The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Psalm 66 urges us as God's people to praise our God. The Psalm instructs us in how to praise him and gives us an example in David of one who is praising him. In this Psalm of Thanksgiving, David reminds us that if we consider all the great things our God has done, we would tell the world that this is the God who made you. Come and praise the Lord.

Guest (Male): Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. "Come and hear and I will tell you what he has done for my soul," declares the Psalmist. Turn in your Bible to Psalm 66 and let's join Dr. Boice as he examines David's great Psalm of Thanksgiving and reminds us of the reasons that God deserves both our thanks and our praise.

Dr. James Boice: Last week we were studying Psalm 65 and this week we're studying Psalm 66, and there's a link between them. I wonder if you've seen it. It occurs between the very last verse, actually the last line, of Psalm 65 and the first two verses of Psalm 66.

It's probably why Psalm 66 is placed where it is in the Psalter. At the very end of Psalm 65, the Psalmist, David, is talking about the meadows and the valleys and he says they shout for joy and sing. Then, in the first two verses of the Psalm we're looking at now, he turns to the earth and he says to the earth, "Shout with joy to God, all the earth, sing to the glory of his name."

So, you have that link. Each one of them talks about shouting for joy and singing. There is a difference, however. When David is talking about the earth, the meadows and the valleys, and he's really encompassing all of God's inanimate creation, impersonal creation, he says that creation does shout for joy and does sing.

But when he turns to the world of human beings, he doesn't say you're doing it, he urges us to do it. Obviously, because it's hard for us to do that. You and I ought to be praising God at all times. We have far more to praise him for than the inanimate universe. Furthermore, we understand what we're doing. When you talk about nature praising God, it's only a poetic fallacy. Nature doesn't actually do that. We're the ones that should, but we don't.

And so, we have to be urged to do it. That's what this Psalm does. It urges us to do it, it instructs us how we might do it, and then it gives us an example of one who's doing exactly that. And that's the way we're going to look at it. Now, before we plunge into it in detail, let me just tell you something about the movement of the Psalm. It's helpful to understand how it goes, to get a little glimpse of that ahead of time.

There actually are two overlapping movements in the Psalm. The first is a movement from the praise of God on a large scale to the praise of God on a small scale with something in between. Here's the way it works. First of all, in verses one through seven, all of the earth, that is everybody on the face of the earth, is called upon to praise God.

The second section, verses eight through twelve, the nation of Israel is called upon to praise God. So it narrows down just a trifle. And then in the final section beginning with verse 13, the individual Psalmist all by himself is praising God. Derek Kidner, who is one of the best of the modern commentators on the Psalms, identifies those three sections like this. Number one: God of all. Number two: God of many. Number three: God of one. So you get the idea how it's moving.

There's a sense in which this Psalm begins broadly then, and widely and all-encompassingly, but ends narrowly. What happens, it strikes me, can be illustrated by something interesting in music. One of Joseph Haydn's symphonies, the 45th symphony, it's in F-sharp minor and it's called the Farewell Symphony. If you know anything about it, you'll know why it's called the Farewell Symphony.

It's like this. It begins with the entire orchestra sitting on the platform. They're all playing in the first movement. But then as the symphony goes on, the sections begin to get up and the individuals, one by one, they begin to walk off the platform and finally, by the time you get to the end, the only people on the platform are two violinists.

When that was first performed, I understand, in Vienna in 1772, as each instrumentalist got up from his place on the stage and walked off, he had a little lantern there that was illuminating his music. They didn't have electric lights. And so, as he got up with his part being finished, he blew out his light. And so, as the piece progressed, not only did the players get fewer and fewer, but it even began to get increasingly dark. And finally, the two violinists played and the lights went out entirely.

That's the Farewell Symphony. Now, something like that is happening here in Psalm 66. The Psalm begins with the entire earth, all the inhabitants of the earth, upon the stage. But then they begin to get dismissed one by one, and then you've got just the nation of Israel left, and finally, at the very end, the Psalmist is standing there all alone.

