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Psalms

Psalm 95

11 verses · BSBPsalms book hub →

Speaks with:Hebrews 4×3Hebrews 3×3Psalms 100×21 Corinthians 10×1Psalms 81×1Psalms 150×1

Summary

Chapter summary

The Venite: 'Oh come, let us sing unto Jehovah… let us kneel before Jehovah our Maker: for he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture.' The great King above all gods holds the deep places of the earth in his hand; the sea is his, and he made it. Then the warning that Hebrews 3–4 preaches at length: 'To-day, oh that ye would hear his voice! Harden not your heart, as at Meribah… Wherefore I sware in my wrath, that they should not enter into my rest.'

Context

Poetry · David, Asaph, Sons of Korah, others — Psalms overview

Threads

Each of these runs on past this chapter. The passage you have just read is marked.

Murmuring, from provision to judgment

Pattern

In Exodus every complaint in the wilderness is answered with bread, water or meat. In Numbers the same complaints bring fire, plague and forty years. Psalm 95 reads the whole story as a warning, and Hebrews quotes that psalm and applies it to its own readers.

The change between the two books is one of the most important things in the Torah, and neither book states it alone. The generation that was fed at Massah dies at Kadesh for the same voice raised again, and the New Testament says these things happened as examples. Harden not your hearts is Scripture's own sermon on this thread.

  1. Exodus 16:2-4

    Bread answers the murmuring

    The whole congregation murmurs for food, and God rains bread from heaven.

  2. Exodus 17:2-7

    Water at Massah and Meribah

    The people chide Moses for water and are given it; the place is named for the striving.

  3. Numbers 11:1

    The fire of the Lord

    In Numbers the same complaining is answered with burning, not bread.

  4. Numbers 14:22-23

    These ten times

    The sentence at Kadesh keeps its own count of the provocations.

  5. Psalms 95:8-11 you are here

    Harden not your hearts

    Psalm 95 reads Massah and Meribah as the standing warning.

  6. Hebrews 3:7-11

    Hebrews applies the psalm

    The New Testament quotes Psalm 95 and turns the wilderness story on its own readers.

The world behind this chapter

Psalms 95
When
Date unstated; a call to worship with a warning attached · Author unnamed; the wilderness events it recalls are dated c. 1446 BC
Where
The gates of the sanctuary, as a congregation comes in to worship
Who first heard it
Worshippers walking through a door, told about ancestors who refused to walk through one

The history

The opening is a call to worship, the kind sung as people came into the courts, and it names the actual postures: come before his presence with thanksgiving, worship and bow down, kneel before the LORD our maker. Bowing in that world meant going to the ground, face down, the posture used before a king. Nobody worshipped standing casually.

The creation lines run the whole vertical range of the land the singers knew. The deep places of the earth — and the Dead Sea basin is the lowest dry land on the planet — up to the strength of the hills, with the snow on Hermon at the top. The sea is his, and he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.

Then the psalm turns on two place names: the provocation and the testing, which in Hebrew are simply the words quarrel and test, the names given to the spot in the wilderness where Israel demanded water and asked whether God was among them at all. Moses struck a rock there and water came out, and the names stuck as a permanent reminder of the day the people put God on trial.

Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and they shall not enter into my rest. The rest is the land. The people who would not trust God at the water died outside the country he had promised them.

What it meant to them

A worship service that begins with singing and ends with a warning. The congregation is told at the door that their fathers also stood at a door and would not go through it.

The New Testament letter to the Hebrews quotes this psalm at length and stretches the word rest past the land itself. That is a later use worth knowing, but the first hearers had a nearer point: today, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your heart.

Sources cited

  • John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews & Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament
  • Charles H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David

Every work MannaFest builds on →

The text of this chapter

This page carries no textual note on Psalms 95. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →

Connections from this chapter

v. 7 · Quoted with a formula: 'it is written'

'as the Holy Ghost saith': present-tense legei, Spirit as speaker (Nicole's eternal-contemporaneity class).

Hebrews 3:7→

Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says: “Today, if you hear His voice,

This page draws on C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David, on Psalm 95; Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament; Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.

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