In many evangelical circles today, the word “worship” has become synonymous with “singing.” Song leaders are often referred to as “worship leaders,” and I have heard many people speak of the “worship” portion of a Sunday service as the singing portion, as in this kind of expression: “We had praise and worship for thirty minutes, and then we had a sermon.” I believe this understanding of worship is too narrow.
In Scripture, worship includes, but is much more than, singing. It is a dialogue of communion with God between himself and his people that begins with his initiative and our response. It is both giving and receiving, hearing the Word of God proclaimed and answering with praise, thanksgiving, and supplication. Here at Cornerstone we observe a regular pattern of corporate worship—a liturgy—that attempts to reflect this pattern of dialogue. It begins with God’s Word to us in our opening Scripture reading. Then we respond with prayer and then singing, which is one particular form of prayer. Then we have another Scripture reading, so that the dialogue may continue as we hear from God again. That middle Scripture reading is followed by prayer and more prayer in the form of song, then our giving to God through the offertory, our supplication before God in the pastoral prayer, and then we hear from God again through the third reading from the Scripture, along with an exposition of that Scripture reading through the sermon. The sermon is followed by yet another word from God, a visible word given to us in the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper, followed by our response in song again, and then it is closed with a final word of benediction from God. The rhythm of our liturgy reflects the giving-and-receiving, the dialogue of worship, as communion with God.
This short psalm likewise reflects the dialogue of worship. You notice that it is entitled “A Song of Ascents.” This title is attached to fifteen psalms, from 120 through 134, and so this one represents the final psalm in that collection. There is some debate about what these songs of ascents where used for, but the most convincing proposal is that they were sung by pilgrim worshipers who were “ascending” or “going up” to Jerusalem for the annual feast days. We can only speculate about the specific use of Psalm 134, but it would seem to fit quite well in a setting where the feast has come to an end, and the pilgrims who have traveled to Jerusalem to worship are now about to return home, but before they go they call upon the priests and Levites who will remain at the temple to continue praising the Lord in their absence. I believe we are on solid ground to say that verses 1-2 are addressed to priests and/or Levites, because they are identified in verse 1 as those “who stand by night in the house of the LORD,” indicating continual presence in the temple precincts. First Chronicles 9:33 seems to shed some light: “Now these, the singers, the heads of fathers’ houses of the Levites, were in the chambers of the temple free from other service, for they were on duty day and night.” Although I cannot say I have certainty, I do have confidence affirming that verses 1-2 are addressed to priests and/or Levites. Naturally, then, verse 3 follows as a blessing pronounced by the priests and/or Levites on the departing pilgrims as they go home. And so this, the final of the songs of ascents, provides a succinct expression of the dialogue of worship, as one party, representing the people, speaks in praise of God, and the other, representing God, speaks blessing upon the people.
As such, this psalm beckons us to enter into the dialogue and commune with God in worship. I will draw out two words of application to help us learn to perform well our part of the dialogue.
The first word of application is this:
In verses 1-2 the pilgrims address the Levites with the command to bless the Lord. The dominant verb for this psalm is the verb “bless,” which is used in all three verses. While we normally think of blessing as something that God does, in verses 1-2 it is something that human beings are commanded to do with respect to God. In this sense, to “bless” is to speak well of God in recognition of his majesty and greatness. It is another way of saying that we should praise God.
I see four things we can say about praise based on these two verses.
First, praise is commanded. The psalm opens with these words: “Come [literally, “Behold!”, as in Psalm 133:1], bless the LORD.” And verse 2 reads, “Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the LORD!” This is one of numerous commands to praise God throughout the Scripture, and especially in the Psalms. I think it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the oddity of a command like that and thereby probe deeper into its meaning. As human beings, we praise things all the time—grandchildren, nice cars, sports teams, celebrities, houses, etc.—but we seldom, if ever, command each other to praise something. Those of you who are grandparents, I know that you enjoy showing off pictures of your grandchildren. You praise your grandchildren out of the natural overflow of your heart. But when you are showing off pictures of your grandchildren, do you ever say to the other person, “Praise my grandchildren!” Probably not. Nor do we ever do such a thing with our cars or our favorite sports teams.
