Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

To the scripture we read at the opening of our service in which we just sang back to God Psalm 95. “Oh come let us sing unto the Lord. Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving and make a joyful noise unto him with psalms. For the Lord is a great God and a great king above all gods. In his hand are the deep places of the earth. The strength of the hills is his also.

The sea is his and he made it and his hands form the dry land. Oh come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our maker. For he is our God and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. Today if you will hear his voice, harden not your heart as in the provocation and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness. When your fathers tempted me, proved me and saw my work.

For 40 years long was I grieved with this generation and said, ‘It is a people that do err in their heart and they have not known my ways.’ Unto whom I swear in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest.”

I said that I would mention again the sheet qualifications for office. I am mentioning it again. I won’t have you raise hands this morning, but I’d encourage you all to go through this at some point in time to familiarize yourself with those requirements and to evaluate yourselves according to them.

We don’t want to be foolish men and women who look at the word of God and then walk away and forget what it’s told us. We want to think about its implications for our lives. And so I’d encourage you all to use this in your homes. This morning, we begin a new series of talks. This will probably go easily 10 to 15 weeks. What we’ll be doing is going through our liturgy, what we do, our order of service on Sunday.

And so this is essentially a series of talks on worship, corporate convocative worship, Sabbath, Lord’s Day worship, and we’ll go through all the appointed elements. We’ll start this morning with the call to worship. Next week we’ll talk about the day of preparation. Once we understand the call and what it entails to us, we’ll understand what we’re supposed to be doing Saturday and Sunday morning in preparation for coming.

After that, we’ll talk about the corporate prayer, the prayer of confession of sins that we make after our call to worship. We’ll spend one week on that. After that, we’ll talk about God’s absolution to us, the words of encouragement that he gives us. And we’ll continue right on through what we do every Lord’s day. Now, the fact that I said we’re going to talk about our liturgy, I hope doesn’t disturb too many of you.

Just to make sure we’re all tracking on the right wavelength here. Liturgy simply means in its original root the work or service of the people. It means the order means what you do on Sunday. And what I’m trying to get across here is the question is not whether or not we’re going to have liturgy or no liturgy. Every time the people are convocated together in Christian worship, they go through a liturgy.

They have a work or a service that they perform on the Lord’s day. So the question is not liturgy or no liturgy. The most minimalistic church has a minimalistic liturgy, but nonetheless it has an order. The word has a little high church connotations to it in our modern sense, but that’s not what it means in its root, and it’s not the way we’re using it. We’re simply saying we’re going to examine what we do, our work of service on the Lord’s day.

The question, as I said, is not liturgy or no liturgy. The question is bad liturgy or good liturgy. Like anything else that we do, it can either be done well or it can be done improperly and poorly. And of course, if we’re going to make an evaluation of what we do and what anything that we do, we must need a standard. That standard is the word of God. And so, what we’re going to be doing is examining how the word of God affects or reforms our order of worship that we’re familiar with from our childhood, from our early Christian days, if we’ve been converted later in life, and from our past, and from what we do at Reformation Covenant Church.

The reformers reformed many aspects of life among which was the reformation of the liturgy or of worship of what they did and their intent was to reform it according to the word. That’s the rest of the phrase: reformed means reformed according to the word according to the regulating principles found in God’s word. The reformers were actually attempting to reform the medieval liturgy and do that, as I said, according to the evaluation standard that God gives us in his holy word. They didn’t want to start something brand new. They were reformers and so we’re much in the same way today.

We are standing in need of reformation and reconstruction of this country and that means we got to reform everything about it including our orders of worship. The Puritans who developed what is now known and talked about as the regulative principle—they are actually credited with the idea of the regulative principle of worship. And I would just encourage you all as soon as we get the tapes from the conference to check those out of the library.

Doug Kelly in his second talk, I believe, talked about the regulative principle and pointed out that in the Puritan concept the regulative principle was not simply applied to worship. They talked about the regulative principle of God’s word that it regulates all of life. And we’ve talked about that a little bit in the last few weeks, haven’t we? In terms of the three-fold way in which God regulates us.

In terms of our person, we have special officers. In terms of our productivity, we have special money that we use. And then in terms of our time, we have a special day that we set aside. And that day, then serves as the regulator for all of our lives. And so the Puritans wanted to regulate all of life including worship according to the word of God. Now this certainly affects, as I said, worship liturgy as well as everything else if we understand that God’s word is to regulate all that we do.

But when it comes to worship specifically it’s a bit more demanding than it is in certain other areas. The reason for this is found in the second commandment of the ten commandments. The first commandment is a general prohibition against idolatry. “Have no other gods before me.” The second commandment prohibits specific forms of idolatry and specifically in terms of worship. This may not be readily apparent, but if I read to you from Exodus 20:22-26, it’ll be somewhat more apparent.