However, unlike the symphony which just sort of fades away, in the case of the Psalm, the passion and the intensity builds. The earth in the widest scope sort of is called upon to praise God, but doesn't really do it very well. Israel has a lot to praise God for, and they do it. But then finally the Psalmist is there all alone and with passionate intensity, he tells God that he's going to fulfill his vows and then he gives a testimony to everybody who will listen to come and hear what God has done for him. So that's the way it goes.

That's the first movement. The other overlapping movement is something that goes like this. You notice the stanzas, if you kind of study them and get the theme, you'll find that first of all, a group or an individual is told to praise God. And then that same individual or group is called upon to praise God. Come and praise God. So "praise" and "come" are the way it alternates. Now you see that, the first stanza uses the word shout and sing, not the word praise except at the end, but the whole earth is being told to praise God.

And then, as it doesn't do it very well, I would suspect, in verse five, there's an invitation. Come and see what God has done, that you might have something to praise God for. Third stanza, again now talking to the Jewish nation: Praise our God, O people. And then in the third, the next section, the fourth one, the Psalmist himself says, "Well, I'm going to come and praise God." And then finally at the end, he talks to everybody and he says, "Now, listen to what God has actually done for me." So those are the movements. That's the way it operates.

The first section then deals with this call to the entire earth to praise God. Most people know, most Bible students know at least that after the Babylonian captivity, when the Jews came back from their captivity in Babylon, they tended to become religiously exclusive. They didn't have a great deal of concern for the other nations. There's probably a very good reason for that.

They felt they had to narrow down, focus on Israel as a whole and Israel's religion and deplore all of the other religions of the world and the peoples of the world in order to preserve their own identity. What is surprising, therefore, in view of that, we normally think of Judaism operating that way, is that you find something quite different in the Psalms.

Quite often in the Psalms, you have this broad, kind of inclusive view, which has in mind the fact that this God of Israel who has done such wonderful things for Israel is actually the God of the whole earth. And so, the whole earth is called upon to come and praise him. We find that right here. There's a little block of Psalms that do this. Psalm 65, which we looked at before, this one, 66, and also 67 and 68. Four of them altogether, all kind of have this particular biblical kind of and proper kind of universalism. All the nations of the world, not just Israel, are called upon to praise God.

Now, that's understandable, isn't it? There's a kind of universalism in our day that's very popular, unfortunately even among evangelicals, that kind of says, well, you know, God can't disapprove of anybody and in the end everybody's going to be saved and therefore anybody's particular view of things is okay. We have a certain relativism in our time that says, well, it has to be okay because after all, all we really have are religious opinions.

And because we don't have any way of validating one over the other, your opinion's good for you, my opinion's good for me; all are equally valid. Now that's a wrong kind of universalism. The Bible doesn't encourage that at all, and as I say, you can understand why, because if there is a God, which the Bible of course assumes there is, and everybody ought to know there is, we're fools if we think otherwise, if there is a God, then God is what God is. God is something. He's not just whatever your opinion makes him.

And so the question ought to be: That's your opinion, but is your opinion valid? And this is my opinion, is my opinion valid? How do you answer that? The only way you can answer a question like that is when God himself reveals what he's really like. And Judaism, Christianity, claims that's exactly what God has done in the Bible. It's not something we made up, it's not our opinion. This is God saying, this is what I'm like.

Now, if there is a God, then there is a certain kind of narrowness by definition as to what he is. But at the same time, there's this broader kind of biblical universalism, which says this nevertheless is not Israel's God, it's not America's God, it's not a God of a particular class or a particular race. This is the God of the whole earth. He made it all.

And therefore, our task, if we actually do know him through the scriptures and the work of the Holy Spirit in making that live in our hearts, is to say to the whole world, look, this is the God who has made you. This is the God who has blessed you. Come and praise the Lord. Now, that's exactly what is happening here. The sad thing, of course, is that the world doesn't do it.

