Psalm 33

Updated
2001-05-26; 14:33:27utc

Two reasons are given in this beautiful psalm why a man should praise God: In the verses 4-9, because of His Word, and in the verses 10-19, because of His counsel. Both words have a deep and broad significance. The first three verses exhort us to praise. The righteous are admonished to sing joyfully, and to shout for joy, and to accompany this hymn under the accompaniment of various musical instruments, such as the harp and the ten-stringed lyre. The mention of the ten-stringed lyre suggests that the ancient Jews had a ten-tone system, as some primitive tribes do, from which the fa and ti are absent. The emphasis given is that the music should sound beautiful and that it be played skillfully. This pre-supposes preparation and rehearsal. It is naïve to suppose that, in spiritual things, only spontaneity is desired. It takes a lot of rehearsal and great skill to produce something that is worth listening to; yet, the final product has to sound as if it is produced spontaneously.

The joy and praise in these verses is very inspiring. The poem differs from other pieces of art in that it has to be "in the Lord." Most pieces of art are the product of a human genius. In this respect the hymn of praise differs from other art forms. Not very many artists have put their talents on God's altar. There are two prerequisites to produce a hymn of praise: one has to be righteous, that is the artist has to be clothed with God's righteousness, and one has to sing "in the Lord." The meaning of this admonition is, probably, best explained by the Apostle Paul, when he writes to the Corinthian church: "Therefore, as it is written: 'Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.' "^¹ Most translations render the NIV's, "Sing joyfully" with "Rejoice." TLB expresses best the emotions of the Hebrew with its paraphrase: "Let all the joys of the godly well up in praise to the Lord." Praise belongs to the godly; joy and righteousness go hand in hand. Just as faith and good works cannot be separated, so do righteousness and praise go together.

The "new song" is spoken of several times in the Bible. It is mentioned for the first time in this psalm. We find it again in different places in the Book of Psalms .² The "new song" is a prophecy of our redemption and the new creation in Jesus Christ. As such it occurs in the book of Revelation: "And they [the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders] sang a new song: 'You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.' "³ In vs. 3 of this psalm the "new song" is sung in connection with the first creation, since in the first part of the psalm the poet deals with the creation of heaven and earth by the Word of God. At the same time the Holy Spirit sees over the horizon of creation to the rehabilitation of man in Christ. Paul does the same when he says: "For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' made his light shine in our hearts …"⁴ The psalmist, (we read nowhere that this psalm was written by David), does not speak about two different subjects, old and new creation, but about one only. What God does in the realm of matter is the same as what He does in the spiritual domain. Just as we cannot separate Michelangelo's Piëta from the marble from which it is cut, so we cannot detach the creation of heaven and earth from salvation in Jesus Christ. After all, it is the upright who reach for their harps and ten-stringed lyres to sing praises to the Creator.

The reason that we should sing and shout for joy is, in the first place, the Word of God. This Word is mentioned twice in this psalm, in vs. 4 and 6. We find the terms "he spoke," and "he commanded" twice in vs. 9, which is synonymous with "the plan of the LORD," or, as the KJV puts it "the counsel of the LORD," in vs. 11. John discloses the secret meaning of all those expressions by identifying the Word of God with Jesus Christ. "The Word became flesh."⁵ So in this psalm also we are not introduced merely to words that were spoken in a human tongue, but to a Person. God tells us literally who He is; His speaking is the purest expression of His being, and it becomes flesh and blood in a the person of the man Jesus. The psalmist himself cannot have known this. Even we, who know the facts, understand little of it.

The psalmist says four things about this Word, which he expresses beautifully; the Word is characterized as "right and true," "righteousness and justice." These two pairs are description of the same truth. He also uses the word "goodness," which is the translation of the covenant word chesed. Truth is expressed in the spoken Word. God is faithful in everything He does. Righteousness is the principle that rules God's behavior, and justice is the demonstration of that principle in practice. The fact that God loves those principles means, in the first place, that He never deviates from them, and also that He seeks those, and encourages them in others. God's goodness, this deep inner quality of God, is visible in creation as a whole. "The earth is full of his unfailing love."

These two verses contain enough material for four volumes; they deal with four attributes of God, which are evinced in their relationship to creation. God is, in the first place, the God of truth, that is, the God of reality. The opposite of truth is a lie, and the antonym of reality is fiction. The devil has tried to place God, in the minds of some people, in the realm of the subjective, that is, ultimately in the sphere of fiction. He even manipulates the meaning of words in order to achieve this goal. Lies and illusion are his vocabulary. Truth and reality belong to Christ. Only God is real.

Then we see that God's word is the truth, by the fact that God uses it to create. We will never be able to describe exhaustively the deep meaning of God's speaking. Our own ability to express our feeling, and thoughts in words is a vague shadow of God's revelation of His secrets. God's Word is the truth. He says exactly who He is; His Word proves to us that He is the truth.

