If you have nieces and nephews, children or grandchildren, or otherwise have children in your life, you have almost certainly heard a story about a child who was a climber. I was one, and now I have one in my home. My five-year-old son loves to climb. When we go hiking, he makes me nervous climbing on boulders. But he has a point; sometimes you just cannot beat the view from up top.
On top of Red Mountain here in Birmingham sits The Vulcan, the world’s largest cast iron statue. When I find myself in the neighborhood and with time between things, I like to read up there (it happens all too infrequently). From atop Red Mountain in Vulcan’s shadow, you can see all of downtown Birmingham. I am sure you have been to a place like this too. Heights are awe inspiring, be they skyscrapers or the Grand Canyon.
Psalm 47 describes God as “exalted,” which is an image of height. God is above. He is supreme. This psalm focuses on recognizing God’s exaltation, perhaps even recognizing his enthronement. We call that joyous recognition praise. In this first part of this series looking at Psalm 47, we will look at God’s exaltation and our response of praise; in the next part, we will look particularly at God’s relationship to his people, especially in Christ.
Praise From His people
Perhaps it is what we expect, but the repeated command of this psalm is to sing to God, making Psalm 47 an excellent choice as a call to worship. As verse 6 cries out, “Sing to God! Sing! Sing to our King! Sing!” The “us” in this psalm is the people of God, who are, as verse 4 puts it, “the pride of Jacob, whom he loves.” God’s people are called by the psalmist—and by extension God—to sing to God in praise.
This summons to sing is grounded in his exaltation. Repeatedly, the psalmist describes God as exalted and roots its praise in that exaltation of God. We see this in verse 2, where God is proclaimed King “over all the Earth” (emphasis added), or in verse 5, where he “ascended with a shout,” going up into his rest. Yet again in verses 7–9, “he is King over all the Earth” and “rules over the nations” (emphasis added). The psalm ends with the affirmation, “He is very exalted.” God’s rule and reign are over all, and for this his people praise him. As we will see, God’s universal rule is the grounds for the nations assembling to him (v. 9). So too is his exaltation the reason for the praises of his people.
If we understand Psalm 47 not only as a call to praise, but as a praise song in itself, we learn another lesson about praise. Proclaiming, singing, and repeating truth about God is an act of praising God. We praise God by recognizing exactly who he is—the ever-exalted God.
We also see that God’s rule over all is a comfort to his people. We will come back to this more in depth in part two, but God’s rule means that the nations are subdued under his people. One thing this shows us is that God’s universal rule is good for his people. God’s rule and reign is to the benefit of those who are his. To extend the monarchial metaphor, the high king’s rule is to the benefit of his subjects.
Praise From the Nations
The apostle Paul reasons in Acts 17 that God
made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.. . . He commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. (Acts 17:26, 30–31)
As he addresses the Areopagus in Athens, Paul could have been preaching Psalm 47. God is not only parochially God to his people; he is universally king over creation.
There is not another God. There is not another creator. The Greeks in Athens, the gentiles in Galatia, and the modern in his own country must reckon with this truth: God made you for himself. God will be praised and recognized, if not now, then in the last day when “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:10–11).
He made all people and he “rules over the nations.” While he rules in a special way among his people, even this rule will be extended beyond the realm of Israel. The psalmist envisions the rule extending as,
The princes of the peoples assemble,
The people of the God of Abraham;
Because the shields of the earth are God’s. (v. 9)
The “shields of the earth” belong to God, a metonymy indicating that the realms of the earth are his. Because the nations belong to him, they will assemble with or even “as” (in the ESV) the people of Abraham’s God. And this of course is true in the promised seed of Christ.
As we will look at more closely in part two, Christ fulfills this psalm. But as an initial gesture in that direction, consider Galatians 3:16. Paul writes to the Galatians that “the promises were told to Abraham and to his ‘seed’; and not to ‘seeds’ as to many, but as to one, ‘and to your seed,’ who is Christ.” Then, applying this insight to the gentiles, those of the nations in Galatia, Paul continues, “If y’all are of Christ, then y’all are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to the promise” (3:29; my translation—notice the plural “you” brought out explicitly here from the Greek). We see a glimpse of this in Psalm 47—even the nations are to praise and to assemble with Israel because God is King of all.
This fuels our vision of missions. As Christians, we have in Psalm 47 a picture of the kingdoms of this world assembling before our God to praise. We of course see this elsewhere in the Bible. This picture fuels the call to carry the gospel forward into the world. The apostle Paul wrote to the Romans, “I aspire to preach where Christ has not been named” (Rom 15:20). And we, like him, can aspire to spread the gospel wherever we are, and to the ends of the earth. We do this by supporting the ministry of gospel preaching both here and abroad, and by sharing our faith with those around us.
Sing Praise With a Maśkîl
This being the Heidelblog, I could not let an opportunity to extol psalm singing go unnoticed. In verse 7, the psalmist commands the singing of praises with a maśkîl. This Hebrew word should probably be translated as something like “insightful song.” The word is used outside the Psalms primarily in wisdom contexts like Job or Proverbs, although twice it is also used as a descriptor for David. More apt to this context though is that it is used in psalm headings (Ps 32; 42; 44; 45; 52–55; 74; 78; 88; 89; 142). We see a cluster of these psalms around Psalm 47—before and after it are plenty of psalms each called a maśkîl to sing.
The psalmist commands us here to sing a maśkîl. The rarity of psalm singing, even in Presbyterian and Reformed churches, is always surprising to me—especially in light of clear biblical commands such as this one. Even for those outside the Presbyterian and Reformed churches whose worship tends toward the “normative principle,” there is a biblical command here to sing psalms, and the command goes not just to Israel but to the nations.
There is a command here to sing a maśkîl, and about the only way I know how to do so is to sing one of the many wonderful psalms that bear the label. I know that I have sung almost all of them in church, and I have sung every one with my family. It is doable.
Conclusion
Who God is, especially in relation to us, fuels and provides us with words to use in praise. Not only for God’s people, but for those among the nations who are called to repent and worship God, either now or on the last day. Lastly, the command here reminds us of the great resource for our congregational singing that the Psalms are for us. Next time, we will look more in depth at the relationship of God to his people that this psalm draws from and how that points us to Christ.
©Luke Gossett. All Rights Reserved.
You can find the whole series here.
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Luke Gossett
Rev. Luke Gossett (MA Westminster Seminary California; MA and PhD Candidate, Catholic University of America) is the pastor of Ascension Presbyterian Church (a mission of the OPC Presbytery of the South) in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. His dissertation focuses on the linguistic functions of the Hebrew word for “now.” Luke has been married to his wife, Jennifer, since 2014, and they have three wonderful children.
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