Psalm 96 and a Global Call to Worship
- mww
- Jun 18
- 17 min read
God is the glorious Creator and righteous Judge.
Bible Study Ideas and Commentary for Psalm 96
Psalm 96 is part of a group of "Yahweh is King" psalms that many Bible readers love. God's people are called to declare God's glory and glorious deeds over all the earth, leading all people to acknowledge that glory and majesty and worship Him themselves. The great promise (and warning) is that God will come to judge the earth.
Sing a new song to the Lord (96:1)
Getting Started: Things to Think About
Missions Exist Where Worship Does Not
This is not really a topic for discussion; it's just a thought I want us to keep in mind as we study Psalm 96. The headlines from around the world are pretty dire right now. I don't think we need to rehash them. John Piper is credited with the line, "Missions exist because worship doesn't." I want to use that sentiment to help us connect Psalm 96 with the world around us. God's people are tasked with bringing the entire world to worship and fear the Lord. And the only way these conflicts end is to complete that task.
The Greatest Thing Since ...
For whatever reason, I regularly think of the line from the Annie movie -- "She thinks you're the greatest thing since sliced bread." It's a great line.
When you're trying to say something great about a person or thing, what's your "sliced bread" substitute?
Depending on context, I've used
indoor plumbing,
central air conditioning,
fire,
the wheel, and
cane sugar Dr. Pepper.
This week's Psalm focuses on the greatness of God. How can we declare how great God is to the rest of the world? Well, it had better be better than how we describe anything else!
Advertising Language
Do you have an ad that particularly bugs you, and why? I've already complained about drug commercials -- how they spend more ad time talking about the side effects than the benefits! And Toyota runs this audio ad talking about some new generation of young entrepreneurs who is coming to take their turn behind the wheel, and they aren't waiting for our permission. Who was denying them permission to drive a Toyota? The commercial was so dumb that I had to start muting it.
I told you that I subscribe to the "Morning Brew" newsletter. They integrate their ads into the newsletter, so it's harder for me to completely ignore them. This morning's issue included an ad for "Death & Co" (which I guess worked because it got my attention), and it had the amazing line, "Investors can join at this rare moment of momentum." Well, it's a cocktail bar, and it's expanding beyond 10 locations. I'm sure they paid somebody a lot of money to make them sound like a can't-miss investment opportunity.
We are surrounded by descriptions that are so clearly too-good-to-be-true that I feel like I'm desensitized to it all. I take what I hear and immediately cut my expectations in half, even if I don't know anything about the subject. I had better ensure that I don't let my cynicism extend to the descriptions of God!
How can we speak about the greatness of God without sounding like we work for an advertising agency?
Five Star Reviews!
When you are investigating a product, do you read the reviews, or do you just read the average stars? To me, "10,000 5-star reviews!" gets my attention, and then I read reviews in detail.
In this week's Psalm, the psalmist declares that "the Lord is great and is highly praised". It's similar to saying that God has a lot of 5-star reviews (work with me here). But how many 5-star reviews does a product need to get noticed by the algorithm and pushed above competing products?
That's more like what the psalmist is getting at: there are a lot of false gods out there; what it will take for people to realize the One True God is God's people consistently and frequently telling others about His greatness.
Your Favorite Church Song
As a church music leader, I am hesitant about this topic -- it can go off the rails real quick. If you use it, make it clear that you are only allowing positive language this morning. No one is allowed to complain about music someone else enjoys. It would certainly be the wrong morning to complain about whatever new music you don't like. "Sing a new song to the Lord" is literally how the Psalm begins! (We'll talk about what that means as we go.)
I'm thinking in terms of a "Top 5" list. I'm not sure I could even whittle it down that much; it would depend a great deal on my mood.
If your group has talked about this recently (or regularly), you might add this wrinkle: what would be the difference between your personal favorite worship songs and the songs you like most to sing congregationally? Those are two different lists for me; there are songs that really inspire me when a certain person sings it that I have zero interest in wanting to sing myself. Try to figure out what the difference is. I've mentioned that some of the Psalms were clearly intended to be sung by the congregation; some were clearly intended for personal/private devotion and prayer use. I wonder if your lists divide similarly to how the Psalms were intended to be used?
