The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): The picture of a family gathered round the piano to sing after the evening meal is one from the past. We enjoy listening to others sing but as a people, we seldom sing ourselves.

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Though few break out in song these days, for God's people, singing is a way of expressing the truths of God's word and our passionate response to those words. Let's join Dr. Boice as he examines Psalm 149 and the reasons God's people are exhorted to not only sing, but to sing a new song unto the Lord.

Dr. James Boice: It's been quite a while now that we've been studying these final worship psalms of the psalter, but we haven't said much about singing. It is time to talk about singing now. I'm thinking not of the kind of singing that is performing before an audience—at least I hope I never have to do that—but the kind of singing we do when we're alone because we're happy. It's like singing in the shower. And also, the kind of singing that we do with other people as we do in church.

The sad thing about our day is that not many people sing today. There was a time when people used to. People would sing in their homes as they gathered around the piano in the evenings, but there's not much of that that goes on anymore. Someone has said that you can trace the changing mood of our century by thinking of the typical pictures of soldiers in some of our major wars. In the First World War, the soldiers were singing soldiers. They sang as they marched to battle. It was somewhat of a heroic picture.

By the time of the Second World War, the GIs didn't sing, they cracked jokes instead. They had nicknames for their officers and they poked fun at them. And by the time of the war in Vietnam, the soldiers were neither heroic nor jokers; they took drugs instead. Some of the best memories of my youth were singing songs with my friends at summer camp in Canada. I still think back on those days with very fond memories. I enjoyed many times driving along on vacations with my parents and my sisters in the car singing all of those songs together, everything that we knew to cause the time to pass, but I don't think that happens very often.

The young don't sing much today. They listen to music, but they don't actually sing. About the only place today that people really do sing is in church. And it's a good thing we do, because we're preserving something very, very precious. Now, Psalm 149 encourages us to think about singing and what it means for the people of God because "sing" is the very first word after the word "hallelujah." And what we're told to do in this psalm is to sing a new song.

Now, one way we might think about Psalm 149 is to recognize a connection with the previous psalm, Psalm 148. The 14th verse of that psalm noted God's special grace to Israel, and the nation was urged to praise the Lord. And so here in the following psalm, that's exactly what they do. They're encouraged to do it by singing. Or we could look at it another way. In Psalm 148, the whole creation from heaven above to the earth beneath has been praising God, but now it's time to hear specifically from God's saints.

Now the word "sing" is repeated in the psalm, but "saints" is another word that's repeated. You find it three times in each of the psalm's three stanzas. It's in verses one, five, and nine, so you might say that this is the psalm of the singing saints. How are they to praise God? Well, the answer that's given at the very beginning is by singing a new song. Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise in the assembly of the saints.

Now, to sing a new song to God is not a new idea. We've already come across it several times already in the Psalms. It's there in the third verse of Psalm 33. We find it in the third verse of Psalm 40. It leads off Psalm 96 and 98, and it's again in Psalm 144, which is only a few psalms before this, and then it occurs again several times in the book of Revelation. We ought to ask, since it occurs here in these final psalms, why here of all places?

Why are we urged to sing a new song in this next to the last psalm of the entire psalter? Probably, would be my suggestion, it's to call attention to the importance of singing in the worship of God. But what's unique about singing, especially the singing of psalms, hymns, and praise songs by Christians, is that singing joins affirmations about God and the gospel expressed in words to an emotional response to that content, which music both encourages and affords.

I've been saying many times over in these studies of worship that worship has got to involve the mind. It's a serious mental activity. That's because worship means acknowledging and praising God for who he is, and in order to do that, we have to understand who he is, and in order to understand who he is, we have to know the Bible, because the Bible is where God tells us what he's like and what he's done for our salvation. So, it's a mental activity. It's not something that we can engage in mindlessly.

But at the same time, that doesn't mean that these facts that we come to know about God are bare facts, that is, facts that aren't supposed to touch us in any deep way. On the contrary, they are truths that call for our passionate response. They teach that God is a loving God who has given himself to us in Jesus Christ, who died for us, and that God continues to give himself to us by the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. God loves us, cares for us, preserves us, guides us, sustains us, lifts us up when we're down, and that he'll never stop doing that.

If we really understand those things, we want to respond to them. Now, that's what singing allows us to do. It provides this unique joining of biblical content and personal emotional ascent or response. Music alone doesn't do it, though music has a very important role in services in quieting our hearts to hear the voice of God in scripture. And words alone, while we can understand them and respond to God in words—it's one of the things we do in prayer—become far more personal and a part of us when we are able to sing them, and even more so when we're able to sing them with other Christians as we do.

