Psalms 95

Psalms 95:1-11

The two fold testimony of judgment and salvation. The ninety-fifth psalm gives us now the testimony, not yet actually of the Lord coming, but of the need of the obedience to Him, if Israel is to have the security of His care. While at the same time He is celebrated as the God of the whole earth, to whom everything is subject. It is thus, practically, (though neither so wide in its address, nor so definite in its announcement,) the message of the “everlasting gospel” in Revelation 14:1-20 : “Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment is come: and worship Him that made the heaven and the earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.” That the hour of His judgment is come is not in fact declared: but the next psalm declares it, and for this the present one prepares the way. Israel, however, is alone in view here: the invitation and the warning are distinctly addressed to them.

1. The psalm opens with the exhortation to sing to Jehovah as the Rock of their salvation; to answer with “confession,” of what He is to them, -the word for “thanksgiving” being literally “confession.” For Jehovah their God is a great God, and a great King over all that man would exalt to deity. The earth in its depths and heights is then claimed as His and the sea and the dry land. which He has formed. In these last two cases the idea of control seems prominent, and that as necessarily inferred in the fact of His making them.
2. Then they are exhorted again to do Him homage, and His loving relationship to them as their Shepherd is put before them as what may well incite them to this. But there is added as the necessary condition to the continuance of this, “today, if ye will hear His voice! “* Apart from such obedient hearing there could be no walking together, of those not agreed. Grace only fulfills -not sets aside -such conditions.
   A sad page of their history is now brought before them, the time of their “strife” with God at Meribah, and “tempting” Him at Massah. And this was but a sample of forty years in which He was grieved by a generation finally cut off in the wilderness for unbelief. They are exhorted not to harden their hearts as did their fathers, when they tempted and proved God, and saw His work, -found Him alike faithful in His promises and in His threatenings. And now the rest of God is so near at hand, and in proportion to the blessedness of all implied in it, is the awful irremediable ruin of being cut off from it.