Why don’t we command the praise of other things? It is because we are not in a position to do so. There is no universal moral obligation placed upon humanity to praise your grandchildren or your car or your favorite sports team. Some people will, and some people won’t, but at the end of the day, that is not a moral issue. However, the greatest of all commandments, the most universally binding moral imperative, is the command of Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” We are commanded, above all, to love God, and because we love him, we are commanded to let our love for him spill over into praise. We are not commanded to love God and to praise him if our hearts are so inclined. God knows that are our hearts are not naturally inclined to love and praise him, and that’s why it is necessary to command us to praise him. The command reminds us of what we are required to do even if we don’t feel like doing it. It reminds us that, if we do not feel like loving and praising God, the problem is not in God, but it is in us.
Second, praise is continual. If my understanding of the setting in which this psalm was used is correct, then the pilgrims who are now setting off on their return journey home are calling upon the Levites and priests (who remain ever in the temple precincts) to carry on the continual task of worship as their representatives, so that God’s name may be blessed at all times. This command is, in other words, a summons to praise God continually. That may also be implied in the particular reference to the fact that these “servants of the LORD” (i.e., priests and Levites) stand “by night” in the house of the Lord, when everyone else has gone home.
Here I think of Revelation 4:8, which speaks of the four living creatures before the throne of God, day and night never ceasing to say, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!” You see, we never reach a moment when God has been praised enough. Throughout eternity, we will never come to a time when we say, “Well, I think we’ve exhausted the possibilities for praise here.” God’s infinite glory and staggering mercy will leave us with ample reason to praise him throughout endless ages. But what does that mean for you and me today? Does it mean that our conscious focus twenty-four hours a day must be on praise? Obviously, that would be impossible for us. It does mean, however, that our life should reflect a rhythm of regular, rather than sporadic, praise. Let it begin for you at the start of every day. C.S. Lewis once wrote that he had to renounce the attitude of self-focus each morning, “for it grows all over me like a new shell each night.” Make it your first business to delight in God each morning, and let the rhythm of praise be felt throughout your day as a result. And then, every Lord’s Day, let your primary focus be on praising God in the company of his people.
And that brings us to a third observation: praise is corporate. In this psalm, one group (the pilgrim worshipers) calls upon another group (the Levites) to bless the Lord. The command has both vertical and horizontal implications. Not only does the command itself represent a form of praise to God, but it also represents an exhortation to others. Have you ever heard someone say, “I don’t have to go to church to worship God. I can worship God out on the lake on Sunday morning”? Certainly, it is true that you can worship God on the lake. But what you cannot do on the lake is fulfill the biblical command that Paul gives in Ephesians 5:18-20 to “be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Yes, we can and must worship God privately, but your private devotion should be gravy on top of your regular participation with the saints in corporate worship.
I want to speak to two groups in particular on this point. First, for children: it is such a delight for us to have you in here worshiping with us. Many churches offer a special worship service just for children up through a certain age (even up to twelve years old), but here we prefer to have you in here with us from the time you are four or five years old, if not younger. Our conviction is that you should learn how to praise God by being a regular part of the Sunday morning worship. You may not always know what is going on in a worship service. You may not always understand what the preacher is talking about. You may not always know all the words to the songs. On top of that, you may not always feel like participating with us in worship, because you have your mind on something else. Let me encourage you to take advantage of the time that you are here. Learn how to worship God. Participate with us in singing and praying and listening to God’s Word preached, and learn how to do things well while you are young. These are the most important things that you will ever learn how to do.
The second group I want to address today is visitors. What a privilege it is to us that you have chosen to worship with us today! You could have stayed home, but you chose, in obedience to Christ, to come and be part of corporate worship on the Lord’s Day. If you have been visiting with us, perhaps off and on, for some time, but you have not yet pursued membership, let me now urge you to take another step of obedience to Christ and solidify your commitment to the body by joining us as a member. We live in a culture that prizes individual liberty over corporate responsibility. We are naturally inclined toward resisting commitments that might tie us down and limit our freedoms. After all, if you are not a member, you are free to come and go as you please, but if you are a member, this body will take responsibility for your perseverance in the faith. You will be expected to be a regular part of the corporate worship of this body if you become a member. And perhaps for some, that sounds like too much. It is certainly easier to leave yourself non-committed and therefore free to come and go as you please. But I believe the easier option in this case is the wrong option for a number of reasons, one of them being that our participation in the corporate worship of God with his church is something that should be a regular, and not a sporadic, part of our lives. Praise is not primarily individual, but corporate.