Now listen to this. It begins the same way. It begins at the second commandment and then develops it. We read in Exodus 20:22-26. “The Lord said unto Moses, ‘Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, you have seen that I have talked to you from heaven. Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall you make unto you gods of gold.’” Prohibition of idolatry. He goes on to say, “An altar of earth thou shalt make unto me.” So he’s saying, “Don’t do improper worship. Idolatry, worshiping of idols or gods.” But he tells us here what proper worship is. And he says in verse 24, “An altar of earth thou shalt make unto me and shalt sacrifice therefore thereon thy burnt offerings and thy peace offerings, thy sheep, and thine oxen. In all places where I record my name, I will come unto thee, and I will bless thee. And if thou will make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewed stone.

For if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it. Neither shalt thou go up by steps upon mine altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon.”

You see, God takes the second commandment and in Exodus 20 tells Moses that he gives a little exposition of it in terms of proper and improper worship. So the second commandment takes the general principle of God’s regulation of all things and says in terms of worship be real careful. Don’t take a stone to make an altar and cut it up and make it look nice. The stone had to be unhewed. If we lay our tool to God’s stone or altar then it’s polluted. It.

Now the stone, of course, as well as the work of the priest who was not to ascend steps so he would not reveal his nakedness on the stones—what that’s talking about is that the works of fallen man is an improper mediator for worship. The high priest had special robes and garments. And those of us who’ve gone to some churches where they actually have a garment made up, you understand what that means. And probably all of you have at least seen pictures of the special robes and garments. The point of that was the high priest was a symbol or type or picture of Jesus Christ.

And so the fact that we couldn’t reveal our nakedness—any of our who we are as it were—on God’s altar and the approach to it means that we’ve got to come to God through a special mediator, Jesus Christ. And the fact that altar is not to be hewed means that we don’t get to figure out how we want to worship God. God develops the initiative in worship. He tells us specifically what we are to do. And he says that if we don’t do what he tells us to do, it is idolatry. And so that’s why, you know, we talk a lot about will worship in terms of worship. And that’s what God is saying here. Don’t figure out what you think is the best way to do it.

Listen to me. And in terms of the regulative principle as it’s applied to special aspects of worship, you must be much more exacting and thorough in what you do. And the second commandment tells us that. Now, this means in essence then that man can only approach God—generally of course, but then specifically in convocative worship, which is a picture of all of our lives—man can only approach God on his terms, not on our terms.

And that’s why we worship on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, the Lord’s day. It wasn’t like we looked at all seven days of the week said, “Well, well, let’s choose Wednesday. That’d be a good day for us.” No, no. God says the Lord’s day is the special day of worship. And we spent a series of talks talking about that. Now, R.J. Rushdoony commenting very astutely on the second commandment says the following.

“Whenever man begins by establishing his own approach to God, he ends by establishing his own will, his own lust, and finally himself as God. If the terms of man’s approach to God are set by man, then the terms of man’s life and prosperity are dictated also by man rather than by God. But the initiative belongs entirely to God and therefore the only lawful approach to God is on his terms entirely and by his grace.”

Okay? And that’s what’s set forth in the second commandment and that’s what the implications of the regulative principle are for worship. We must be very exacting that we approach God in his way. We ought to be very careful then to understand what God tells us to do in terms of worship. And of course, as we said before, the scriptures are that standard. And so, what we want to do over the next 10, 15, 20 weeks, however long it takes, is to understand what the Bible says about liturgy, what the Bible says specifically about worship.

We want to conform ourselves to it. Now, we’re not going to be able to do it perfectly. We’ll talk more about that at the end of the service, but what we want to be is a reformed church according to the word in our worship and a reformed church according to the word, reforming continually ourselves in our worship in relationship to our understanding of God’s word as it grows. Okay, so that’s what we’re going to be doing.

Now, one example of how God’s scripture regulates the order of worship, of course, can be looked at in terms of the Old Testament sacrificial system and the special convocated worship at the temple itself, which is the verse we just read has specific application to. And without spending a lot of time on this because we’re going to talk more about this in later services, but just to give you an example of what I’m talking about in Leviticus 9:15-22, we have an order of offerings that is presented to us there.

And it represents to us the basic order of our worship. It was prescribed worship in terms of the offerings as they went to the temple. And it then helps us to understand the correct order of our own approach to God as well. Well, so we don’t approach God on our own terms. The first in the list of offerings in Leviticus 9:15-22 is the sin offering indicating the need for corporate confession of sin as we obey the voice that calls us to the temple, to God’s holy mountain, to his convocated presence.

