they would go, they would follow the cloud. And they would follow it until the cloud stopped. And when the cloud stopped, then they would stop and they would set up camp again.

That sort of thing is not referred to very often today, and yet it is found many, many times in the Old Testament. It's at the very end of the Book of Exodus, for example. The last verses of Exodus: "In all the travels of the Israelites, whenever the cloud lifted up from above the tabernacle, they would set out. But if the cloud did not lift, they did not set out until the day it lifted. So the cloud of the Lord was over the tabernacle by day and the fire was in the cloud by night in the sight of all the house of Israel during all their travels."

Now, in the 10th chapter of Numbers, there's a very significant statement concerning what Moses would say when the cloud began to move. In verses 35 and 36 of that chapter, when the cloud raised up and the Ark set out to follow it, Moses said, I quote: "Rise up, O Lord. May your enemies be scattered. May your foes fly before you."

And when the cloud stopped and settled down over the Ark again, Moses would say, "Return, O Lord, to the countless thousands of Israel." Now, I think that's what this is referring to. I acknowledge, of course, that the psalm is written later. This is not written during the years of the wandering, and so it's figurative language. It's using language that they would associate with what happened during the wilderness, and it's using it figuratively for a present reference. But that is exactly what the present reference means.

God had gone before them in the victory that they're celebrating. And with the victory over, God had in a certain sense come back into the city and He was enthroned upon Zion, which is what the language often says. Well, what he's saying here is that this God of all the nations, the God that he is calling upon all the peoples of the earth to acknowledge and to worship, has done a great deliverance and has led them and kept them and blessed them throughout all the days of their life.

Now, is it any different with us? You and I worship that same God. We know Him in Jesus Christ. And we can say God has been with us all our days. If you've known Him for any length of time, He's never abandoned you. He's never been unfaithful. He's provided for all your needs, as Paul said He did for his. And when He has moved, if you've had any sense, you have followed after Him. And when He has settled down, you have settled down.

And you can say just as the Jews did, this God is our God, but He's the God of the nations too. And what we are calling you to do is come and worship Him, come to know Him. Clap your hands, shout to God. How awesome is the Lord Most High. You see, we have a great God to proclaim, and we proclaim that great God joyfully as this psalmist did.

When we come to the end of the psalm and we come to that last phase of the thought, which I said goes to an even greater height because it combines the fact that God is the God of all the earth with the truth that God was the God of Israel. Because what we find here in the last stanza is the peoples of the earth gathering together as, verse nine, the people of the God of Abraham.

So you have a prophetic picture here of the day when people from every tongue and nation and race bow before God as the people of Abraham. That is coming in faith, in the steps of Father Abraham, who's the great model of faith in the Old Testament. Now, I have to say, and you are well aware I am sure, that this has not happened yet. Peoples of the nations have not yet come.

If we want to describe what is going on among the nations today, we describe it not by a reference to this last verse and its prophetic anticipation of the end days, but we describe it by the sort of thing we have in Psalm two. Psalm two, at the very start of the Psalter, pictures the nations of the earth and their leaders setting their face against God and His anointed, saying, "Look, let's get together because if we get together, we'll be strong enough to get rid of God."

"What we're going to do is break His bands and throw His fetters from us, because we want above all else to be free. Free of God." And so the nations of the world do that, and that's what we have today. We have everybody, everybody apart from those who know Jesus Christ as Savior, doing everything they can to throw off any kind of restraints that God would impose upon them.

"God's law? We don't want God's law. We want to be free. God's righteousness? We don't want righteousness. We want to do our own thing. God's rule through Jesus Christ? We will not have this man to rule over us." And it doesn't trouble God a bit. In Psalm two, it says the one who sits in the heavens, far above it all, the one who sits in the heavens laughs to Himself.

And He looks on them with scorn to think that puny men and women have within them the strength to throw off the fetters of Almighty God. And yet they try. That's what human culture is, men and women trying to throw off the fetters of Almighty God. And what the psalmist sees here is the day when some at least, those who have come to be the people of God, the children of Abraham through faith as Abraham himself exhibited faith, when those people come and actually bow before God.

You see, in that day, that final day, God is going to be acknowledged as king of all the earth, and Jesus Christ is going to be proclaimed as Lord of lords. But those who stand before Him are going to stand in one of two ways. There are going to be people who, like those of this psalm, bow before Him joyfully. They're going to say, "Yes, He's the king and He has been a wonderful king, a wonderful Lord, a wonderful Savior to us."

And they're going to sing all these praises. They're going to clap their hands and they're going to shout to God and they're going to praise Him forever and ever, and they're never, ever going to grow tired of praising Him. And then there are going to be those who have resisted Him all their lives and who would resist Him still except now He is all-powerful and He is powerful over them, and they cannot resist Him any longer.

And they will bow, but they won't bow willingly. But they will be forced to their knees by the angels to acknowledge that God is the God of all the earth. That even happens sometimes in this life. There are people who will fight against God and against God's laws. They'll say, "Look, I don't want to be bound by the laws of an Almighty God. I want to do my own thing." But the laws of God are the laws of God, and they're there whether we acknowledge them or not, just as God is there whether we acknowledge God or not.

And God cannot be mocked and the laws will apply. And so they break themselves against that immovable anvil. But even if it doesn't happen here, sometimes the righteous seem to flourish and the wicked seem to flourish right alongside. But even if it doesn't happen here, it will happen one day.

Someone once asked me in a question and answer period, "Is the kingdom of God past, present, or future?" I think they were thinking of the debate that has gone on in scholarly circles among people like Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Dibelius, C.H. Dodd and people like that, Albert Schweitzer and some others. And I had to reply that you can't exhaust the kingdom of God even in that way.

The kingdom of God is the rule of God, and therefore it is past, and it is also present, and it is also future. But it is not just past, present, and future. It is internal as well as external, and it involves those who bow willingly as well as those who are forced to bow because of the power of Almighty God. The kingdom of God is in one sense the greatest concept in all the Bible. It is the rule of God.

And the question, the only meaningful question for you and me, is whether we are a willing part of that kingdom. The way you become a part of that kingdom is by bowing before the king. And that king is Jesus Christ. He died for you. He proved that He's a loving king by doing that, but He is also the exalted King of kings. And the way you become a part of His kingdom is by saying, "My Lord and my God." May you do that, because one day you may not say, "My Lord and my God," but you will acknowledge Lord and God. And it's far better, it's the only wise course to bow before Him joyfully now. Let's pray.

Our Father, we're thankful again for these verses. We're thankful for the psalm, for the teaching, for the prophecy, for the theme that causes us to look back and forward and indeed recognize that we can never exhaust it. We would pray for those who hear these words, that they might not somehow fondly cherish in their hearts the idea that they can ultimately resist You, becoming kings unto themselves, lords of their own domain, for we are not the master of our fate.

You are the master. And we pray that by Your grace, You would use these truths to break through the hardness that expresses itself in such stubborn rebellion and so subdue many willingly before the feet of Jesus Christ, that they might find Him to be the loving Savior as well as Lord that He truly is. For Jesus' sake, Amen.

Guest (Male): Thank you for listening to this message from the Bible Study Hour, a listener-supported ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance is a coalition of pastors, scholars, and churchmen who hold to the historic creeds and confessions of the reformed faith, and who proclaim biblical doctrine in order to foster a reformed awakening in today's church.

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