Deeper Commentary
Psa 66:1
For the Chief Musician. A
song. A Psalm-
I assume from Ps. 72:20 that this is still one of the Psalms of David. It
is a Psalm of praise to God for all He has done in saving David from some
specific situation (:10-12), but it has clearly been reused by a later
inspired hand, given the reference to the temple (:13).
Make a joyful shout to God, all the earth!-
The invitation is to the entire eretz
to convert to Israel's God. This Psalm imagines that David's
invitation to them to praise God will be positively responded to (:4).
The "shout" as in Ps. 47:1 could imply that all the earth is now
accepting Yahweh as their king; to shout and sing was typical of a
coronation. The idea is that the Gentiles will accept Israel's God as
their king. The Psalm can be read as a vision of how people in the Kingdom
of God will feel. They will realize their prayers finally were answered,
they will see like Paul in Romans 7 that they did not cherish sin but
hated it, they will see all God's works were "awesome" rather than
struggling with God's actions. And outside the space-time continuum, they
will be able to go back to events like the Red Sea deliverance and thank
God for them and rejoice with Israel there. They will be able to declare
the good which God had done for their soul. They will realize that being
in "prison", literally or figuratively,
being treated like a door mat with men walking over them, going through
fire and water- was all part of the refining fire which brought them into
the "place of abundance" (:12) of God's eternal Kingdom. So the Psalm can
be read about our final understanding of all things, our making sense of
our lives, which is necessary to make eternal life wonderful.
Psa 66:2
Sing to the glory of His name! Offer glory and praise!-
By singing along with the words of David's
Psalms, the Gentile nations within the eretz (:1) would be
praising His Name. David perceived that the offering God really wanted was
not so much animals slain upon the altar in Zion, as the sacrifice of
praise. David had learned this from his own experience of sinning
concerning Uriah and Bathsheba. Unable to offer any sacrifice to atone for
what he had done, he concluded that the sacrifice required was a humble
heart.
Psa 66:3 Tell God, How awesome are Your deeds! Through the greatness of
Your power, Your enemies submit themselves to You-
Here David is as it were teaching the
Gentiles how to pray to God in praise, putting words in their mouths. The
submission of God's former enemies was therefore not forced upon them by
God, but was rather a voluntary submission in awe at His power and works,
especially His fearsome deeds of judgment upon sinners (s.w. Ps. 64:9).
The submission however is not of the kind usually imposed upon the
conquered- these who are laying down ['submititng'] to Yahweh are pictured
as worshipping Him and singing to His Name from the heart (:4),
identifying with Israel to the point that they can rejoice at the
historical acts of Yahweh for Israel as having been done for them.
Psa 66:4
All the earth will worship
You, and will sing to You; they will sing to Your name. Selah-
This Psalm imagines that David's invitation to the Gentiles within the
eretz to praise God will be positively responded to (:1). They would
appreciate God's Name, His essential character and purpose.
Psa 66:5
Come and see God’s deeds- awesome work on behalf of the children
of men-
David invites us to come and see the works God did at the Red Sea,
commenting: “there we rejoiced in Him” (Ps. 66:6). He praises
God for saving him in the language of Israel’s Red Sea deliverance,
speaking of it as “the day of my trouble” (Ps. 86:7,8 = Ex. 15:11).
He saw how their circumstances and his were in principle the same; he
personalized the Scripture he had read, inviting us to play "Bible
television" with the text. We are to go and see the Red Sea all over again.
Psa 66:6
He turned the sea into dry land, they went through the river on
foot. There we rejoiced in Him-
The Psalms so often encourage Israelites to feel as if they personally had
been through the Red Sea experience. Generation would tell to generation
the Passover story, and would also sing of God’s greatness as Israel did
in Ex. 15 (Ps. 145:5-7). Hence: “He turned the sea into dry land…there
let us (AV: did we) rejoice in him” (Ps. 66:6 RVmg.). We too are
enabled by Scripture to feel as if we were there, and to rejoice in what
God did for us there. This of course depends upon our sense of
solidarity with God’s people over time, as well as over space. The
message here has special appropriacy to the exiles, who were encouraged to
make a similar exodus to the promised land.