Okay. God calls the people. They come forward, they’ve got sacrifices and the first thing they offer is the sin offering. And when we come to church, we respond to the call to worship and the first thing we do is we pray and we confess our sins as the sin offering was. So we have that. Next, after that in the order of offering according to Leviticus 9 is the whole burnt offering and the cereal offering combined.

And this indicates our total whole burnt offering to God as we’re in response to his presence and his command word. And so we come, call to worship. We give a sin offering. We pray. We hear the word expounded, then we respond to that with a whole burnt offering and the cereal offering. And in this church, we do it really pictorially in that we get up our whole body, our whole burnt offering as it were—of course, in the mediator Jesus Christ. We get up and we come forward with our cereal, with our production, with the fruits of our labor.

And so we have a whole burnt offering and cereal offering together in the offering that is a response to the sermon. And then finally, the last offering that was required in Leviticus 9 in the order there is the peace offering which indicates our communion with God. There was a meal there. You have to eat part of that sacrifice. And so at the end of our service in the second half of the service, remember it’s two halves of one service—the last offering we have is when we have a meal with God and that is the peace offering and the meal of communion with God.

And so that order in Leviticus 9 shows us specifically what we do in terms of our basic pattern of worship on Lord’s Day. You may have thought we just sort of put it together because that’s the way it was. That isn’t true. We’ve thought about it. And plus, of course, the heritage of the church is such that it’s not too tough to realize that there’s been an explicit order in the past in various churches.

And as I said, the reformers, of course, attempted to reform the medieval liturgy according to the word. And so, we can look at what they did and they understood these things very clearly. So, there’s lots of source material on this stuff. And in fact, there maybe so much source material makes it that much more difficult to think it through and to understand it all. Okay. So, have said that then in a general introduction to the whole series we want to look now specifically at the call to worship that is the beginning of Lord’s day worship and we want to start there and we want to do a good job here because as one person has written well begun is half done. If you start correctly your task is halfway finished and so what we do when we start holy convocative worship is very important for establishing the pattern for it and for the rest of our lives as we will develop this morning.

Now the call to worship in the reformed churches a specific vocal verbal call replaces in terms of the Roman Catholic service the ringing of bells. In the Roman Catholic services it was developed as the ringing of the church bells. That was the call to worship for the people as they came forward. And here in Protestant circles, reformed circles, we replace the ringing of the bells with the ringing of God’s word as it proclaims that thing. Now, of course, the bells are okay. Church bells are good things. And we probably don’t think of it that often, but that’s what it is.

The church bells are indicating a call to worship and the call we use today is more of a verbal call. Because of course we live so far away we wouldn’t hear the bells. It is interesting to note by the way I was thinking about this on the drive in this morning that in most of the liturgies of the church for the last 2,000 years there is a procession. We’re going to be talking about Psalm 95. Psalm 95 is part of a series of psalms that were sung as they approached the temple.

And they’d be coming to this temple singing these songs of approach to God. And then God would issue through the mediator of the Levitical order there a spoken word to the people and they would respond. They would get entrance into the temple then and so they had a processional. Before the act at the response to the call is a procession and so we have a—the only thing we have closely approaching a procession today is the driving to church Sunday morning I guess which is a bit mundane I suppose but if you put yourself in the mindset of what you’ve been doing when you come to church when you get up Sunday morning and you drive here and you hear the call issued you respond with a confession of sin, you’re doing something that the church has been doing perhaps in more beautiful forms.

But in any event, the church has been doing for 2,000 years, more than that, for 6,000 years because it really goes back to Old Testament worship. See, the Roman Catholic Church or the Eastern Orthodox Church, they had a processional as part of their liturgy. Usually, as the people were coming to the church in the villages, they’d be singing. But then beyond that, it got stylized. And as the people would begin holy worship, the choir would come up from the back singing a processional song.

Okay? And that was symbolizing that we come from where we’re at to God’s special presence. Well, in any event, at that point there was an official call to worship. Now, I want you to just be familiar with this word: the Sursum Corda was a call to worship used by the medieval church by the church actually until the time of the reformation and is still used in the Roman Catholic Church. But at the time of the reformation, the Sursum Corda, the lift up your hearts was the traditional form of the beginning or call to worship, one of them.

Anyway, it went like this. The officiant would say, “Lift up your hearts.” The congregation would say, “We lift them up unto the Lord.” The officiant would say, “Let us give thanks unto the Lord.” The congregation would say, “It is meet and right so to do.” And that’s the Sursum Corda—to lift up your hearts to worship God. It’s a call to worship. And that was used by the medieval liturgy. And then when Martin Bucer at Strasbourg developed his liturgy, he eliminated that and he would put in various scripture calls to worship, which is what we do every Sunday, a specific verse.