You see, the very fact that in the second stanza of this Psalm David has to urge people to come and see what the Lord has done sort of betrays that. God has given people everything they have. He's given them their very lives. He's given them health, food to eat, such a thing as common grace. The very fact that people are alive is because of the grace of God, but they don't naturally praise God.

Romans 1 says what they do: They try to suppress the knowledge of God. And so David is calling upon the whole world to come and actually find out what the true God is like. I can't help but think that there's sort of an illustration of what goes on here in the earthquake that took place out in Southern California just this winter. It was, by estimates made afterwards, the most costly national disaster that has ever overtaken America, even greater than the hurricane in Florida some years ago.

And that struck some people as significant, especially since it followed on a number of other disasters out in Southern California. There were the riots that did a lot of destruction, then there were the brush fires in the fall. Now you got an earthquake that's terribly destructive. They were discussing this on national television and one person said, an observer, I'm quoting as nearly as I can, "Maybe God is trying to tell us something."

And then on another program, I heard someone say, again, this is national television, "Maybe God doesn't like what's going on in Southern California." Well, I don't know, maybe he doesn't. But you see, if that is true, that line of logic should lead you to seek the true God out, find out what he's like, find out what he approves and what he disapproves, and worship him. But of course we don't do that.

These great acts of God sometimes catch the attention of the world, and so God kind of filters into our conversation a little bit, but the world, left to itself, really doesn't worship God. Now, we're going to go on to see what Israel does, but before we do, let me just digress a moment to say that this opening section has something to tell us about the place of music and singing and thanksgiving in worship and the relationship between these things. Because that's the way it begins, doesn't it?

Not just shouting with joy to God, but also we are to sing for the glory of his name. And then what we're to sing is sort of spelled out here in very short scope. Isn't it interesting that people of God in the Old Testament, Jewish people, and then today in the church, are people who sing God's praises? Ever think about that? The importance of actually singing?

I don't mean the importance of music alone. There's always been music, I suppose. Greeks had music, we don't know what it was like. Egyptians had music, and so on. The Romans, and so on, all down through the various parts of history, the various nations. But mostly it was performance. In other words, you had a trained musician who would sing for you, and it sort of filled the role in many periods of history that television does for us today.

You got a gathering together, you had a big dinner, you had to do something afterwards, and so the minstrels would come in and sing. Mostly that's what it was like. Now when you get into an age where you've got mass dissemination of information and you can circulate music and people are well off enough that they can begin to take music lessons and so forth, that's become a little bit more of a broad experience.

So you have such things as popular tunes. You know, a number of years ago, a generation ago at least, but perhaps even during the war years, you had a lot of that. People kind of sang songs, the popular songs of the day, to keep their spirits up. And during the war they sang patriotic songs and things like that, but not terribly often, or terribly well, or not the best music.

What I notice today is that people in the world really don't sing. You ever thought of that? People in the world today really don't sing. Now, one reason for it might be that the popular songs are unsingable even by the rock stars and they're making some kind of noise, I'm not sure they're really singing the songs. I do notice that the young people today, if you say to them, you know they seem in a little bit of a daze when the music's on, but they're actually listening to the words.

If you say to them, "What are they saying?" You know, I can't hear the words, I don't know what they're saying, all I hear is the noise, and I say to them, "What are they saying?" They know what the words are. They can tell you what the words are, more or less. Sometimes even the young people have trouble. Listen to it enough they're deaf, they can't even hear the music let alone the words, but they don't sing it. They don't sing it.

But Christians sing. You see, Christians have always sung because we have a great God. We're joyful in the God we have and it's natural to express our joy in song. Song expresses emotion, you see. Music has the emotional element. And so that's what we do. But we have to say, of course, that when we're talking about praising God, the emotion is not the dominant thing.