This Week's Big Idea: The Global Center of Christianity
Back in 2011, Pew Research released this amazing map:
(Note that North and South America are combined; South America has significantly more Christians than North. Yes, Pew groups Catholics in Christianity.) They haven't done a similar map since. I found this cool map produced in 2019:
All of that leads to this report released last week (6/9/25) by Pew:
It made headlines for its finding that Islam is growing far faster than Christianity. If you want to know more about that and the reasons why, please read the article. I want to call attention to a different finding: out of the six major population zones, North America is ranked fifth in the number of Christians -- barely 10% of all Christians in the world live in North America.
Why am I bringing this up this week? (Truly, there are a couple of other psalms I could have picked for this, but I decided to choose the first one.) Because when I have studied this psalm in the past in other places, some church members have taken the approach, "This psalm means that it is America's job to teach the rest of the world how to worship." So, that's not what the psalm means.
Here's it in a nutshell -- the psalmist calls on God's people, wherever they are, to bring the peoples around them into a relationship with the One True God. Those peoples will then create their own "new song" to the Lord (again, more about this below). (It would be arrogant and foolhardy to think that everybody else in the world should like your 5 favorite church songs, let alone Western hymnody or American pop music period!)
[And according to the numbers, we have a lot of work to do here in North America!]
When we start thinking about "worship around the world", I just want all of us to appreciate that Americans make up a small percentage of global Christianity. (We have a large percentage of the money, which is why our mission efforts retain outsized importance.) If we attended a "Global Christianity Worship Service", I'm not sure how much of it would be in English, and I wouldn't expect my favorite hymn to be sung. But I know it would be a beautiful fulfillment of Psalm 96 in every language and style.
About Psalm 96
There's a whole lot of similarity between Psalms 47, 93, and 95-99 (and 96 is the only psalm of that group we are studying officially). Read those, and you'll see. You will often find these psalms called "enthronement psalms"; the problem is that term is based on a theory that Jews held an annual ceremony in which they enthroned God as king (post-exilic), which there is zero evidence for, and did God need to be enthroned? I like the title: "Yahweh Is King psalms".
Psalm 96-99 clearly form a group. I found this table in the Word Biblical Commentary on Psalms (51-100) by Marvin Tate:
Psalm 96 | Psalm 97 | Psalm 98 | Psalm 99 |
a new song | Yahweh reigns | a new song | Yahweh reigns |
praise Yahweh | thanksgiving to Yahweh | praise Yahweh | exaltation of Yahweh |
Yahweh comes to judge the world | Zion | Yahweh comes to judge the world | Zion |
holy name | holy hill |
Tate points out that Psalms 96 and 97 share a large number of words in common, including rare ones, so he thinks it is obvious that these psalms were intended to be treated as a group.
Psalm 96 comes from David's song of praise in 1 Chronicles 16 (particularly vv. 23-33). The context is that King Saul had taken his own life, and David had become the undisputed king of the Israelites. He then conquered Jerusalem and made it his capital. There, he built a palace for himself and a tent for the Ark of the Covenant (remember, God decreed that Solomon would build the temple, not David). After everything was ready, David led a huge procession to bring the ark into Jerusalem, and there he appointed a group of Levites to sing this particular song of praise. And according to the end of the chapter, they regularly sang such songs of praise as part of their worship services before the ark.
In other words, we know that Psalm 96 was written as part of corporate Jewish worship.
Is it weird that just the Levites sang? Well, no. It's not like they had any hymnals! The Levites had to memorize the song just like they would have to memorize most of the Old Testament (whatever they had at the time). The people would have picked up on these psalms over time, and when the different collections of Psalms were released, it would have been a lot easier for the people to learn them.
Part 1: A Global Call to Worship (Psalm 96:1-6)
1 Sing a new song to the Lord; let the whole earth sing to the Lord. 2 Sing to the Lord, bless his name; proclaim his salvation from day to day. 3 Declare his glory among the nations, his wondrous works among all peoples.
