The NT quotes from the Psalms more than any other OT book (Longman, 65). Psalms remain one of the most read books of the Bible. The Psalms are a collection of inspired Hebrew poetry that was written over about a 1000 year period (1500 to 500 B.C.)(p.13).
Poetry is the language of the heart in love with God. It expresses in a few short lines what cannot be expressed in volumes of prose. As poetry the psalms find fresh application in every age. Have your ever noticed how a hymn in a certain life situation can speak powerfully to you? A familiar melody in a strange land resonates deeply in the soul.
The Psalms remind us that our corporate and personal relationship to God is not merely an intellectual grasp of abstract theological propositions but is dynamic being worked out in real life situations.
To interpret and apply psalms, it is helpful to find become oriented to the Psalms and have some sense of the overall purpose, message, and structure of the book.
The final form of the Psalms is instructive in interpreting the purpose and message of the book of Psalms as a whole. The Psalms were compiled into 5 books, which connect the Psalms to the Torah. The word Torah means instruction and is often translated so in wisdom literature. The five book structure of the Psalms shows that they were compiled to instruct God’s people in the way of happiness and holiness (Futato, Interpreting the Psalms, 59-72).
How can we be sure that following God’s way will lead to happiness and holiness? The over all message of the book of Psalms is God reigns. Psalm 24 is no exception. The Lord, the King of Glory, gives blessing to the one with clean hands and a pure heart.
To help us find our way in the psalms, we need to realize that Psalm 24 is located in Book 1 of the psalms. Book 1 focuses on the ascendancy, establishment, and challenges of the Davidic kingdom. By the end of Book 2, the kingdom has been fully transferred to Solomon (Ps 72). At the end of Book 3 (Psa. 89), the Davidic kingdom is gone. The Psalmist is struggling to reconcile God’s promise to David and the post-exilic absence of Davidic king. Book four begins with a psalm of Moses to show that the King the Davidic king represented is God, who still reigns. Books 4 and 5 call on God’s people to have faith in God as King and hope in His coming Kingdom, which encompasses all nations and of which there will be no end (Futato, 80-95).
One other point needs to be made about interpreting Psalms and the OT in general. The fact that Psalms is the most quoted OT book in the NT teaches us that early Christians viewed the Psalms as Holy Scripture and they interpreted the OT in light of NT revelation. Jesus plainly said that the OT Scriptures were about Him. Augustine said that the NT is in the OT concealed, and the OT is in the NT revealed (Longman, 65).
Psalm 24 has a rich interpretative history. The second stanza of the Psalm is almost identical to Psalm 15 and fits well the idea of the ascent of worship. It was sung on the First Day of the Week during the period of the 2nd temple to celebrate the first day of creation (c.f. vv1-2). Early Christians used Psalm 24 to commemorate the ascension. Additionally, Psalm 24 has been used as an advent Psalm (EBC, vol. 5, p. 220).
Psalm 24 seems to fit well with biblical history from the first day of creation to the taking of the hill of Zion and establishing Jerusalem as the center of worship. OT religion is the shadow of the reality in Christ. As a result, this psalm is a microcosm of redemptive history. It can be applied to God’s people’s experience of God in this world on the way to the next.
Psalm 24 is an early psalm of David and may have been written on the occasion of David bringing the Ark to Jerusalem.
When David ascended to the throne, two bothersome situations needed resolution: the Jebusites and the ark of God. David was not exaggerating when he said that he meditated on and delighted in the Law of the Lord. God had promised Abraham the land of a list of nations, including the Jebusites (Gen 15:18-21). In all the lists of nations on the to be conquered list, the Jebusites were always mentioned last. The promise is repeated again and again until the time of the conquest (Ex. 3:8, 17; 13:5; 23:23; 33:2; 34:11; Deut. 7:1; Josh. 3:10; 12:8). Despite repeated attempts, Israel could not defeat the Jebusites and take Zion. Several hundred years after the promise to Abraham, David took the Jebusite stronghold and possessed the Fortress of Zion (2 Sam. 5:6-10, esp 7) (Davis, 2 Sam.:Looking on the Heart, 54).
From the time of the conquest, Shiloh had been the center of worship for God’s people. The tabernacle and the ark were there. In an effort to defeat the Philistines in battle, the sorry sons of Eli were persuaded to carry the ark of God into battle. The ark was captured.
The ark proved to be too hot to hold. The Philistines put it on a new cart, pointed it toward Israelite territory, contriving a little test to see if their trouble came from God or coincidence. The ark ended up, tabernacled, in the house of Abinadab for the next 20 years (I Sam 7:1-2).