Psa 66:7
He rules by His might
forever-
The idea is that God has not only been
occasionally active by His might in history, such as at the Red Sea (:6).
His saving activity is constant and not occasional.
His eyes watch the nations-
Very relevant to the exiles. God's Angelic
"eyes" watch and guide the nations as part of His continual activity
towards the salvation of His people. The Hebrew conception of an "eye" was
that if it is watching you, then it is guiding and manipulating you (hence
the concept of the "evil eye"). The allusion is how to God looked
at the Egyptians at the Red Sea, made their chariot wheels get bogged down
in the mud, and made the sea return over them: "in the morning watch
Yahweh looked unto the host of the Egyptians through the pillar of fire
and of the cloud" (Ex. 14:24). Yahweh "looked" at the time of the morning
"watch". And He continues to do so today.
Don’t let the rebellious
rise up against Him. Selah-
"Rebellious" is indeed how Israel were in
the wilderness (s.w. Neh. 9:29; Ps. 68:6; 78:8). David is urging
Israel to learn from this and not be rebellious but accept God's guidance
of them towards the promised land; especially relevant to the exiles. But
sadly they remained rebellious (s.w. Is. 65:2).
Psa 66:8
Praise our God, you peoples!
Make the sound of His praise heard-
David invites the Gentiles to praise "our
God", Yahweh of Israel, and in turn to spread the knowledge of Him to
others.
Psa 66:9
who preserves our life among
the living, and doesn’t allow our feet to be moved-
God's preservation of Israel was by grace,
and was intended to be a witness to the nations amongst whom they had been
scattered. For the context is of witness to the Gentiles (:8). God had
allowed the feet of His people to be moved out of their land, but the
intention was that this was to be temporary, and their return would be a
witness to the Gentiles amongst whom they lived- leading them to join in
and also come to Zion in penitence and faith. And then He would not again
allow their feet to be moved from their land (s.w. Ps. 121:3). The
Jews were kept alive as a people amongst the nations. But the origin of
the Psalm is in David's feelings that he would now not "be moved" when in
fact he was moved and his feet "slipped" at the time of his sin with
Bathsheba, and he later accepts that only God's grace held him up.
Likewise God did allow the feet of His people "to be moved" for they were
taken away into exile by the Assyrians, Babylonians and Romans.
Psa 66:10
For You, God, have tested
us. You have refined us, as silver is refined-
These are the intended feelings of the
exiles upon restoration, perceiving their captivity as a time of refining
and "testing", just as the fathers were tested by Joseph / Jesus (s.w.
Gen. 42:15,16). But the exiles failed to be refined as intended (Is.
1:25), and it must be repeated (s.w. Zech. 13:9).
Psa 66:11
You brought us into prison,
You laid a burden on our backs-
The imagery of the exile as a prison from which the exiles could be
"brought out" is often used in later Isaiah. But most refused that
redemption, and preferred to remain in Babylon. The burden laid on their
backs is describing their exile in the language of the abuse in Egypt. But
their experience there was nowhere near as bad, and the book of Esther
reveals the Jews as wealthy and prosperous there.
Psa 66:12
You allowed men to ride over
our heads. We went through fire and through water, but You brought us to
the place of abundance-
This is indeed what happened when Israel
were brought out of Egypt, passing through the fire and water of the
pillars of cloud and fire leading them. But the exiles for the most part
declined this great salvation offered. Instead of men riding over their
heads they could have had God's cherubic chariot doing so (s.w. Ps.
68:4,33; Hab. 3:8). The imagery is very much that of the exile,
when the Babylonians said: "‘Bow down, that we may walk over you;’ and you
have laid your back as the ground, and as the street, to those who walk
over" (Is. 51:23). But this was "allowed" by God. Isaiah's prophecies of
the restoration spoke in terms of a second exodus, now from Babylon rather
than Egypt, and that explains the allusions here to being brought through
fire and water to a "place of abundance". But the reality was that this
Psalm was not felt nor believed by the exiles. For most declined that
exodus and remained in Babylon, and those who did return did so for their
own ends and without the experience implied here.