4 For the Lord is great and is highly praised; he is feared above all gods. 5 For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens. 6 Splendor and majesty are before him; strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.
As with all psalms, note the parallelism and don't overdo the dictionary work. In other words, don't try to make arguments that we're supposed to "sing" this but "proclaim" that and "declare" the other. It's poetry, y'all. It's the poetic way of saying, "This is the stuff that's supposed to come out of your mouths."
I'm going to treat "new song" in its own section below.
Here are some questions:
Why should the whole earth worship Yahweh?
How should the whole earth worship Yahweh?
What should be the content of that worship?
If y'all can come away from this lesson with confidence in those answers, this will have been an effective morning.
Let me make an observation as a music leader: This psalm is one of the reasons why I am so insistent on congregational singing. This psalm is also how I explain the proper use of different kinds of songs. Example from recent services:
"Holy, Holy, Holy" is a song about God to God. It's the easiest type of song to explain its use in a worship service.
"There Is Power in the Blood" is a song to lost people. BUT -- it is a song about God's salvation, which fits under "proclaim His salvation".
"Christ the True and Better" is a song about Jesus but sung instructionally to one another. That fits under "declare His glory".
All of those types of songs can have a place in a church worship service:
Singing to God.
Singing about God.
Singing about what God has done in our lives.
The challenge is not to repeatedly overemphasize any of those (which can be hard depending on the sermon series) -- if you do, you can actually make God more distant, or (and this is more common) you can make your worship about yourself.
But please note that this isn't just "worship service content" -- we can't "declare His glory among the nations" inside the four walls of a sanctuary building. (Yes, the internet has changed things, but remember King David's audience -- the people had to physically travel to accomplish this psalm.)
There is one true God, and anyone who worships something else is worshiping a false god.
When You've Been Really Excited about Something
If you didn't use the advertisement topic above, you could do something with it here. When you have found a product that you really like, do you tell other people about it? (Like, for example, the ShowerShroom. Everyone should own a ShowerShroom.) I've been around a few products that have gone viral in my peer group. What peer-pressure purchased have you made in your lifetime?
Well, eventually the excitement wears off, and you stop pushing the product. Sometimes, that's because the product wasn't really that great. But sometimes it's still great, but you're just not excited about it anymore.
Translate that illustration to this psalm. God is great. God is the greatest. God will always be the greatest. But we don't always maintain our excitement, and we certainly don't always share that excitement with others.
How do we rekindle that excitement? Well, what makes you excited about a product? It's when it does something that impresses you, right? Well, God does miraculously impressive things all the time. So really, we just need to pay attention when He has done a wondrous work in our own lives. That's something that makes it easy for us to share with another.
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Verse 4 can be translated in two ways:
For the Lord is great and is highly praised (CSB)
For great is the Lord and most worthy of praise (NIV)
They're similar but different. The first is like saying "the Lord has many 5-star reviews" and the second is like saying "the Lord is a 5-star product" (again, work with me; every illustration starts to sound silly after a while). They're both true; I think the NIV is more likely what the original Hebrew intended.
Verse 6 is interesting. The Lifeway material suggests that "splendor" and "majesty" and "strength" and "beauty" are simply descriptions of God. Sure, but that's downplaying the poetic language. Rather, we might think of the psalmist as personifying those traits. Whereas false gods are dumb idols in temples made by human hands, the True God made the heavens. In His throne room, God isn't attended by something so droll as lesser gods but by beauty and splendor itself!
And yes, what it means is that God is majestic and splendorous, and His sanctuary is strong and beautiful. Again, don't lose sleep over the dictionary definitions of the words. This is the poetic way of saying, "Whatever wonderful words you can think of, they don't begin to describe God and God's throne room."
Remember that the temple doesn't exist yet, so David is talking about the "heavenly sanctuary".
Aside: "A New Song"
This phrase has been used to defend so many different things, particularly writing new music for worship. Let's do a quick survey of how scholars have understood this phrase.
