If you pay attention, the psalms can startle you. Psalm 95 is a good example. It begins like many classic praise psalms–bold invitation to to raucous praise followed by a warm call to humble, bowing adoration. But then it turns a corner. In the last section of the psalm we find a sober warning not to be hard-hearted. Some scholars have found this change in tone so abrupt that they think this last section was originally a piece of another psalm. I don’t agree, but it underscores how strange it is.
Again, the first section (1-5) is a joyous summons to praise. Specifically, the speaker is calling for noise; shouting, loud singing, clapping, and noisy music. I am reminded of praying with Ukranian Pentecostal Christians, especially when they first escaped from behind the Iron Curtain after the fall of Communism in Russia. Some of those believers had spent years in Gulags. When the meeting leader said, “let’s pray” an explosion of boisterous praying in tongues, shouting of thanksgiving, and urgent pleas burst from their side of the room. That is what I think of as the proper response to the call to praise that begins this psalm.
The next section (6-7) calls the worshipers to bow down before God in gratitude and submission. It calls to mind the exodus from Egypt and recognizes the great deliverance that God worked for Israel at the Red Sea. The proper response to such deliverance is quiet and humble self-offering to God.
The background of the Exodus provides a clue to the jarring quality of the last section’s warning tone. In fact, it explicitly refers to Israel’s complaints against God and their testing of his loyalty. The psalmist wants us to remember that we can be the recipients of God’s gracious and powerful acts for us and still harden our hearts against him and ultimately refuse the good things he offers us. This theme of warning is picked up by New Testament writers, especially in 1 Corinthians 10 and Hebrews 3 and 4. There we see the wilderness generation held up as a sober warning for recipients of the covenant of grace. So, taken all together we’ve got this warning punctuating all of Scripture–in Numbers, this and other psalms, 1 Corinthians and Hebrews.
You can be a recipient of God’s loving favor displayed in Jesus Christ. It can work wonders in your life. But, you can allow your heart to get hard and fail to fully enter into God’s blessings. You can start out joyously and strong and then fall away into forgetfulness and the cares and anxieties of life. Let us thank God for such warnings as Psalm 95 affords us and let us keep our hearts soft under the daily promptings of the Holy Spirit.