After David dispossessed the Jebusites, he set the Tabernacle up on Mt. Zion and went the Kiriath-jearim to fetch the ark. He used a little Philistine theology and put the ark on a cart. When Uzzah, a son of Abinadab, reached to steady the ark, God smote him. The ark party ended abruptly. The ark was left at the house of Obededom for 3 months. When David learned that the house of Obededom was blessed, he went for the ark, brought it to Zion, and placed it in the tent prepared for it (2 Sam. 6).
If indeed the account of David bringing the ark to Jerusalem is the historical setting of the Psalm, it is easy to see David’s understanding of God working itself out in his life. This Psalm is about the Kingship of God and the implications of that for God’s people.
Vv1-2: David understood that not just the conquered land of 7 nations belonged to God but the whole earth and everything in it is God’s. How could David take a Jebusite city that nobody else had been able to take? The earth is the Lord’s. David understood that God did not choose Israel because of her strength and Jerusalem because of its prestige. These pieces picture the whole. The earth’s is the Lord.
Vv3-6: The ark of God represented God’s throne. It was not God in a box. God was on the box. Nobody was to look at the ark, touch the ark, use the ark as good luck charm, let alone put it on a cart. Who can approach God (v 3)? When God smote Uzzah, David was afraid of the Lord and said, “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?” (2 Sam. 6:9).
God is holy. He will not be a figurine of our curiosity. He will not be manipulated into behaving the way we want him to. He will not be steadied. He cannot be fooled. He will not be thought of with the abstract of Philistine theology. He will not be hauled around in our lives like a piece excess baggage. He is holy. He will not be trifled with.
David was not doing God a favor by taking the Jebusite city, erecting the tabernacle, and moving the ark. God is holy, and we are not holy like Him. His holiness is His otherness. Whatever we are, whatever is, He is other than all of us and everything else. Don’t you think it strange that the symbol of His Presence was a 2X3X2 wood box overlaid with gold with two winged creatures on top that was totally covered in curtains and animal skins? He is otherness. He is not holy because we set Him apart. We are holy because he sets us apart. We are holy because He says we are. David needed to know that and approach the ark accordingly.
Vv7-10: God is a warrior. He did quite well against the Philistines. Israel lost 30K men when the Philistines captured the ark. God cut up Dagon, got 5 gold tumors, and as many gold mice as the Philistines had cities all by Himself, not to mention a couple milk cows and a new cart. You may think, “that’s nothing.” What have you ever gotten from a Philistine?”
As we learned from our study of Joshua, God defeated the nations of the conquest: the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorities, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusties.
We can understand then why as the King of Glory approaches Zion, the cry for the gates to be open comes and the King of Glory is identified as the “Lord strong and mighty, the Lord might in battle.”
Why would David dance before ark with all of his might dressed the clothes of a commoner? David knew that God is the Warrior King. God is the King of Glory. Whatever glory there is to be had must be directed toward the King of all Glory. He is the Lord of the armies.
Psalm 24 is about God. As the Davidic king ascends the throne, Psalm 24 is a hymn that extols the Kingship of God. The Davidic king represents the Kingship of God and prophesies the coming Kingdom of God in which David’s greater Son will reign forever. The things that David needed to learn about God are the very things that we need to learn about God.
In this Psalm, we move in procession with the King of Glory through the provinces of His realm to the central heights of His Holy City (Kidner, TOTC, 130). The Psalm highlights the experience of God that God’s people have in every age.
Psalm 24 opens with the assertion that Yahweh created everything that is. His rights as Creator are absolute. The Psalmist calls on us to view God and the world through the lens of God’s sovereignty.
As creator God is self-existence and self-sufficiency. The world depends on God for its continued existence. Yet, the world by and large does not acknowledge its dependency on God. So the kindness of God is revealed in the unthankfulness of the heathen. God cares for them and fills their hearts with joy.
All of the nations surrounding Israel had tribal deities. They thought of Israel’s God in the same way that they thought of their own gods. The problem was that Israel at times would think of Yahweh as a tribal deity. They would treat Him as though He was their God only. If it worked for the Philistines to move the ark on a cart, it follows that they could move the ark in the same manner.
David needed to realize that He was not setting God up in Jerusalem, but God was setting David up there. Jerusalem as the capital of the Davidic kingdom was merely representative of God’s universal Kingdom.
God is not only the God of Israel but also the God of the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorities, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, the Jebusties, and the other 12K plus ethno-linguistic people groups that are found around the God’s globe.