Calvin and Knox, however, continued to use the Sursum Corda in their liturgy. And I’m trying to give you a sense here now as we get into a discussion of the reformation of the call to worship what it’s been historically and then look at Psalm 95 and its implications for that call. If you’ve been paying attention for the last few years here at Reformation Covenant Church, you’ll note that our scripture reading at the beginning of the service, our call to worship has had a definite pattern to it. We spent, it might be several years ago now, a couple of years going right from the book of Genesis through to the end of the book of Revelation citing most of the applicable verses about Sabbath and we were calling ourselves to Sabbath convocative worship by going through these various scripture readings. I don’t know if you noticed that or not.

And then in the last oh year or so or so we did the same thing. We went right through the scriptures from Genesis to Revelation reading scriptures about worship. And I don’t know if you noticed that or not, but every Sunday we progress in the Bible a little bit in terms of these various passages speaking about worship and the call to worship from God’s throne room. And so we’ve done that. And then of course we’ve used Isaiah 58 a lot as well, which was used traditionally in the synagogue at least during certain portions of the history of the synagogue to call people to special convocated Lord’s Day Sabbath worship.

Okay. The Westminster Directory—it’d be useful before we get into Psalm 95 to just briefly look at what it says in terms of the call to worship. It says specifically in the Westminster Directory, “The congregation being assembled together, the minister after the solemn calling on them to the worshiping of the great name of God is to begin with prayer.” You see, that’s essentially what we do. People are assembled together, the minister calls, and then the minister prays.

And that’s what the Westminster Directory tells us about. And now we’re going to look at Psalm 95 and give some specifics now to this reformation of the call to worship. So, first we’re going to look at the call to worship. The calls to worship found in Psalm 95. And there are three of them actually. And then we’re going to look at what the implications of that are for special convocative worship. So now we’re going to turn to Psalm 95.

So you probably want to turn there in your Bibles. Okay. Psalm 95, as I said, has several calls to worship. Essentially, one way to look at Psalm 95, of course, is in two parts. And I read it when we first read it, and I think the second time as well, we read it in two halves, really. The first half is verse 1 to verse 7, the middle of verse 7. And then in the second half of verse 7, it says, “Today, if you hear his voice, harden not your heart.” And so we begin then a section of warning.

So first we have a call to worship in the first six and a half verses that have reasons attached to it. And then in the last half of verse 7 following, we have a call to worship with a warning or an exhortation—a warning attached to the call to worship. So first we’ll talk about the first half of Psalm 95:1-7a with the call with reasons. One other thing I should mention about Psalm 95 is the reason we’re looking at it.

It has been used in the church for 2,000 years now as a call to worship in various times. Augustine—let me just read here from Kirkpatrick’s commentary on Psalm 95. He says, “In appointing this psalm, sometimes called the invitatory psalm for daily use as an introduction to the psalms for the day, the English church follows a primitive and general use.” And he quotes now from Athanasius. Athanasius said “before the beginning of the prayers and he’s speaking here of the practice of the church at Constantinople before the beginning of the prayers Christians invite and exhort one another in the words of this psalm 95. In the western church the whole psalm appears to have been generally used as a call to worship. In the eastern church an invitatory founded on this psalm 95 is used at the commencement of service.”

So the purpose of quoting that is to show you that what we’re talking about here is a specific psalm that has been generally recognized by the church for 2,000 years to be a call to worship at the beginning of a special convocated worship or a call to prayers. It is sometimes referred to as the Venite, which is Latin for “O come,” which is the way it starts and that’s really the characterization of the psalm. It is a common summons to “O come” and is therefore the morning chant of the western church. Okay.

First half of the psalm then begins with the call to worship with reasons. The call itself is issued in verses 1 and 2 and is repeated in verse 6. Verses 1 through 5 forms a unit. Verses 6 and 7 form a unit. Verses 6 and 7 repeat in essence what was said in verses 1-5. Okay? So you’ve got the call to worship in verses 1 and 2. Verse 1 it says, “Oh come, let us sing. Let us make a joyful noise of the Lord.” And then in verse 2, “Let us come.” So you’ve got the thrice-repeated summons to come forward and to do something in response to this call. And then in verse 6, that’s repeated.

“Oh come, let us worship.” And so it’s repeated in verse 6 as well. This initial call to worship. Now before we go on from this, we should just note here in passing that the fact that God here issues a multi-repeated exhortation to come and worship him means we probably need that exhortation to turn aside our foot from our own ways and to come before his special presence. In Spurgeon’s Treasury of David, he quotes from Martin Guyire who says about this phrase and the call to worship.