Because we don't, in our praise of God, talk about how we feel about things, although we may feel it very intensely and it's the intensity of the feeling that causes us to sing, but rather we focus our thoughts on God. Now that's exactly what you have here, you see. David the Psalmist is calling to the earth, he says, "Look, if you really understood how great God is and what he has done for you and what he has done for us in Israel and what he's done in the great history of salvation," we would say the same thing in terms of Jesus Christ, "why you would shout for joy and you would burst out in singing."

But you'd burst out in singing in praise to God, because God is a great God for what he's done. All the great hymns do that, of course. And one of the sad things about some of the hymns of our day, because even the evangelical church is losing its sense of the grandeur and the greatness of our God, is that our hymns tend to become increasingly sentimental and self-centered. And so we sing about ourselves and our feelings rather than about God. There's a great deal of instruction here.

Second thing that's worth noting about this, just briefly, is that there's an interesting balance between praise and thanksgiving. One of the commentators, his name is Tate, writes about it. He says, if all you're talking about is thanksgiving—thank you, Lord, for this, thank you, Lord, for that, thank you, Lord, for that—well, your prayers become self-centered. Your prayers really have to be praise. You have to be praising God for who he is.

But on the other hand, he says, if your songs and your worship are nothing but praise, then it tends to become sterile and ritualistic because it's really not personal. You're not praising God for what he's done actually where you yourself are concerned. So he says there has to be the balance. And indeed, that's the balance in all things, you see. A balance between emotion and content, a balance between praise and thanksgiving, and what holds it all together is the nature of our God.

The more you know about God, the more you appreciate God, the more you experience the greatness and glory and power of God in your life, the more you'll praise him and you'll praise him rightly, you see, thanking him for what he's done, but above all, thanking him and praising him for who he is. Now, all of that is suggested to us in the Psalm.

Now, the second section of this expresses the praise of the nation of Israel. You see: Praise our God, O people. So that's the people of Israel. Now, the world is invited to come and praise God. That's what happens at the beginning and sometimes it stands in awe of what God does as we've seen, but often it ignores that, usually it doesn't praise him. It's different for the people of God.

They've come to know God and therefore they do praise him. And that's what the author is inviting them to do here. If you look at the content of what is mentioned, you'll find that when the nations of the world are called upon to praise God, it tends to be for what God has done for Israel. Notice verse six: He turned the sea into dry land, they passed through the river on foot.

That's obviously referring to the Exodus and perhaps also to the passing over the Jordan River in order to move into the Holy Land when they attacked Jericho. Now, the Gentiles have seen that and the reason they're told to praise God for that is that that's something they could see, something external. Everybody in the ancient world knew that the God of the Jews brought them into their land having delivered them from their bondage in Egypt. And so David says to the Gentiles, "Look, here's something to praise God for. Look what he's done. Come on, look at it, look what he's done."

Now when he gets to talking about his own people, it's not that specific. If you look at these things, you'll find that the things that are mentioned here are kind of general. He talks in what we would call poetic phraseology: You keep our feet from slipping, you refined us like silver, you brought us through fire and water to a place of abundance. You can't link that up with anything specific in terms of the life of the people.

Now, do you say, "What is that? Does it mean that they don't have specific things in mind?" No, I think the answer is along these lines: The Gentiles really don't know God and so they're kind of looking on and they can see God's mighty acts, at least something like the Exodus. But the people of God have all kinds of things to praise God for, more things than you could possibly list in a single Psalm, although later in some of the Psalms there's going to be an attempt to do that.

And so these phrases are meant to be inclusive. Whoever you are, you individual Christian, you individual Jew, who knows something about the greatness of our God, isn't it true that he kept your feet from slipping? You say, "Oh yes, when this happened to me, I lost my job, I got so discouraged by that, I almost gave up and God kept me, you see, kept my feet from slipping."

And here's another case, you know, I was in great danger and I thought something terrible was going to happen to me, God kept my feet from slipping. And then you get a phrase like through fire and water. That's just a way of saying in every extremity God has kept us. We even have phrases like that ourselves. We say come hell or high water. It's that kind of thing. No matter what happens, you see, God keeps us and the people know this.

