Psalm 150

" Praise the Lord! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens! Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his excellent greatness! Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe! Praise him with sounding cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals! Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!" (Psalm 150, ESV)

Wow, I think the psalmist managed to put every instrument of the ancient world in here. I suppose he felt the need to hammer his point home. Let’s start with all the instruments and then end up back at the beginning.

Ah, the trumpet! What a biblically foundational instrument to play. Trumpet players must be in a higher echelon of God’s people…. JK. We first hear about the trumpet inExodus 19:16-20, where the trumpet announces the coming presence of the Lord. The trumpet was used to call the people of Israel (Lev 23:24, Num 10:2, Num 10:8). Also, the trumpet was used often in war, but I think it’s important to notice the significance of Num 10:9. The trumpet was used so the people might be remembered before the Lord. Fast forward to the New Testament, and we see in 1 Thess 4:16that the Lord’s coming again will be announced by the sound to the trumpet of God.

Next we praise Him with the lute and harp. Unfortunately we don’t actually know what any of these instruments looked or sounded like. We can infer, but that’s it. When I think of a lute, it’s almost like a guitar with a whole lot of strings, but like I said, that’s speculation. The harp referred to here is the lyre.. I think I’ve got a mental picture of these two instruments, but then I read 1 Chr 16:28 where it says they made loud music on harps and lyres (same Hebrew words). I had pictured these stringed instruments as being a soft sound, but perhaps not. I would guess the author is simply poetically contrasting the “brass” (actually likely a ram’s horn, although in Numbers the Israelites were instructed to make 2 silver trumpets) with the stringed instruments.

Boy, I hate to even bring up the next verse in the Baptist church……. 

The tambourine was an instrument associated closely with dance. We see dance as a part of praise throughout the bible in places like 1 Chr 16:29 where David was being undignified in his praise to the Lord. We get the picture from the ensuing argument with his wife that fear of man should not drive our worship, but rather our reaction to the Lord. How much does the fear of man drive our worship today? Say you’re a person who likes to raise their hands in worship? It’s a biblical expression in worship (Ps 28:2, Ps 134:2, Lam 3:41, 1 Tim 2:8). Some people feel called to lift their hands in worship, some don’t. Both are okay, it’s accepted in the Bible, but it’s not commanded in the Bible. If you were a person called to raise hands in worship, and you were in a congregation with hands down, would you raise your hands? Why not?

The same case of using every instrument we have at our disposal is again built with the cymbals. Clashing cymbals aren’t the most elegant of instruments. There isn’t a lot that you can communicate with a cymbal. There is no finesse to a cymbal. Cymbals are not poetic, or orderly for that matter. Yet the psalmist says that we can praise the Lord in cymbals. For whom do you crash the cymbal? Do you draw attention to the Lord, or yourself?

So who should be doing all of this praising? Everything that has breath!!!! We look forward to the day when every tribe, and every nation and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord. How wonderful it will be before the throne, in His sanctuary Praising the Lord.