Guyire said that our foot has a greater proclivity to head to the field, the oxen and the new wife than to come into the sacred courts. He’s having reference there of course to Luke 14 where we’re called to the marriage supper and people give various reasons why they don’t want to come. And so we need that exhortation from God that calls us to worship.

But secondly, the psalm gives us not simply a call, but it gives us a direction of how to worship. Okay? There’s an exhortation to worship in the call. There’s a specific specification of how we are to worship also in verses 1, 2, and 6. We’re to sing. That’s part of what worship is. We’re to make a joyful noise. And that doesn’t mean a joyful noise doesn’t mean singing à la Dan Apprentice. What Dan has often said he can’t sing too well. A joyful noise does not mean that sort of singing. Joyful noise referred to the blowing of trumpets and the singing that would go on during the worship.

So the noise is the fact you’ve got instruments and people all coming together. It’s supposed to be loud though and it’s supposed to be joyful. There’s to be thanksgiving. Verse 2 tells us in the worship of God again repeating a joyful noise and adding now the qualifier with psalms. So psalms are to be regular part of worship—singing, joyful noise—and then verse 6 gives us some a little different direction in terms of what we’re to do in worship.

It gives us three words. It says we’re to “Oh come let us worship let us bow down and let us kneel.” And now the word for worship means to prostrate oneself flat out on the ground. I always think when I think about this I think about when Chris and I were going to a—I don’t remember what kind of church it was now, brethren church I think many years ago. We didn’t go to a particular Sunday night service. We heard during the week what had happened.

Some man who had never visited the church before got up, interrupted the service, came up to the pulpit and said, “You guys want to know how to worship? I’ll show you how to worship.” And he threw himself right down on the stage flat out on his face. And people thought, “What kind of nut is this?” You know, but see, he was really right, right? That is what the word worship means. Now, he wasn’t right to disrupt the service, etc.

But sometimes we kind of need that, you know, we need somebody getting up here and saying, “Look at folks. Worship is something we’re supposed to do. It doesn’t just mean some sort of mental cogitation about things. It means a—it is a verb.” And a man named Weber has written a book called Worship is a Verb. And it’s an excellent book. I guess I haven’t read the thing myself, but I’ve read portions of it.

But in any event, worship means to throw yourself right out on the ground before God to prostrate oneself. And so we’ve got three things here, a repetition in verse 6 of three aspects of one aspect of worship thrice repeated—to throw yourselves out before God, to bow down to God, and to kneel before him. The idea is getting down. Okay? The idea is to prostrate yourself before God. And it’s repeated three times here for emphasis.

Really important that we understand when we come before God’s presence, we know who we’re coming before. And if we know who we’re coming before, the result of that in our minds is going to be a prostration of ourself before God because we’re humble. We’re humbled by his presence and by his call to worship. Now, the Proverbs says we can take a lesson from the ants and I guess I’m going to see if I can apply that to dogs.

We’ve got a couple of dogs and we learned I learned in dog training class that dogs have this really well-defined sense of order in the pack. And if you’re going to train a dog, you got to understand that you’ve got to be head of the pack. And we’ve got a dog, one of our dogs is just little slow. I won’t talk about him. He doesn’t have things right. But the other dog, he he knows that I’m the leader of the pack.

He looks at me as another dog probably. But the point is he knows that I’m top dog. Okay? And so when he comes up to me, he doesn’t come, oh, how you doing, you know, as an equal. He comes submissive. And he comes so submissive sometimes I have to kind of encourage him to lift his head up because he puts his head down like this and his tail is between his legs and he’s very submissive to me because he knows the leader of the pack.

Now, to the little kids, he doesn’t see them as leaders to him. See, they’re smaller than him, etc. And so, he kind of bounces on them and knocks them down, and he’s just playing with them. Well, what I’m saying is that is an aspect of our worship to God. According to verse 6 of this psalm, we’re supposed to grovel, I guess, in a sense, we’re supposed to realize our humiliation before the great God of creation.

Okay? We’re supposed to have that kind of submissive attitude. Now, we’re not like dogs, though, because the submission, the prostration of ourselves includes that aspect of understanding who we are in relationship to God and the need for mercy from him. But it also includes an adoration, a reverence. We talked last week about honor and we talked about honoring our parents, bowing down before them, etc.

It isn’t the simple, “Oh my gosh, he’s going to whip me.” Like it is with the dog. We have an appreciation. God has revealed himself to us as being loving to us. He’s our shepherd. We’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes, but it isn’t. The dog illustration breaks down there. He’s given us an understanding of who he is and so we are submissive and low before him. But that lowness also indicates our adoration, our love and obedience to him.