A New Work of God. Some scholars point to the "new song" in Isaiah 42:10 ("sing to the Lord a new song"). Well, in Isaiah 42-48, the "new song" is in response to the "new acts" of God. God is doing something new -- which (sadly for the Jews) means the destruction of Israel and the preservation of remnant from which God's salvation will come.
In other words, simply put, when God does a "new thing" in your life, there should be a "new song" about it.
An Ever-New Song. Some scholars take the "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" approach (Lam 3) in which God's people need to continuously and passionately celebrate the continued works of God -- i.e., faithfulness, forgiveness, hope, etc. So, it's not necessarily a new song, but an old song in a new/fresh energy/setting.
A New Worship Service. Some of the more critical scholars say that this term was cultic -- that people would sing a "new song" when there was a military victory celebration, or when there was a new festival. This might be like commissioning a song for a special occasion.
Any of those sounds reasonable. Our best answer will come from the context of the psalm. So, what is the psalm about? It is a global call to worship, a call for God's people to declare God's glory around the world, and for those people to worship God. (Missions exist where worship does not.)
To me, what I think that means is that when God breaks through to a new generation or a new people group, they should sing that act of God back to Him in a new context. If we are only singing "our grandparents' church songs" then we are suggesting that God hasn't done anything new in our lives worthy of a new song.
That should only make sense. Let me take one of my favorite songs, "Victory in Jesus," as an example. I've heard some Christians suggest that we don't need any other music; we have "Victory in Jesus"! Uh huh. So, "Victory in Jesus" was written in 1939. Psalm 96 was written somewhere around 1000 B.C. "Victory is Jesus" is more than "97% new" from David's perspective. Indeed, every song we could sing in our American church service is extremely "new" from David's perspective.
However, this is not a willy-nilly newness. This is not "new for the sake of new" (which I feel like is a lot of the Christian music being written today, and for that I blame The Algorithm). We might be experiencing God's activity in a new way in our own lives, but God has been doing His mighty works for a long, long time. His works today are certainly not less than His works in the past. In other words, music from the past should be establishing a floor for new music, not a ceiling. And I feel like it's the opposite in too many ways right now.
Part 2: God Is Worthy of Worship (Psalm 96:7-9)
7 Ascribe to the Lord, you families of the peoples, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. 8 Ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name; bring an offering and enter his courts. 9 Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness; let the whole earth tremble before him.
If the first section was a call for God's people to praise the Lord, this section takes the slightly different tack of calling not just God's people but all people to acknowledge that God is worthy of that praise. ("Ascribe" means to "attribute".)
"You families of the peoples" is the same word in Genesis 12:3 about the extent of Abraham's blessing. People groups, literal families, political nations, whatever -- the point is that all people everywhere for all time should acknowledge God's glory and strength.
"Glory" points us to last week's Psalm 19 -- "The heavens declare the glory of God." You can't talk about the word "glory" too often.
I'll again copy James Hamilton's words from his article in the NIV Study Bible:
What is the glory of God? The answer is as infinite as God's glory itself, so the question can never be answered exhaustively. Some key aspects of God's glory, however, can be summarized as follows: the glory of God is the weight of the majestic goodness of who God is and the resulting name, or reptation, that he gains from revealing himself as Creator, Sustainer, Judge, and Redeemer, perfect in justice and mercy, loving-kindness and truth. God's glory elicits praise.
That's just a great paragraph.
The glory is already His. We're just called upon to acknowledge it.
Again, the temple hadn't been built yet when this psalm was first sung. The ark (which was considered the physical location of God's presence among His people) was in a tent. The original words in 1 Chron 16:29 don't mention courts at all. So, this could have been a later editor's addition (long after the temple had been built), or it could simply be a reference to the space in front of the tent of the ark where the people could gather.
After the temple had been built, the people had more defined courtyards they could enter.
And when those people came, they were to bring an offering. Do you remember the kinds of offerings we talked about when studying Leviticus? What did the people "bring" as an offering in David's day?