When we sing together, what we're confessing is that the things that we have learned about God in the Bible are true. It's a way of saying "amen" and "hallelujah" to them. And so, what we're doing is confessing that they are a delight and joy for us while we join with others who make the same confession. Now, the reason God's people are called to sing is expressed in verse four. It says, "The Lord takes delight in his people; he crowns the humble with salvation." That's a very brief statement, but it's an important one. It's saying that our singing must be a response to that truth.

Now, we want to look at the psalm in a little detail. The truths about God in which the writer of the psalm takes delight and encourages us also to take delight are spelled out in the first stanza. And there are three of them in verses two through five. First of all, we're told that God is our creator. Now the stanza is referring to Israel as God's people and it's calling Israel God's saints. So when God is referred to as creator, what that might mean is that God is the creator of his people, that is, the nation, and in our case, it would be God's role in the creation or the formation of the church.

Jesus said, "I will build my church," and so he's the creator of the church. It might be that that's what the psalmist is talking about. On the other hand, in the previous psalm, God has been described as the maker of all things, heaven and earth, and the entire universe is praising him. And as a result of that, it might mean here that the psalmist is thinking of God as creator in that broader sense. Now, whatever way we take it, God is the creator. If God's the creator of all things, he's certainly the creator of his people, and he's created us as members of the church.

I've been very impressed recently as I've been doing some thinking in other areas that this is where the Bible begins. You go back to the early chapters of Genesis, the very start, and what we find there is not what we would call the doctrine of salvation, which comes later. And the earliest chapters don't even mention Jesus Christ—he only comes in as a prophecy in the third chapter. The Bible begins with God as the creator. And it's a way of saying this is what people have to understand first of all.

God is the creator, he's the one who has made you, and because he's made you, you owe him something. You owe him worship, you owe him thanks, you owe him praise. And the problem, of course, is that we don't do that. So the sequence of thought that's developed for us in the Bible is first of all that God is the creator, our responsibility, our failure to live up to that responsibility because of our sin, and therefore God's gracious promise of a savior.

I might add we find the same thing in the New Testament. It's exactly what Paul does in Romans 1. He's going to talk about the gospel. Now Jesus has come, there's a great gospel to be announced. He even says in the first chapter, verses 16 and 17, that this is what he's going to talk about. But in order to talk about it properly, that we might understand why Jesus had to come and why he died, he begins with God as creator. And so God has revealed himself in creation, he says, by the things that he has made, so that his invisible qualities are clearly seen.

The problem, he says, is that we don't acknowledge that. We repress that truth about God as a result of which the wrath of God comes upon us for our sin. I think that's probably what we need most in evangelism today, because we're living in an increasingly pagan world. You see, when you live in a world or a culture in which the basic truths of Christianity are more or less known, you can presume a lot of things and begin to talk about Christ.

But in a pagan culture, you have to begin to talk about God as creator and our responsibility to God as our creator and the fact that we've failed to do that and we're guilty before him, not just before one another and even less before the state, and therefore we need a savior. At any rate, that begins to come through in the psalm. Now, secondly, God is also praised as our king. This is true at the most basic level. God is king of the entire universe because he is the creator.

He rules it, and it includes all nations and all peoples. It's one cause for their just judgment that they failed to acknowledge this. As a matter of fact, the nations are in rebellion against God. Our culture is in rebellion against God. The second Psalm describes it: the kingdoms and kings of this world gather together against the Lord and against his anointed one, saying, "Let us break their chains and throw off their fetters." Well, the people of this world are hostile to God's rule.

That's the culture in which we live, and they need to be taught that God is king in spite of their rejection of him. Because it's only in this way that they can begin to understand something of the nature of sin and why it is that we really need a savior in Jesus Christ, the kind of savior that only God himself can be and who provides. The people who have to teach them that are those who have come to acknowledge Jesus Christ as their king, that is, the Christians.

And then that leads to the third point. It's the sequence I've been developing. The last of these truths about God is that God is our savior. He saves us from our rebellion. The psalmist says in verse four, "The Lord takes delight in his people; he crowns the humble with salvation." Now as I've been thinking about these three themes, it's occurred to me that you could write a whole theology based around them. God as creator, God as king, and God as savior. God the creator of all things, the king involving providence, and then you would have the savior doctrines.