Okay. After this then, these acts of what we are to do in worship, it entails a statement of who is to be worshiped in verses 1 and 6. Verse 1 it says, “We’re to come before to sing unto the Lord Yahweh the covenant name of God. And then it says again in verse 1, make this joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. Remember that term rock of our salvation for a little bit later in the outline. So we’re to come before God and worship him.

Finally, we have a direction and the fourth aspect of this call to worship is a direction of where we are to worship. In verse 2, it says, “Let us come before his presence, his presence with thanksgiving.” And that’s the special place of God’s holy presence. And this psalm, as I said, was written originally to be used in temple liturgy. And the idea was God’s special presence. Now, as I said before, Solomon knew that God’s presence fills the whole world, but in a special way, God wants them to consider his special presence in the temple.

And so, that’s when they would do these acts of worship specifically and in a convocative pattern—was at the temple. That was where his presence was. That was where they were to worship.

Now in terms of this—well, I’ll mention this a little later. I guess that’s where we’re to worship. Okay, so that’s the call to worship telling us what we’re supposed to do, when we’re supposed to do it, who we’re supposed to worship, etc.

And then there are some reasons attached to this call. As I said, God is nice to us. He is very gracious and forgiving to us. And he gives us reasons as well as the command, which alone would be enough to cause us to worship him. He then gives us some reasons as well in verses 3 through 5. Now implied here, I’m not overlooking the fact that when it tells us we’re to worship Yahweh and the rock of our salvation, that certainly has implications for why we’re to worship him.

But we want to look specifically at the outline God gives us in verses 3 through 5. Verse 3 says first of all that God is a great God and a great king above all gods. And in your outline, I’ve entitled this the civil preeminence of God—is one reason why we obey the command that he issues to us to come before his presence and worship. Now it says when he’s king above all gods, the word gods there in Psalm as in Psalm 82, I think has primary reference to civil rulers.

Civil rulers in the Old Testament, Psalm 82 specifically and other places are referred to as gods, rulers, strong ones. That’s what the word means. They’re strong and mighty in terms of their authority. The point is Jesus is king of all kings. God is king of all gods. Okay? King of kings, lord of lords. And so God has civil preeminence. I. T. Robert Ingram in writing in The World Under God’s Law said that “the other gods about whom we must be concerned are as they ever have been to be found in the seats of temporal or human government.” Okay, we don’t normally think that way. But when God calls us to worship here and says we’re to worship him because he is king above all gods, the idea is we worship him and not the other gods.

And it doesn’t mean idols of stone—it means that too. But it also means we’re not to ascribe worship to those people sitting in seats of temporal power and government. And of course, this was central to the affirmation of the church, the lordship of Jesus Christ, not the lordship of the state and Caesar. And it’s central to our day and age. The questions that we face in terms of legislative action etc. are really questions of lordship ultimately. Okay. And who is God and who are idols? And God calls us to worship him in his civil preeminence.

Secondly, he calls us to worship him because of his creative preeminence. In verses 4 and 5, we read statements about the created order. He owns the deep places. He owns the hills. He made and owns the sea. He made the land. And so he’s sovereign over the maker of all that there is. My daughter was asking me this morning a question about whether or not God could lie. And I said, “Well, you know, the question is phrased incorrectly. We phrase questions about God in terms of man.

We’ve got to remember that illustrations break down. Our understanding breaks down because this is the God who created everything else. And we can’t think of him solely in terms of the creation. He wants us to be known through the creation, but he’s incomprehensible in his totality. He knows us completely. We don’t know him completely. We know him through his creation, but it is not complete and total knowledge.

The point is that because God is the creator, we are to worship him and to again get down and prostrate ourselves before him. Third, we’re to worship God because of his covenantal preeminence. Not only does he make all things, make the physical order in verses 4 and 5, but verse 6 repeats the call. And then verse 7 repeats the reason, a reason. And so we look to verse 7 and it says the reason is that he is our God and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.

And now this is a great fact. It is a great fact that not only has God created us, so we have necessary obedience to him. He’s redeemed us. He calls us to worship because we’re the sheep of his pasture. That means that we’re in his special place of protection and nourishment and guarding. And so God not only created us and demands our worship and he’s not only our king and demands our worship, he loves us.

He’s our shepherd and our leader and our guardian. And because of that, we worship him. We’re the sheep of his pasture. And there’s a great sense here of a movement in these two calls to worship beginning in verse 1. Then the reasons in verses 4 and 5 and then the call repeated in verse 6, the reason repeated in verse 7, but the reason is built here. Now it’s gone from the fact that he is powerful.

He’s the king. He tells you to do it. Do it. Then to explain he made everything. We’re to respond to our maker. And then finally we have this great crescendo of who God is in terms of calling us to worship. He is our great shepherd. He loves us. He’s brought us into covenant relationship with him. He’s the rock of our salvation. He’s died—and they knew, I think they knew that those sacrificial animals pointed to the death of God’s only son.