Yahweh is not only the God of America. He is the God of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Muslim, the Jew, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, etc. Remember He is not in the box; He is on the box and everywhere else too.
Psalm 24 takes us back to Genesis 1 to give us perspective. The Bible does not start with Genesis 12 but rather with Genesis 1. God not only made the land we call Palestine. He also made the land we call earth. God’s interests are global, extending beyond us.
When we see the world given to idolatry, building temples and burning incense and blowing up airplanes, our response is not to be, “Oh, how nice, sincere, and devoted they are.” We are to realize that behind the smoke and mirrors resides the evil one, endeavoring to usurp God and gain glory that belongs only to God.
Our task is to overthrow the Jebusite strongholds of the world, not with bows and arrows and underwear bombs, but with the Gospel of God. We are to preach to the pagans that God created them, and now by the Man whom He raised from the dead, He commands them to repent and believe or face sure and certain judgment on the appointed day.
The Psalmist smashes the pagan belief of His neighbors when he asserts that God established the earth on the seas (v2). The writer in Genesis 1 did the same thing. To the Canaanite mind the seas represented the forces of chaos, everything that threatens a well-ordered world (Futato, 73).
God has destroyed the forces of chaos. Everything that argues against God in the pagan mind, the Psalmist argues, is what God established the world on. God brings order out of chaos. The culprit behind all the chaotic, disorder in the world is the devil. He disorders lives, families, societies, churches, and nations. As God destroyed the chaotic forces to establish the world, He will destroy the chaotic forces that threaten to undo us, our families, and the world to establish His Kingdom.
I cannot tell you how this text helped me in cross-cultural missions. When we left the country, we would not eat in a restaurant that served alcohol. I was scandalized in Richmond, VA, because when we finally escaped from the farm for an evening, we couldn’t find any place to eat where alcohol was not served. I didn’t want my children exposed to that life. Little did I know that within a year, we would be putting our daughter on an airplane to fly to the Peace Center in Rijeka, Croatia, to participate in a MK retreat. Both of our children by the time they were 12 or 13 would be flying internationally by themselves. For 6 years, they would get themselves to and from boarding school, crossing borders and riding airplanes and trains. This is our Father’s world, and for the sake of the Gospel, He will have you take your children where you don’t want to take them and send them where you don’t want them to go.
I have some pictures that I have kept for years. They are pictures that normally we discard. They are blurry, not clear. When we first arrived in Kiev, we lived in an apartment on the 8th floor across from a military compound. Every morning a group of soldiers were on the sidewalk below chipping away ice with shovels. The blurry pictures came to represent the cross-cultural experience. No matter how strange the place or custom, this is God’s world. He was in Ukraine before I got their, and He was there after I left.
In Moldova, as we spent a winter with ice and mold growing on our wall, I was reminded that this is God’s world. If He is here in this situation with us, who are we to complain? We gathered with the church on the Christmas of 1996 with hundreds of people in a building with the inside temperature of 5 degrees below 0. For two hours, three of us preached about the advent of Christ. This is our Father’s world and He wants the Gospel preached where it is cold and inconvenient.
I visited our missionaries in Bosnia. They lived buildings and houses in Sarajevo that were literally filled with bullet holes. Some floors were so shot up that they could not be lived in. Some our MKs playing soccer kicked the ball into high weeds. They knew better than to go after it. As they tried to see where the ball was, they saw something shiny. They told their parents who in turn called the mine squad. They came and found the body of a soldier and an anti-tank mine. This is our Father’s world. He wants missionaries to take their families to the epi-center of the forces of the evil one to preach Jesus.
In Kosovo, I visited family after family and village after village burned out with no one but women, children and old men living because all the able bodied men had been executed and dumped in mass graves. I had to sleep on a concrete floor wrapped in wool blankets in the shell of a building and listen to gun shots as Serb sympathizers were hunted and killed.
This is our Father’s world. He wants His people to go to such places and preach to the pagans that this is His world and they must repent and believe the gospel or experience worse things.
All of these stories have had happy endings for me and my family and the other families involved. That is not always the case. These stories do help us gain perspective on the far reaching implications of believing this is God’s world and relating to it in light of God’s purpose of grace through the Gospel.
What of the city that God has placed us in? Is it now the task of the church to preach to each other, to look after each other, until we make it to heaven? Or rather is it our task to preach to each other and pursue holiness together (church health) in order to engage this city with the gospel? Is our aim in ascending the hill of the Lord to simply live better lives? Or does God have an interest in this city outside of us that He wants to use us to accomplish? How will we go about preaching the gospel to this city? Is it our responsibility? Will we be held accountable for it? How did Jesus, Paul, and the early church manage to stir up so much trouble doing the same things we are doing while we live so peacefully?