According to the psalmist, God's faithfulness is demonstrated in His works. What is meant is probably God's sustaining of His creation. The writer to the Hebrews says that Christ is "sustaining all things by his powerful word."⁶ The Word of God, therefore, is not only the source of the existence of all that is created, but also the power by which all things function. The Deists were wrong in believing that God had created all things, and that nature was like a clock that ran by itself without any outside interference. It is God's presence that sustains His creation. That is the content of God's faithfulness. The sun rises and sets at certain fixed times. Everything moves according to a predetermined velocity. There is always enough oxygen for man and beast, and the earth produces its fruit. This is evidence of the faithfulness of God. This is in sharp contrast with the "déjà vu" attitude of the writer of Ecclesiastes, with his: " 'Meaningless! Meaningless!' says the Teacher. 'Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.' What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. … All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."⁷ There is nothing meaningless and wearisome in the Word of God that sustains His creation. Even people who give no thought to God in their lives build upon this faithfulness of God. If, for example, a man promises to meet someone on Monday, at 7 o'clock under the clock of the bank building, he may not realize that, without the faithfulness of God there would be no Monday, nor the hour of seven, or even the clock.

"The LORD loves righteousness and justice." This means, first of all, that God Himself is, in His own being, the standard of all ethics. There is no injustice in God. When He acts as a person in relationship to other persons, He acts rightly. Ethics govern only inter-personal relations. An animal has no moral consciousness. The psalmist not only says that God possesses ethical awareness, and that He does not violate His own moral standards, but that He loves righteousness and justice. The principles of righteousness and the practical application of those principles in justice are for God a positive source of joy. Sometimes we live under the illusion that we are more righteous than God. There is a trace of reproach and even distrust in Abraham's intercession for Sodom, when he says to God: "Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?"⁸ If man has a sense of righteousness and justice, this is derived from the image of God within him. Injustice is a deviation from God's image. As we saw above, God's love for righteousness and justice means that He appreciates those features in human behavior.

"The earth is full of his unfailing love." Or, as the ASV renders it: "The earth is full of the lovingkindness of Jehovah." Cynics react to this by saying: "Is that so?" When we look at cruelty and injustice, even in the realm of nature, it seems difficult to discover the unfailing love of God on earth. Many people feel that this statement is open for debate. But if we put a question mark behind the psalmist's statement, we hold God responsible for the evil that exists on earth. The Bible clearly connects the presence of death, and all that is connected with it, with the fall of man. This puts the responsibility on the shoulders of man, not only for the cruelty man demonstrates to his fellowmen, but for the corruption of creation in general. Yet, we acknowledge at the same time that life is good and nature is breathtakingly beautiful. We love people and animals, and we cling to life. Only the emotionally sick consider suicide. Yet, in our blindness, we fail to see that the world is full of God's lovingkindness. We drink in beauty without realizing what we do, and without being fully satisfied by it. Only if we know the Creator will we be able to see His lovingkindness around us. Isaiah hears the Seraph sing: "The whole earth is full of his glory."⁹ Without the presence of our Lord, how gray and arid our world would be. The problem is not in our surrounding, but in our eyes. The Flemish poet Guido Gezelle wrote: "O wild and authentic the beauty of flowers alongside the canal."¹⁰ Why doesn't everyone look at flowers that that? The earth is full of the lovingkindness of YHWH.

After this soft and sweet music, we hear the peals of thunder. The verses 6-9 express the awesomeness of God's speaking. We fine ourselves before the throne and the presence of Him from whom earth and sky flee.¹¹ Infinite space with its millions of stars and planets, some of which are at a distance of millions of light-years away from us, came into being by the Word of God. I do not know if there really was a "big bang" or not. But at the beginning of all that exists stands the Word of God. John says this stammering and inimitably in the prologue of his Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made."¹²

We understand that the phrase "the breath of his mouth" presents anthropomorphist images, but this does not make God's speaking less impressive. On the one hand, we can understand quite well what speaking is, since we do it ourselves daily; on the other hand it is impossible for us to understand what God's creative speaking means. Our speaking is, most of the time, superficial and without content. Even if our words translate faithfully what lives within us, they are not very effective. And even if our speaking achieves anything, it is never a creation in the real sense of the word. God created "ex nihilo."¹³ Composing music may be a vague image of what creating is. Because our speaking is akin to God's speaking, and because we understand in some sense what it means, it surpasses our comprehension and fills us with awe.

The phrase: "For the word of the LORD is right and true," (vs. 4) is parallel to "For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm" (vs. 9). The creative power of the Word of God is proof of its truth. When we realize this, we will fall down before our Creator and worship. Those who deny creation's story lose themselves in stupidity.

The second part of this psalm, beginning with vs. 10, depicts the condition in which man arrives when he severs his bond with the Word of God. The psalmist uses the words "plans" and "Word" as parallels. The Word of God not only creates, it also foils the plans of the nations; and it thwarts the purposes of the peoples. The fall of man is not mentioned specifically in this psalm, but it is understood in the space between the verses 9 and 10. A world of righteous and upright people is not a reality; the majority of men have turned their backs on God. The verses 10-17 deal with this rebellion. Vs. 10, especially, evokes images of the Second Psalm. Man lives under the illusion that he would be a match for God in a confrontation. There are two incidents in world history that are prominent above all the others, as examples of God's foiling the plans of the nations and thwarting the purposes of the peoples: the flood in Noah's days, and the confusion at the tower of Babel. Men who rise up against God are doomed to fail. This is the issue that determines the course of history. World history rushes toward Armageddon, where the Antichrist will be crushed by the overwhelming power of the Lamb of God. Man's counsel is temporal; God's counsel is eternal. The Word of God will never become outdated. It stands firm from generation to generation. The Gospel is eternal. The whole book of Revelation is a commentary on the theme that man's conspiracies cannot hold up against God's eternal counsel. Those who make plans for world hegemony will be put to shame. The plans men make outside God will be crushed against God's plans. This is the reason the Apostle Paul can say: "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."¹⁴