Psalm 95

Psalms 95:1-2

The psalm opens with a double summons to worship, O come, let us sing unto the Lord, let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation, singing and shouting held together rather than set against each other. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving names the posture, approach rather than distance, and with psalms ties the invitation to the very kind of song the psalm itself is. Spurgeon reads the rock of our salvation as the title carried over from the whole Psalter's use of rock for God, a fixed place to stand before the warning that follows.

Psalms 95:3-5

a great King above all gods: The reason for the summons is stated as fact: the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods, a claim that does not deny the existence of rival claimants so much as rank the Lord over every one of them. His rule over the deep places of the earth and the strength of the hills, the sea and the dry land, covers the whole creation top to bottom, the heights he did not climb and the depths he did not descend named as already his. Delitzsch notes the sea is his, and he made it stated as one clause, ownership resting on the fact of having made it rather than on conquest.

Psalms 95:6-7

let us worship and bow down: The psalm renews its summons in lower posture, O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our maker, kneeling answering the great King of the previous unit. The reason shifts from creation in general to covenant in particular, we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand, the same shepherd language that runs through the book. The verse does not stop there: to day if ye will hear his voice begins to turn the invitation toward a condition, which the next unit states outright.

Psalms 95:8-11

The command lands: harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness, naming Meribah and Massah, where the fathers tempted God at the water and tested his patience (Ex 17:1-7). Forty years long was I grieved with this generation states the outcome plainly, a whole generation that saw the works and still did not know his ways, and the oath follows, I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest, the wilderness generation barred from Canaan by their own unbelief. Hebrews 3:8, 3:15 and 4:7 quote this warning three times to a church still on the way, naming a rest that remains for those who do not harden their hearts, the New Testament's own use of the psalm rather than a reading added to it.