We struggle in knowing how to relate to this world. Psalm 24 is instructive.
Paul used this text to argue that eating meat sacrificed to idols was no sin (1 Cor 10:26). It is not meat that defiles. We are to be in the world not of the world. We cannot confront the world if we are not in it. You can lock yourself in an underground room, and you will still struggle with sin. The source of defilement is our own hearts.
What is wrong with us is not the world we live in and the pagans we live around. The matter with us is our own hearts. Only Jesus can save you from sin and keep you from sin.
The Good News is that Christ saves sinners. He majors in taking the chaotic messes of our lives and the lives of others and creating them anew. The temptation for believers and for the church is lose confidence in the Gospel. We become activist churches fighting the wrongs of the world.
The voice of the church needs to be clear on the moral and social issues of our day, but our message is not, “Quit sinning and join the church.” Our message is, “Repent and believe the good news.”
We must make no mistake. God requires and demands holiness of His people. If we would be the kind of people that God will use for His glory in the pursuit of His interests in the world, we must be holy.
The Psalmist asks a sobering question in v3: “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in His holy place?” The second line intensifies the first. If one did manage to ascend the hill, could he stand?
The answer that comes in v 5 does not help. It is stated both positively and negatively. Positively, the one with clean hands and a pure heart and, negatively, the one who does not lift his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully can ascend the hill of the Lord.
The Psalmist brings us the to Law of God to see if we are blameless in our relationships with others—clean hands, swearing deceitfully—and with God—pure heart, lift up soul to what is false.
We are prone to compartmentalize our lives to the extent that we justify any of our behaviors and claim to be right with God. The idea is that if everybody thinks well of me it does not matter who I really am. It does not matter that I plot and scheme to feed my own self-centeredness if I can just make people think I am godly. We are such deceivers that we begin to believe our own lies. It does not matter what people think. God knows you.
The filth on our hands comes from our hearts. We can focus on our outward behaviors in the pursuit of holiness and end up in despair. Our problem in our sanctification is our hearts. In other words, at the very core of our being, in the center of our desire and will, the affections are being formed that will drive our behavior.
We keep fighting the outward sin, and we ought to. Yet, what is giving rise to the sin of our hands is the sin of our hearts. We often hear of big sinners getting converted—drunkards, addicts, adulterers, etc.—and we say, “They really changed.” I thank God for it. Yet, the longer I live and experience God’s sanctifying grace, the more I realize that those big sins were the working out of worse sins operating in the core of who I am.
Learn this about sanctifying grace: it is no less grace than justifying grace. God is as committed to our sanctification as He is to our justification. We are as dependent on God for our sanctification as we are for our justification. Sanctification flows out of justification. One of that blessings of justification is that God puts His Spirit within us and begins the life long process of sanctifying us. The Spirit of God battles the sinful tendencies of our hearts and causes us to progress in holiness. It is not your sin that troubles you. It is God. Not only does He kill the big sins, He roots out their heart causes of pride, arrogance, anger, fear, self-importance, self-worship, distrust of God, idolatry.
In the OT, no less than in the NT, blessing and righteousness came through faith. Jesus and Paul did not think up some new angle on salvation that is strange to the OT.
The one who ascends the hill of the Lord is not only the one who is experiencing the sanctifying grace of God but also the one who has received the justifying grace of God. Blessing and righteousness and justification come through faith. On the basis of faith alone, God gives sinners a righteous standing. The one who ascends the hill of the Lord and stands in His holy place is the one who believes that his only hope to walk with God and stand before Him is based solely on the kindness and graciousness of God alone.
The Psalmist looks at the whole of the people of God and says that the ones who ascend and stand in God’s holy place are the ones who have experienced the favor of God and set their affections on Him.
The mention of Jacob puts us in mind to two things. One is that Jacob was in the chosen line. Jacob can also be used corporately to designate the chosen people of God. The second is of Jacob struggle with God at Peniel. He strove with God and would not let Him go until He blessed Him.
In our sanctification, we are not fighting for God’s acceptance or approval. For God’s own reasons, He set his affection on us not because of anything we have done, are doing or will do. He declared us righteous and has given us all His blessing by calling us to faith in Christ alone. That righteous standing is the basis of all of our striving for holiness.