Psa 66:13
I will come into Your temple
with burnt offerings. I will pay my vows to You-
David desired to offer sacrifice in the
sanctuary because of some great deliverance received. This is therefore
reworked, under inspiration, with relevance to the time when the temple
was built. The restored exiles ought to have vowed to offer sacrifice
there in thanksgiving for their deliverance, but the record of the
restoration indicates that they did so at best only half heartedly.
Psa 66:14
which my lips promised and
my mouth spoke, when I was in distress-
David had apparently promised that if he
was preserved, he would go to the sanctuary and offer sacrifice, and he
was eager to do this. His time of "distress" or AV "trouble" therefore
looks ahead to the time of Jacob's trouble in the last days.
Psa 66:15
I will offer to You burnt
offerings of fat animals, with the offering of rams, I will offer bulls
with goats. Selah-
Whenever this Psalm was originally written, it was presumably before David
had come to the conclusion that God doesn't want animal sacrifice as much
as He desires the sacrifice of a broken heart (Ps. 51:17). Israel
unfortunately didn't learn that lesson; for the few exiles who did return
did so without contrite hearts, and offered merely tokenistic sacrifices.
Or perhaps, if this Psalm is written after the Bathsheba issues (as
suggested on :16), David is slipping back from his earlier understanding
that God didn't really want sacrifice.
Psa 66:16
Come and hear, all you who fear God; I will declare what He has
done for my soul-
David knew his sinfulness, he knew his reliance upon the grace of God,
more and more as he got older. One would have thought that after the
Bathsheba incident, David would have kept his mouth shut so far as telling
other people how to live was concerned. But instead, we find an increasing
emphasis in the Psalms (chronologically) upon David's desire to teach
others of God's ways- particularly the surrounding Gentile peoples, before
whom David had been disgraced over Bathsheba, not to mention from his two
faced allegiance to Achish (1 Sam. 27:8-12). There is real stress upon
this evangelistic fervour of David (Ps. 4:3; 18:49; 22:25,31; 35:18;
40:9,10; 57:9; 62:8; 66:5,16; 95:1,8; 96:5-8,10; 100:1-4; 105:1,2; 119:27;
145:5,6,12). Indeed, Ps.71:18 records the "old and greyheaded" David
pleading with God not to die until he had taught "Your strength unto this
generation". As with Paul years later, the only reason he wanted to stay
alive was in order to witness the Gospel of grace to others.
David therefore coped with his deep inner traumas by looking out of
himself to those around him, eagerly desiring to share with them the
pureness of God's grace. He didn't do this as some kind of self-help
psychiatry; it came naturally from a realization of his own sinfulness and
God's mercy, and the wonderful willingness of God to extend this
to men.
Psa 66:17
I cried to Him with my
mouth. He was extolled with my tongue-
The idea is that David prayed for
help and at the same time praised God for already answering him, such was
his faith. Hence GNB "I cried to him for help; I praised him with songs".
Psa 66:18
If I cherished sin in my heart, the Lord wouldn’t have listened- This appears self righteous. For apart from the Lord Jesus, there is no heart in which there has been no cherishing of sin. In the matter of Bathsheba, David is set up as the parade example of a man who lusted in his heart, and then performed the fantasized sin. And yet here he predicates God's answer to his prayer as being on the basis of his spotless heart. He fails to perceive that his deliverance or salvation was by grace. This raises the question as to whether this Psalm originated before or after the sin with Bathsheba. If after (see on :16), then again we wonder as to the extent of his repentance; he apparently failed to maintain the intensity of his grasp of grace and his own sinfulness. And we all have that same tendency.
Psa 66:19
But most certainly, God has listened. He has heard the voice of
my prayer-
As discussed on :18, David wrongly predicates God's listening
to his voice upon his apparently spotless heart (:18). We can note that he
speaks of the voice of his prayer, as if within verbalized prayer there is
an essence of our spirit which is the true voice of the prayer, and God
hears this. Therefore it is wrong to think that we cannot pray well or
effectively because we aren't good at verbalizing.
Psa 66:20
Blessed be God, who has not turned away my prayer, nor His grace
from me-
David had a theoretical understanding that the salvation given him
was by grace alone; and yet as noted on :18,19, he still maintained an
inappropriate self-righteousness. And our professed understanding of grace
can be similar.
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