Here is a glorious, enthusiastic celebration of all that God has done for his people. Perhaps the psalmist is thinking of the Exodus, or the return from exile, or victory in battle. Whatever it was, God had saved his people. Look through the psalm again to see some of the ways in which the writer describes God and his actions.

We have even more to celebrate. No doubt Paul, having met the crucified and risen Christ, could have used words like this to describe his experience. You could check out some of his own words in Romans 11:33–36 or Colossians 1:15–20. So, what better psalm to read on this first day of the week when we gather to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus – God’s supreme victory over all the powers of evil.

The praise here is exuberant and abandoned: shouting, singing, making music. The whole of creation joining in. We may express our feelings in different ways, depending on our mood, our personality or the nature of worship in our churches. The key thing is to focus on who God is, what he has done for us and to respond in ways that genuinely celebrate his character and our gratitude and that honour him. 

‘Let all the world in every corner sing, / “My God and King!”’¹

This psalm is very similar to Psalm 96, expressing the same joyous sense of the worthiness of Israel’s saving God to be worshipped by the nations and the whole of creation. It begins by recalling the Lord’s great salvation, which is not some private affair, but public, historical reality that has been shown to all nations. The deliverance of Israel and the gift of righteousness to it is an event of international significance and embodies the promise of redemption for all the peoples on earth. Such an event demands a ‘new song’ (v 1) because it transcends the limits of all previous compositions.

So great is this God and so wonderful his salvation that the whole earth is invited to join in the song, and a full panoply of instruments will be needed to celebrate his grace appropriately. One has the feeling that the corporate worship within the Jerusalem Temple must have been something really extraordinary. Even that ecstatic praise, however, is insufficient to do justice to the Lord and the ‘marvellous things’ he has done (v 1), so the whole of creation is summoned to contribute to the everlasting song: sea, world, rivers, mountains – all are called to ‘sing before the Lord’ their Creator (v 9). The entire natural world seems to be set in motion by the glory of God, resulting in the magnificent harmony of an ‘exultant chorus of the whole world singing praises to the glory of God’.²

Set this picture over against the ecological crisis of our times and a natural world which, instead of joining in celebration, appears to be in mourning as the extinction of species accelerates! This glorious psalm suggests that there is no mere technological fix to our global malaise: only as the human race learns to worship God will the chorus of the created world strike up again.

Find the wonderful poem of praise with which we began and make it your own today. 

¹ George Herbert, 1593–1633  ² Artur Weiser, The Psalms: A Commentary, Westminster Press, 1962, p639