Although sanctification is God’s gracious work in us through the Holy Spirit, we are to strive for holiness nonetheless. Notice that our striving has to do with our affections. To seek Him is to have your affections set on Him. Our holiness and sanctification is not a check list of outward dos and don’ts, but rather a setting of our affections on God and finding our joy and satisfaction in all that He is for us. The Scripture is clear: He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, and our righteousness and sanctification, and redemption (1 Cor. 1:30).
That we fight for sanctification makes it no less the gracious work of God’s Spirit in us. That we struggle to ascend the hill of the Lord makes it no less the gracious work of God in us. Not only is He at the crest of His Holy Hill, He is in the procession with us. God fights for our sanctification. The reason we are in the fight is because He is in the fight. Stop trying to win the approval of God. I have to think that if you are trying to win His approval, you don’t love Him and your affections are not set on Him. He fights for you. Find your joy in Him.
God’s ultimate interest is His own glory. There is no conflict in God’s pursuit of His glory and in His fighting for our good. God seeking His glory does sinners good.
In this Psalm, we are not ascending the Hill of Zion to stand before a localized deity. We are both ascending to Him and ascending with Him at the same time. We are in His procession approaching His Holy Hill.
As the procession approaches the Holy City, the cry goes out twice for the eternal doors to be lifted up for the entrance of the King of Glory. Twice from the gates a question comes, Who is this King of Glory? Two different answers arise from the procession. First, He is Yahweh strong and mighty Yahweh mighty in battle. Second, He is Yahweh of hosts He is the King of Glory.
To use the language of warring in association with God is not politically correct today, especially in a day when in the name of God infidels are declaring jihad and are indiscriminately murdering people. I cannot figure out what about the greatness of God makes people want to kill somebody.
How different with Yahweh. First, He fights for His glory and our good. Second, when He judges the world, He is not going to do it by putting Southern Baptists on airplanes with bombs in their britches. When the armies of Heaven judge this world, there will be no need to duck or call 911.
God’s glory is the visible manifestation of His Presence. God made His glory pass before Moses. When Paul said, All have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, He meant the we lack God’s glory. That is, we have not treasured and desired who God has shown Himself to be. We have treasured ourselves and measured what is valuable by ourselves.
God is Present everywhere, but He is not Present everywhere in the same way (BCOT, Vol 1, Goldingay, p. 362). His glory is everywhere, but not in the same way. We know that the Exodus, the ark, and Jerusalem are types of shadows of things that have come and are coming. The Exodus, the ark, and Jerusalem speak of Christ delivering us from the bondage of sin and taking us into His eternal glory.
God created the world for His glory and crowned Adam as His kingly representative on earth. The lying usurper came and toppled Adam and lorded it over the earth. Christ came to claim what rightfully belongs to God. He is the King of Glory strong and mighty the Lord mighty in battle. In His life, He was the ark tabernacling among us. In His sinless life and substitutionary death, He took our sin and destroyed death and the devil. Christ is the ultimate manifestation of the glory of God, and He, in His death on the cross, entered the Holy Place and sprinkled His blood on the mercy seat to secure eternal redemption for us.
In the Gospel, Christ has both declared the glory of God and done God’s people good. Notice in the Psalm that God is both on the hill of Zion and leading a procession to the hill of Zion.
Christ has battled the devil, defeated death, and turned the wrath of God from us. Our greatest problem is not the devil, not death, not even our sin. Our greatest problem is the wrath of God. Christ saves us from wrath.
To save us, He conquers us. We were in rebellion against God. We had declared war on God and set ourselves up as god. Mercifully, Christ made his goodness and grace known to us to defeat us and take us in His procession to glory. Through the indwelling Spirit, He continues to war against our sinful nature and is committed to bring us to His eternal glory.
One day Christ will come again with the armies of Heaven. He will tread the winepress of the wrath of God. He will gather the nations together. He will place the sheep on His right hand and the goats on His left. All wrongs will be righted.
Then the King will say to those on His right, Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world…Then He will say to those on His left, depart from me, you cursed , into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. (Matt.25: 34, 41)
There will be a new heaven and a new earth and the new Jerusalem will come down out of heaven. A loud voice from the throne will say, Behold the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself with be with them as their God…(Rev. 21:1-8).
Then Psalm 24 will find its final meaning.
This is God’s world and His interest in it ought to be ours. Our purpose for covenanting together in this body is first an end in itself—to worship God. Second, we are here pursuing health so that we might be used of God in His gracious purpose in the world. We are not alone in this task. He is with us and fights for us.