And then there is a fourth observation: praise is Christ-centered. Where in the world could I derive that idea from this text? Notice the command to the Levites and priests in verse 2: “Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the LORD!” The pilgrims exhort the Levites to worship God, not just anywhere, but at the temple, the place where God had made himself known. When Solomon had completed the temple and was dedicating it to the Lord, he offered a lengthy prayer that is recorded in 1 Kings 8. The heart of Solomon’s petition is represented in verse 30, where he prays to the Lord, “Listen to the plea of your servant and of your people Israel, when they pray toward this place. And listen in heaven your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive.” The sanctuary in Jerusalem was the place where God had chosen to rest his name, and thus it was the place where God was to be sought. That is why, when you read the accounts of the various kings of Judah in 1-2 Kings, that one of the recurring sins for many of them is that they did not remove the high places, which were alternative worship sites. The problem wasn’t always that the Israelites were worshiping false gods, but it was quite frequently that they were worshiping their God, Yahweh, in a manner that he had not authorized. They were seeking him in a place where he had not revealed himself. They were bypassing his dwelling place, the temple, and seeking to worship him in places where he had not made his presence known.
As we flip the pages from Old Testament to New, we discover that all along the temple was not intended to God’s full and final revelation of his presence to humanity. Instead, it was a type that anticipated a greater revelation of the presence of God in his Son, Jesus Christ. It was Jesus who told the Jews in John 2:19, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” by which he meant the temple of his body. If the priests and Levites are commanded to lift their hands to the holy place to worship God as he had made himself known, and not in any way they pleased, so are new covenant believers to worship God as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ.
In the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, Martin Luther laid out an approach to theology, the study of God, that he called a “theology of the cross,” which stood in opposition to the prevailing approach to theology of his day, which he termed a “theology of glory.” What Luther means by this contrast is that we do not understand God rightly if we start from human ideas and expectations about who God is. That is, we do not know God by starting from the premise of what we would imagine the greatest of all beings to be like, because all we will end up doing is creating the kind of God that we want instead of knowing the God who is. Instead, we must learn to see God revealed to us in the place we never would have expected by our own imaginations: the foolishness of the cross. And thus we do not worship God rightly unless we worship him as the God of the crucified Messiah. In an age when the church faces pressure from the culture to acknowledge that God may be worshiped acceptably in a variety of different religions, we must stand firm on our conviction that all true worship must be focused on Jesus Christ. Otherwise, we will bypass the very place God has chosen to make himself known and seek him in the dark.
And so verses 1-2 summon us to play our part in the dialogue of worship by blessing God continually through Jesus Christ. Now we come to verse 3 and a second application of this passage to our lives:
Once the worshiping pilgrims have called upon the priests to keep the fires of praise burning in their absence, the priests in turn speak these words to the departing worshipers as they go: “May the LORD bless you from Zion, he who made heaven and earth!” And so the dialogue of worship entails not only our contributions—our prayers, our songs, our offerings—but more importantly God’s contribution: his word of blessing to us. When we gather to worship, we must not imagine that we are coming to do all of the talking. In fact, we should train ourselves to do far more listening than talking, for our part in the dialogue means nothing except as a response to God’s prior word to us.
Note again that the verb in verse 3 is the same verb that has been used in verses 1-2: “bless.” When man blesses God, he praises him, but when God blesses man, he does far more. When God blesses man, God puts man under his favor. In other words, God gives to man the greatest gift imaginable, the gift of himself. The Triune God, whom Cornelius Van Til described as “self-contained fullness,” needing absolutely nothing outside of himself in order to be fully and supremely joyful forever, has nevertheless freely chosen to go outside of himself and make his dwelling with man. Blessing is the opposite of curse, which is the fundamental problem humanity has faced since Genesis 3. For when Adam and Eve sinned, they were expelled from the Garden and placed under the curse of God’s wrath. But God gave humanity a new start when he called a man named Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans and gave him a promise that is saturated with the word “bless”: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you may be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” It is this promise, and this word “blessing,” that drives the storyline of the rest of the Bible, the story of a God who rescued his enemies from the curse of his wrath and blessed them by welcoming them once again into his presence.