We certainly know it. He died to effect that. He is the great shepherd who will give his life for the sheep. And so we’re to worship him. Okay.

Summarization of the reasons then: God’s exaltation. He is the great king, the creator, and the redeemer shepherd of his people. And for those three reasons, we are to worship him and obey the call. And so when you get up Sunday morning and you drive to church, you think, why am I doing this? Think of those three reasons. God’s king. He tells us to do it. He created us for his purpose. The scriptures tell us one of the purposes is to praise him. And then finally, he’s redeemed us that we might praise him correctly. Okay.

All the implications then of this is that the covenant of grace, God’s condescension to bring us into covenant with him is a reason why we worship him. The surety of our salvation, the rock of our salvation—the surety of our salvation is another reason to worship God, to obey the call, the strength and majesty of the Lord is a reason to prostrate ourselves before him. He made and owned—he made and owns all things. He’s our creator and as a redeemer—and because he’s our creator and our redeemer, he’s also our king. And for those three reasons, we worship God and respond in obedience to his call. He is God. He has condescended and shown mercy to us. We are made and owned by him and are the objects of his special care and love. And therefore, for all these reasons, we prostrate ourselves before God in submission, in acknowledgement of who he is and in loving adoration for what he has done for us.

Okay, that’s the first half. The second half of Psalm 95 gives us a call with warning. Spurgeon commenting on Psalm 95 and this transition that we going to look at here now said the following. And it’s interesting that Spurgeon speaks about the call to worship here and he doesn’t relate it to the ringing of the bells as a call to worship but he talks about the psalm in terms of ringing of bells. In any event Spurgeon says of Psalm 95, “It has about it a ring like that of the church bell. And like the bells, it sounds both merrily and solemnly. At first ringing out a lively peal and then dropping into a funeral note—as if tolling at the funeral of the generations which perished in the wilderness.”

And so you have this big change of how the thing is written rhythmically. This is how the psalm is written rhythmically as well as the intent of the words themselves. It goes in this lively pealing of the bells as a call to worship. And then there’s the solemn funeral ringing of the bells warning us that if we don’t respond to worship then he judges us. We don’t enter rest and we die like they died in the wilderness. So that’s the transition that’s going on here.

And so the second call to worship is a call with warning as opposed to reasons. Again here in verses 7b following we have an exhortation. Okay. Or we have first of all the call to worship itself. Verse 7b says “Today if you will hear his voice”—implied in that is that you’re supposed to hear the voice. You’re supposed to come to worship now and forever. In all that we do, you hear his voice. So that’s the call itself. Then the warning is attached to it. And the warning has an exhortation. It says, “Don’t harden your heart.” Okay? Don’t do this.

Now, it’s not telling what is to do. It’s telling us what not to do. And what it says is in response to the call to worship, don’t stay away. Don’t harden your hearts. And then secondly, it gives us an historic example as well as the exhortation not to harden our hearts. In other words, obey and don’t disobey. He goes on to give his historic example. The time of the historic example is “the provocation” and “the day of temptation” in the wilderness.

Now, you’ve got to know there that the Hebrew words used for provocation and temptation there are the words masa, which means provocation. Meribah is the Hebrew word for temptation. And Massa and Meribah have specific historic references that this psalm refers to. And probably the King James people would have been wise to translate it Massa and Meribah because there’s no reason not to. And it has a geographical connection. He’s giving them a historical incident here. And he tells us what incident he’s talking about by using the terms Massa and Meribah.

In Exodus 17:1-7, the second year after the Exodus, people complain to God at Horeb for the fact that they have no water. They’re thirsty. And the name of that place is called Massa Umeribah. In the Hebrew, it is called, in other words, provocation and temptation by God because of their failure to rely upon his sovereign enablement. They cried out and complained because they had no water and they said, “Let’s go back to Egypt. What do you bring us out here to die for?” And God’s reminding them of the unbelief of the people.

Now, again, I said before, remember that God is the rock of our salvation. And God gives them a picture of that now in his response to their cries for water. He gives them water. He gives them water out of a rock. In 1 Corinthians, Paul tells us quite clearly that rock is Jesus Christ. You see, they failed to come to the rock of God. And he reminds them now through this object lesson that it’s from the rock, from the person of God and the covenant mediator that all blessings flow out of. And they didn’t believe that.

So he gives them this symbol which was probably lost on that generation because 40 years later—40 years later at the end of the wilderness wanderings, it happens again. The same term is used 40 years later in the book of Numbers 20:2-13. And the same thing happens. The people grumble because of lack of water. And God says again, these people are judged because of it.