Notice something else about this middle portion, beginning with verse eight where the Jews are called upon to praise him. Notice that the pronouns change. It becomes personal. Here you have the second person pronoun "you." Look, read it that way: Praise our God, O peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard. He has preserved our lives, he has kept our feet from slipping. For you, O God, tested us, you refined us like silver. You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs. You let men ride over our heads. We went through fire and water, but you brought us to a place of abundance.

See, the nations of the world can praise God in a general way. They can say he's a great God, he made the universe, isn't that marvelous. They don't do it, but they ought to do it, they can do it if they would. But the people of God have more to say than that. He is our God, you see. He's done this for us individually. And so they praise God that way.

Well, we come to the last stanza and this is the Psalmist himself, David. Now the orchestra has left the stage and here's the single violinist. You can understand how effective that would be. I can imagine doing a play that way and I'm sure there are plays that are done exactly that way. Some of Shakespeare's plays end that way with a single character on the stage. All of the tumult is over and the armies fade away and now here is the sole person upon the stage.

An illustration occurs to me as I'm thinking of this. You ever seen a tattoo, you know what they do in Scotland where they have all the massed pipe bands and the bagpipes and so on, all these clans and their wonderful array will march up and down the field playing that, but when it's all over you have a single piper up there that sort of pipes the final farewell. Now, that's what the Psalmist is doing here, but he does it with great intensity.

There are two parts to the last stanzas: 13 through 15, 16 to 20. In the first he speaks to God. In the second he speaks to whoever will listen and he gives a testimony. Now, look at his words to God. I mentioned that the passion and intensity of the Psalmist comes through in the end and it really does here, and you see it in a number of ways.

First of all, he's talking about offerings that he's going to bring and he describes them as burnt offerings. Now, that's significant. There were different kinds of offerings, you know. There were fellowship offerings and burnt offerings and the difference between a fellowship offering and a burnt offering is that when you brought a fellowship offering it was sort of to have fellowship with your friends and you offered up some of it that was burned upon the altar, but the rest of it you sort of ate up.

It was like having a barbecue for religious reasons. It was sort of a festival, a party. And that was all right, that was good, that was encouraged in Israel. Sometimes they had huge parties like that. Solomon when he dedicated the temple just fed the whole city. You say, offering all these things, fellowship offerings.

But a burnt offering isn't like that. A burnt offering is burnt, all of it's burnt up. And it's a kind of offering that testifies to the wholeness of commitment or dedication on the part of the worshipper. It's a way of saying I'm not going to hold anything back, I am utterly yours. And David explains here how he did it. He said, "When I was in trouble, I told the Lord I was going to present these offerings and he delivered me and now I'm going to do it."

That's the first thing. Second thing we notice is that he mentions what it is he's going to offer. And there's a variety of them. He's going to mention rams, offering them, and bulls and goats. That's a lot of animals, that's two at least of each class, six animals. David as the king probably offered many more than that. And the point of that is that that was expensive.

You know, you could come and offer a lamb, you had to even pay for that. Animals were expensive, but to offer a bull and rams and all of this, that was expensive. So David's saying, "This is not just a casual rite I'm going through. Lord, I was delivered by you and I understand that you've delivered me and therefore I want to do it right, I want to give a costly offering."

I wonder if you've ever done anything like that. You say, "Well, for what reason?" Well, if for nothing else than that God himself, if you're a Christian, has delivered you from the penalty of your sin. He's delivered you from hell. I don't know what kind of a deliverance David is talking about here, he had many deliverances from his enemies on every hand constantly, it seems, he talks about enemies all the time.

But whatever they were, however great they may have been, your deliverance from the penalty of your sin is even greater. Have you ever sacrificed anything to God because of that? You ought to give yourself. That's what Paul says in Romans 12:1, "Present your bodies a living sacrifice." And with your bodies everything else besides. The Psalmist sets the pattern.