We can make two observations about verse 3 and the blessing that we receive from God:
First, blessing comes through Christ. Again, you may ask, how could I derive this idea from the text? The principle is the same as in verse 2, for the first part of verse 3 reads, “May the LORD bless you from Zion.” Zion is, of course, another name for Jerusalem, particularly in its capacity as the home of the temple, God’s dwelling place. The priests and/or Levites pronounce this word of blessing upon the departing pilgrims to remind them, as they go home, that the God who dwells in Zion will continue to let his favor rest upon them, mediated through the place where he has chosen to dwell on earth. We have already noted that the temple serves as a type of Christ, the one who fully represents God’s dwelling among us, and so we should look to Christ, and nowhere else, for the blessing of God to come to us.
In Ephesians 1:3 Paul writes, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” The short phrase “in Christ” is a phrase of massive importance, for it communicates to us that outside of Christ we cannot expect any spiritual blessing, but only curse. As John 3:36 reads, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.” The fact that John uses the word “remains” indicates that the wrath of God already hangs over us, and it will continue to do so unless we hide ourselves from it in Christ, who has already endured the final judgment of God in the stead of his people. He delivered us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, says Paul in Galatians 3:13, so that the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles. Therefore, we must not look for blessings to come to us from God except we look for them through Jesus Christ.
Second, blessing comes from our Creator. The first part of verse 3 shows that God’s dwelling place is Zion, but the worshipers who are now leaving there must not imagine that they are moving beyond the reach of his blessing. In other words, they must not imagine that God’s dwelling in Zion implies any limitation on his universal sovereignty. And so he is identified in the second part of verse 3 as “he who made heaven and earth!” The God who is revealed in concrete particulars, such as a city, a temple, and a man from Nazareth, is also the God who has universal dominion, for he is the creator and ruler of all things. Therefore, his power to bless is unrestrained.
At our family dinners recently we have been working our way through the catechism book that we use here at the church. One of the questions we have discussed recently is this question: “Can God do all things?” I love the way that question is answered. The answer is not just “yes,” as though we should imagine God in the abstract having unlimited power to do anything (as true as that is). Instead, the answer is written this way: “Yes, God can do all his holy will.” In other words, the reason the doctrine of God’s universal sovereignty matters to us is because it implies God’s unfailing ability to accomplish what he wants to accomplish. And what does God want? What has his word revealed to us about his will? From Genesis to Revelation, the testimony of Scripture is that God’s will is to bless us! The fact that he is also the God who made heaven and earth is a reminder to us that nothing, absolutely nothing in all of creation, will stop him from accomplishing his purpose.
John Calvin nicely summarizes the implication of this juxtaposition between the first half of verse 3 and the second half, where God is revealed first as the one who dwells in Zion and second as the God who made heaven and earth. He writes, “By looking to the heavens, then, they were to discover the power of God—by looking to Zion, his dwelling-place, they were to recognize his fatherly love.” The one who made heaven and earth delights to make his dwelling among us through his Son Jesus Christ. In the dialogue of worship, we come to hear him speak words of blessing.
Human beings are worshiping creatures. It is in our very nature to marvel and wonder at things outside of ourselves. This is why we enjoy watching Olympic swimming, visiting art museums, or attending concerts. The question is not whether we will worship, but rather what we will worship. And Paul writes in Romans 1:21-22 of the fundamental sin of humanity: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.” Confronted with the glory of the creator, we have turned instead to the creature and sought to carry on the dialogue of worship by closing our ears to the Word of God and offering up our praises to other things. It is for this reason, Paul writes in verse 18, that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” But the same God who stands against us in wrath is the God who loved the world in such a way that he gave his only Son to live a sinless life, to die in the place of sinners, bearing the wrath that they deserved, and to be raised again to life on the third day so that they too could share in the life that he has. He has now ascended to heaven, where he sits at the right hand of the Father and offers you forgiveness of sins in his name for the time being, until the day that he returns to make his kingdom openly manifest. On that day all who have failed to bow the knee to him will endure the full extent of God’s wrath that even now hangs over their heads. Do not wait any longer. Go to Christ now and be delivered from the wrath to come.
For those who are believers, we have heard God’s word proclaimed to our ears. Now he beckons us to receive with our other senses as well, in these physical elements that represent to us his promises mediated through broken body and shed blood of Christ, by which we are saved from the wrath to come. If you are a believer in good standing with a local church, we invite you to come to the table and eat and drink with us, as the dialogue continues.