I think if I were constructing it, I would do it that way and then I'd back out again using the same outline. I would do God as creator, then I would do God as king, then have a section on God as savior, and then I'd have a section on God as king for those who have found him as savior because you can't have him as savior without a Lord, and finally I would have God as creator again because the end of it all is that we might praise him as our creator. Wouldn't that be a great theology?

Maybe I'll write it someday. It occurs to me as well that it ought to guide our worship. As a matter of fact, it would be possible, would it not, to organize the whole hymnbook along those lines where it would have God as the focus from the beginning to the end. Now the next stanza gives us what we would call a victory song, and a victory song also plays a part in the worship of God by God's people. Going all the way back to the song of Moses and Miriam after the Jews' exodus from Egypt and their crossing of the Red Sea.

You know how that happened. There was a worship team if there ever was one. And they got the people all together and they began to worship God and this is what they sang: "I will sing to the Lord for he is highly exalted. The horse and its rider he has hurled into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my song, he has become my salvation." Now strictly speaking, the last stanza of Psalm 149 isn't so much a victory song as it is an anticipation of victory and a prayer for victory.

But its anticipation is so strong and its prayer is so certain of being answered that we can almost visualize it happening. We can almost see the soldiers marching out to battle, singing their songs, a song of praise in their mouth, and we might add verse six, a double-edged sword in their hands. Now that's been a problem for some people, people who wonder how believers can be engaged in war in any sense.

War is sometimes necessary in a fallen world, and to be a soldier is not an unworthy occupation for a follower of God. One of the great commentators, H.C. Leupold, a Lutheran, defends this view saying it's quite possible that one may have the high praises of God upon his mouth and a two-edged sword in his hand. I suppose that's a scholastic way of saying praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

But now having said that, I have to offer some qualifications or what I've said can be misunderstood. I said that in a sinful world, war is sometimes necessary and that being a soldier is not an unworthy vocation for a follower of God—David was one—but I didn't mean by that that Christians are to advance the work of God by killing their enemies. A Christian can serve in the armed forces, but he does so as a citizen serving his country and its interest and not as a Christian battling for Christianity.

He can contend for the faith, but when he does so, he has to do it in a very different way. Now let me illustrate it in terms of this psalm by an historical incident. Thomas Müntzer used this psalm, Psalm 149, to incite the German farmers to military action in what has come to be known as the Peasants' War at the height of the Reformation. It was a sad abuse of Christianity, and it happened this way.

The war began near Schaffhausen in 1524, which was seven years after Luther had nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, and it dragged on for two years to 1526. By the end of that first year, there were some 30,000 German farmers in arms refusing to pay taxes, feudal church tithes, or feudal dues. In March of 1525, they circulated a document that was called the Twelve Articles. It was their demands, the kind of things they were concerned about, and they were very just concerns.

They claimed the right to choose their own pastors, they wanted to pay only just tithes, they wanted to be considered as free men rather than serfs, enjoy fair rents, and there were other reasonable demands, and to top it all off, they were in favor of the Reformation and they were opposed to the Roman Catholic Church. Now the peasants expected Luther to support their cause. And Luther was sympathetic.

He wrote about what was going on, communicating with the nobles and the hierarchy of the church, and he said it's your fault that all of this has come upon us because you really are behaving wrong in your treatment of the peasants. And yet Luther didn't endorse the rebellion, and sometimes people have looked on that and said that was a great failure on Luther's part. Here we had a national uprising, he should have been behind it, but Luther didn't do it.

And he had very good reasons for it. First of all, he had great fear of anarchy. Those who have always lived in an ordered society take order for granted, but it's nothing to be taken lightly. And Luther understood that anarchy is bad; many innocent people perish in such times. Secondly, he was well aware, because he knew the Bible, that God has established the authority of princes, including even of those that we don't like.

And so he didn't want to go against the teaching of the word of God there. But chiefly, Luther knew that the power of the sword has not been given either to the church or to the individual Christian and that our weapons are not the world's weapons and that they are actually arguments which alone have power to demolish strongholds. Luther had an interesting way of expressing it. He said the Reformation will proceed "non vi sed verbo." That means not by force, but by the power of the word of God.

And so it did. Now the Peasants' War was a tragic episode in the Reformation period. More lives were lost in that war in Germany than in any skirmish prior to the Thirty Years' War. Some 130,000 farmers died in battle or afterwards as the result of punishments. Germany was impoverished, the Reformation itself nearly floundered, and yet it didn't because it was advancing by the power of the word of God and by persuasion and by prayer.

