Psalm 50

Psalms 50:1-3

The Hebrew title, which this page's text does not show, reads A Psalm of Asaph; Asaph carries twelve titles across the Psalter and this covenant lawsuit is the first of them. The mighty God, even the Lord, hath spoken, and called the earth from the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof, three names for the one God summoning the whole world as witness. Zion, the perfection of beauty, is where he shines, and his coming is no quiet visit: a fire devours before him and a tempest surrounds him, the language of Sinai turned now toward judgment on his own people.

Psalms 50:4-6

He shall call to the heavens from above, and to the earth, that he may judge his people casts sky and ground as the summoned witnesses of a covenant lawsuit, called in against Israel rather than against the nations. Gather my saints together unto me, those that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice, names the ones on trial precisely as covenant partners standing at the altar, not strangers to it. The heavens shall declare his righteousness, for God is judge himself closes the summons with Selah, a term that marks seventy one verses across the Psalter whose exact sense, a musical pause by the Septuagint's rendering, a lift of voice, a call to weigh what was just said, remains an honest unknown named by the commentators rather than settled.

Psalms 50:7-8

Hear, O my people, and I will speak: Hear, O my people, and I will speak shifts the psalm from summons to direct address, God himself testifying against Israel as a covenant partner rather than a stranger. I am God, even thy God insists the charge does not rest on any doubt about the relationship. I will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices makes plain the complaint is not that the offerings stopped; the burnt offerings were, as the verse itself says, continually before him, and the fault lies somewhere else.

Psalms 50:9-13

I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he goats out of thy folds sets aside any thought that God's altar works like the tables of the nations' gods, fed by their worshippers. Every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills, and the fowls of the mountains claims the whole animal creation as his own possession already, before any Israelite brings an offering. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee, for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof turns the pagan logic on its head: a hungry god who needed feeding would be no god at all, and this one already owns the cattle laid on his altar.

Psalms 50:14-15

Offer unto God thanksgiving, and pay thy vows unto the most High names the sacrifice God does ask for, not the animal but the grateful heart that brought the animal in the first place. Call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me turns the exchange around: the worshipper's part is to ask and to be helped, and the glory that follows is God's own answer rather than anything paid for in advance. Henry reads the pairing as the psalm's positive answer to the argument just made, thanksgiving and prayer standing in for the bullock and the goat, because ritual sacrifice was never the point of the covenant to begin with.

Psalms 50:16-21

But unto the wicked God saith turns the psalm to a second group, one that takes the covenant's own words into its mouth, my statutes and my covenant, while hating instruction and casting those words behind it. The list is concrete: consenting with a thief, keeping company with adulterers, giving the mouth to evil and the tongue to deceit, slandering even a brother and a mother's own son, sins mostly of speech set against a psalm that opened with God's own speech. These things hast thou done, and I kept silence carries the sharpest correction of the psalm: thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself mistakes God's patience for God's approval, and the verse promises that the record will be set in order before the offender's own eyes.

Psalms 50:22-23

Now consider this, ye that forget God, lest I tear you in pieces closes the address to the wicked with the same devouring imagery Asaph used of God's coming at the start of the psalm. Whoso offereth praise glorifieth me is the psalm's own summary of what the verses before it established, that thanksgiving rather than the animal itself is the offering God actually named. To him that ordereth his conversation aright will I shew the salvation of God closes the psalm on a promise rather than a threat, right living opening into the sight of God's own deliverance.