Now notice at the end, having done all of that, having spoken to God, having told God that he's going to do what he said he would do, he now turns to those who may be looking on and he invites them to hear what God has done for him. In other words, he gives a testimony. He says that God delivered him from all his trouble. Therefore, he concludes the Psalm, "Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me."

It's interesting about John Bunyan. You know, John Bunyan, who wrote Pilgrim's Progress, he wrote his own spiritual autobiography. It's called "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners." Do you know what the key verse of that is? A verse that he puts at the very beginning that you read before you actually get into his own personal story? It's a verse from the Psalms, it's verse 16.

It's in the King James Version, of course, rather than the New International Version that didn't exist in that time, but in Bunyan's text, here's what he says before the first page of his autobiography: "Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul." There's a testimony.

Do you ever invite people to hear that? People become Christians and they invite their friends in and they say, "Look, I want to tell you what God has done for me." People who really know the Lord and love the Lord and are sensitive to the fact that he has saved them from their sin are trying to do that all the time. Many people in this congregation are trying to reach their neighbors all the time, people that they've known for years, some of who have become Christians late in life and they're praying for them constantly, doing one thing after the other because they want them to know what God has done for them and they want them to come to know God himself.

Well, the Psalm ends with a redirected syllogism. Now, let me explain what that is. A syllogism is a logical sequence and it involves three propositions, the last one based upon the first two. You have proposition A, proposition B, and then on the basis of those two, you make a conclusion. Now, I'll give you an example. All men are mortal (proposition one), Socrates was a man (proposition two), therefore Socrates is mortal. That's a syllogism.

Now, you have one here. I want you to see how it works. Here's the first proposition, verse 18: If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. Well, that's sound enough, isn't it? That's just what is said elsewhere in the Bible. It's said in Isaiah 59, for instance: Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear deaf that he can't hear, but your sins have separated between you and your God. Therefore his arm doesn't move to save you and his ear doesn't hear.

So that's what David is saying. "If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened." Here's the second proposition: But God has surely listened and heard my prayer. That's clear enough, the very fact that David is there is proof of that, because if God had not listened and delivered him from trouble, he'd be dead. So, the second proposition is true enough.

Now, what follows from that? Just think it through. If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. He has, however, listened. Therefore, you can make the conclusion: I have not cherished sin in my heart. But that's not what he says. What does he do? Instead, he redirects it and he says, "Praise be to God who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me."

Isn't that interesting? One of the older commentators, Thomas Fuller, talks about this being a syllogism and he says, "David fooled me by that syllogism, but he hasn't wronged me because he's taught me a great lesson. I thought he was going to put the crown on his own head and instead he turns around and he puts the crown on the head of Jesus Christ."

So he says, "I'll learn this excellent logic. I will learn to like David's syllogisms better than Aristotle's. And whatever the premises may be, I'm going to make God's glory the conclusion." And that's the way it is with Christians, you see. We can say, "Yes, I accomplished this," we can say, "Yes, I was enabled to do that," we can say, "Yes, I spoke and God blessed the word and people became Christians and I rejoice in that," but I don't rejoice in my ability to do it because everything comes from God.

And therefore, David ends as we should begin and says, "Praise be to God." And that's what we should do. Whatever our triumphs may be, they're always by the grace of God and they're for God's glory. Amen.

Let's pray. Our Father, we do thank you for this Psalm and for the lesson it has for us. We've traced this progression from the call to the nations, to the testimony of Israel, to the marvelous testimony of this single soul who is delivered from great trouble and knows that you were the one who did it and who gives testimony and calls upon us to praise you too.

May it be true of us as well. We can't speak for the nations, we can't even speak for our own nation, we can't even speak for our family, but we can speak for ourselves. And if we're Christians, we can say God has been gracious to me, God has saved me. Therefore, praise be God. And we invite other people to do that. May we do that. Give us grace to do that. Bless that testimony and do it for the sake of your own glory and honor. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

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