So what you’ve got here and the historical example that he gives them to warn them what they are to heed the call to worship is he gives them an example at the beginning of the 40 years in the wilderness. And at the end of the 40 years in the wilderness and says that generation was faithless. They learned nothing after 40 years. They still relying upon physical water instead of the grace that comes forward from God for their sustenance. Okay? God knows we need physical water. We don’t need to remind him of that fact. We don’t need to remind Jesus Christ—symbolized by Moses—of that fact. What we’ve got to do is rely upon the fact that God is with us and the rock of our salvation is the source of blessings to us.

Their act was one of tempting and provoking God. And it might sound a little—you might not understand here—in verse 8 and 9 it says “When your fathers tempted me, proved me and saw my work.” Most commentators believe that it the implication of that last phrase is they tempted and proved me even though they had seen my work. Remember these people were not blind to the great mercy and deliverance of God. They had come out of Egypt, right?

God had brought them out of the mightiest nation in the in the face of the world at that time. And then he had Pharaoh and his men perish in the Red Sea for heaven’s sake. And so they’d seen God’s word, but they still tempted him and proved him and grumbled and disputed and complained and said, “We don’t want your grace. We want water, physical water, and to heck with the rest of it.” And that’s all they got.

They got no rest from God. They got water. Now, the result of this, of course, was God’s judgment upon them. God’s evaluation, 40 years of grief to them. The second evaluation, they die in the wilderness, not going into the promised land. Okay? And I shouldn’t leave this psalm behind without commenting on the fact that it’s of course quoted at length in Hebrews 3 and 4. And it’s important there to recognize that there’s many parallels.

Hebrews was written to a group of Christians who were on the verge of apostasy, falling away from the faith, and specifically they didn’t want to go to worship services anymore because they were going to get persecuted if they did that. Now, worship services—we’re going to talk about the implication for all of life. And we’re not just relating this just to what you do Sunday morning. But the point is that is a symbol of everything else.

And these Hebrew Christians are on the verge of giving all that up. And so, they were warned by God, don’t do that. The writer of the book of Hebrews warns them about that. And he uses the same example, this same psalm, the call to worship. He says, when you hear the call, obey it. As the generation that didn’t obey reliance upon the rock, Jesus Christ, and they suffered for 40 years and then were judged terminally by God.

They didn’t get to go into the promised land. So in the same way these Hebrew Christians who were living in the approximately 40 years between the resurrection of our Lord and the judgment of Jerusalem in AD 70 in the apostate Jewish system, they were also being likened to that 40 years in the wilderness. They were warned the end of that time. The evaluation better find you fitting because if it doesn’t, you’re going to be found outside of rest, eternal damnation instead of eternal rest in Jesus Christ.

So there’s warning in Hebrews 3 and 4 and they relate to they go back to Psalm 95 and they relate to worship. They relate I believe to convocative worship as well. It’s interesting that verse 12 of Hebrews 3 says “Take heed brethren lest among you be an evil heart of unbelief and departing from the living God but exhort one another daily while it is called today lest any of you be hardened to the deceitfulness of sin.”

The word exhort here the term used is found first here and secondly in Hebrews 10:25 and most of us should be familiar with that passage. Hebrews 10:25 says not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together but to encourage each other in this—okay—to continue meeting together and then understanding the implications for that meeting together in all of our life which we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes.

Okay. So and of course let’s see in Hebrews 4 yet he tells us that we’re not—that we are to fear then lest any be found short of falling of coming into his rest. And Hebrews 4:16 says, “Let us therefore come boldly under the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace in help in time of need.”

Now, I don’t want to lessen the impact of that to you and your daily lives and to the daily need we have for the grace of God and the ability we have to go to the throne of grace. But I also don’t want you to miss the fact that Hebrews 3 and 4 repeats what Psalm 95 said and that is a call in its first use to special convocative worship and on the basis of that worship then to understand that all of our lives are regulated by God’s principles. Okay. And so when he says tells us don’t fall back don’t be like those people that didn’t obey the call to worship that got the warning in Psalm 95 and the people later at the restoration of the temple got the warning not to fall back from convocative worship, don’t do that. Approach the throne of grace.

Exhort one another to approach the throne of grace and don’t forsake assembling yourselves together. What I’m trying to say is Hebrews 3 and 4 makes it doubly clear that the call to worship is first a call to convocative worship and secondly the implications of that for all of our lives. Okay, that’s what Psalm 95 is all about. A call to worship repeated twice, as reasons—repeated a third time with a severe judgmental warning from God that we must not forget.

Okay, let’s talk about some implications then of the call to worship found in Psalm 95 implications. I draw two of them here. First, we have in Psalm 95 the proper pattern for corporate worship. The proper pattern for corporate worship.