So, ask the question, can Christians use military language? And the answer is yes, the Psalms do. We can sing "Onward Christian Soldiers," we can talk of advancing the banner of Jesus Christ, but we have to understand as we do that we do so in the words of that other battle image song that goes, "Not with swords' loud clashing, nor roll of stirring drum, but with deeds of loving mercy the heavenly kingdom comes."

Or let me put it this way: our equivalent of this latter half of Psalm 149 would be the spiritual warfare of the Christian life. Because as Paul says in Ephesians 6, our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Or as it says in Revelation 12, we'll conquer, but we'll do it by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of our testimony.

Now that brings us back to this matter of singing and the psalmist's call for a new song. A new song. We love the old songs, of course, just as we love the old doctrines and want to walk in the old paths, but each generation has fresh experiences of God's grace and each experience of the grace of God calls for new songs. Israel had experienced God's goodness in bringing the people back from their bondage in Babylon and then perhaps giving them victory over their enemies, and so they wrote this psalm about it.

And so it is continued. Let me just review something here. When Jesus was born, knowledge of the salvation that has come to us in Christ called for new songs. The first new song was the song of the angels in the sky over Bethlehem. They cried, "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests." Early on, the Christians wrote songs. One of them, probably, is preserved in the second chapter of Philippians beginning, "who being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped," and so on.

Believers who fought the trinitarian and christological battles in the early centuries of church history have left us songs from this period celebrating the Trinity and the deity of Christ. The Gloria Patri that we sing dates from this period: "Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost." A fourth-century Latin hymn begins, "All glory be to thee most high, to thee all adoration. In grace and truth thou drawest nigh to offer us salvation."

The same century, Ambrose of Milan wrote, "O splendor of God's glory bright from light eternal bringing light, thou light of light, life's living spring, true day all days illumining." The recovery of the gospel at the Reformation led to powerful new songs by the reformers, especially by Martin Luther. We sing many of them; best known, of course, "A Mighty Fortress is our God, a Bulwark never failing."

But he also wrote, "All praise to thee eternal Lord, clothed in a garb of flesh and blood," and he wrote, "Great God, what do I see and hear, the end of things created. Prepare my soul to meet him." A few centuries later, John and Charles Wesley wrote hundreds of hymns, especially Charles. He's left us such hymns as "O for a thousand tongues to sing," "Ye servants of God, your master proclaim," "Hark the herald angels sing," "Jesus Christ is risen today," "Arise my soul, arise, shake off thy guilty fears," and the one we like best, "And can it be that I should gain an interest in my savior's blood."

About the same time, Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf composed "Jesus thy blood and righteousness, my beauty are, my glorious dress, in flaming worlds in these arrayed with joy shall I lift up my head." Those hymns reflect something of the spirit of the revival movements of those important days in church history. And now I ask what about our time? Have experiences of God's grace led to the writing of new songs today?

Yes, I think they have. They're not all good. Many of them are quite trite in terms of their lyrics and their music. Many are badly man-centered, but not all of them. There are good hymns and there are good hymn writers. Michael Baughen, a contemporary English writer, wrote a beautiful setting of Psalm 1. Margaret Clarkson, an English woman now living in Canada, wrote "We come, O Christ to you, true Son of God and man," and another one, "Our God is mighty worthy of all praising."

Daniel Iverson, who died in 1977, wrote "Spirit of the living God fall fresh on me." And how about David Clowney, who wrote "God all nature sings thy glory, all thy works proclaim thy might," or his father, Edmund P. Clowney, former president of Westminster Seminary, who wrote "Vast the immensity mirror of majesty, galaxies spread in a curtain of light." What a great treasure that is, going all the way back to the very earliest years of church history and coming the whole way up to our own time as well.

And so I ask about our own time and I ask about us. How about you? Do you have a new song in praise of God's glory? Most of us don't have the ability to write new songs, but don't be sad about that. If that's the case, there's been a new song written for you. You're going to sing it one day because it tells us about it in the book of Revelation where all the saints gather around the throne, and here's what you'll be singing: "You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals because you were slain and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth."

We may sing other songs too, but I don't think we'll ever get tired of singing that. Our Father, we thank you for the joy and privilege not only of knowing you but of praising you in song. We thank you for those who have been given the gift of music, to write lyrics and compose tunes that throughout all the centuries of church history have lifted the hearts and minds and spirits of your people as they have banded together to praise you before the angels and the world. We thank you that we're part of that company, we rejoice in it, and we ask that your blessing might be upon us even as we continue our worship by the singing of hymns. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.

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