And an important question for us: what does "offering" mean for Christians today?
Aside on Jesus. The author of Hebrews makes it clear that Jesus made the ultimate offering. "He doesn’t need to offer sacrifices every day, as high priests do—first for their own sins, then for those of the people. He did this once for all time when he offered himself." (Heb 7:27) A great exercise would be to look up every use of the word "offer/offering" in the book of Hebrews. It's enlightening. And it ends with this call: "Therefore, through him let us continually offer up to God a sacrifice of praise, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name." (Heb 13:15) Does that help you connect Psalm 96 with your own life?
Aside: "The Beauty of Holiness"
The Hebrew phrase in verse 9 has been translated many ways. The word "His" isn't in the Hebrew, so that's where we get the KJV "the beauty of holiness". It's a pretty phrase, but what does it mean? Some options:
Worship the Lord ...
By the beautiful deeds of the worshiper
In the midst of the splendor of God's holiness (both CSB and NIV)
In God's holy sanctuary (i.e. a beautiful building)
In holy attire (i.e. the right clothes)
In "the holy place" (generically speaking)
Most modern translations follow the NIV/CSB here -- we are to worship the Lord "surrounded by His glorious holiness". They are absolutely right in rejecting the translations that make worship about "the right actions of the worshiper", "the right attire of the worshiper", or "the right location of the worshiper". Worship is not about the worshiper at all.
Except -- in that right worship can only be offered by a person in right relationship with God, and that can only be accomplished through salvation in Jesus Christ. So perhaps this is a reference to Christian's holiness in Christ. The problem with that interpretation is the context. David wrote these words a thousand years before Jesus to a people who believed that their relationship with God was based on their descent from Abraham and their keeping of the law of Moses. So, this is either about the holiness of ritual purity, or this is about God's holiness. And considering the focus on God throughout this psalm, I think the NIV/CSB is right to add the word "His" here. "Worship the Lord, being in awe in His presence."
Part 3: Judgment Is Coming (Psalm 96:10-13)
10 Say among the nations, “The Lord reigns. The world is firmly established; it cannot be shaken. He judges the peoples fairly.” 11 Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice; let the sea and all that fills it resound. 12 Let the fields and everything in them celebrate. Then all the trees of the forest will shout for joy 13 before the Lord, for he is coming—for he is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with his faithfulness.
This might seem like a strange way to end a psalm of praise: "Praise God because He is coming to judge!"
Well, let's shift gears to the book of Revelation and the ultimate new song:
9 And they sang a new song: You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slaughtered, and you purchased people for God by your blood from every tribe and language and people and nation. (Rev 5)
Their "new song" in heaven was about the saving act of Jesus Christ that extends to all the families of the nations. But what is that scroll this new song is about? Opening it launches the seven seal judgments of Revelation, and then that prompts the seven trumpet judgments. In other words, the "new song" of Revelation connects directly to the final judgment of humanity at the end of human history.
Why?
Think of it this way -- the great song of Revelation comes back to a version of, "Hallelujah! For the Lord God Almighty reigns!" Can God's reign include allowing continued rebellion? (Remember what we read last week in Psalm 19.) Of course not.
When God comes to judge the earth, He will make right all wrongs, and He will bring an end to all wrongdoing. That was the hope of God's people in David's day, and it is the hope of God's people today.
God gave His law because He wanted His people to obey it, and He wanted them to teach the world to obey it. And He would then judge the world on their faithfulness to His law. (Yes, on this side of Jesus, we know a lot more about what that means.)
In this, God's coming judgment is both
a cause for worship in fear of the mighty Judge, and
a cause for worship in praise of the faithfulness of the Creator God.
In this, the psalmist extends his words to creation itself -- every part of creation longs for God to fulfill His promised judgment (Paul captures this in Romans 8, particularly "that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage to decay into the glorious freedom of God’s children").
It's a beautiful image. We are invited to join the worship that creation itself takes up for the glorious Creator and righteous Judge. Let us invite others to do the same.
This all makes me think about a warning Jesus gave in Luke 18 --
Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?