The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Even the mountains quake in his presence. Today on the Bible Study Hour, we'll take a closer look at the poetic imagery of Psalm 29. In this psalm of praise, David experiences God's power through creation, and he calls on the heavenly hosts to join him in worship of our powerful creator.

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. David is witnessing a literal storm and, rather than fearing the thunder and cowering from the lightning, he acknowledges the power and presence of God throughout all creation. If you have your Bible, turn to Psalm 29.

Dr. James Boice: Now, we're going to be talking about Psalm 29 tonight, and I invite you to open your Bible to it if you've not already done so. This is a wonderful psalm. I am impressed as I work my way through the book of Psalms how wonderfully diverse they are. I don't think that there is a portion of scripture that requires more of the expositor or preacher than the book of Psalms.

You have to have a certain amount of knowledge even to understand what they're talking about. It requires a certain depth of experience because the Psalms reach down to the very heart of the experience of God in all kinds of diverse situations. Then, in addition to all of that, they're presented in a bewildering variety of poetic forms. So you have to have knowledge of doctrine as a whole, which includes a knowledge of the Bible, you have to have a knowledge of Christian experience, and you have to understand something about poetry. I think for that reason, it is very hard to go consistently through the book of Psalms and teach them in the most edifying of ways.

One thing that we find when we go through the Psalms is that we are always being surprised, and that's certainly what happens when we come to this psalm. This psalm is unlike anything we've seen before. You say, "How can it be unlike everything we've seen before? It's a psalm, after all, and it's there in the Psalter and it uses the words we've seen before." Yes, and all of that is true, and yet it's remarkably different in a number of ways.

First of all, this is entirely a psalm of praise to God. That is to say, it is exclusively a psalm of praise. You say, "Well, aren't all of the psalms psalms of praise?" Yes, they are in most cases, but not exclusively. Usually, they mix other things with it. The worshiper will say, "I'm in great distress, God help me," and then he says, "I know God's going to help me and I praise his name."

Or he'll recite something that's happened to him. He says, "I was in great distress and God came to me and delivered me. Praise his name, join me as I praise him." Sometimes they'll speak about sin and the need to confess it, and they will be psalms of confession. Sometimes they'll speak in ways that glorify the king and point ahead to the coming of Jesus Christ, who is the great anointed one of God. All those different things occur in the Psalms along with the praise.

But here's a psalm that is exclusively praise. It talks about God and his glory from verse one to verse eleven. Then secondly, it's pure poetry. Now again, you're going to say, "Well, aren't all of the psalms poetry?" Yes, they are. But when you read this one and study it, you sense that it is almost in a category by itself. What are the characteristics of Hebrew verse? Well, there are two chiefly. One is repetition and the second is parallelism. Chief characteristics of our verse are meter and rhyme, but that's not true of Hebrew verse.

These characteristics are repetition and parallelism. Now, the repetition is obvious. Let me give you just the chief examples, the chief two examples. You have a repetition of the word Jehovah throughout the psalm. It's translated the Lord in upper and small caps, and you find it in virtually every verse. Altogether, it occurs eighteen times in the eleven verses of the psalm. Each of these verses, with a few exceptions, has two lines. So there are about twenty-two lines there. Well, eighteen of them have the name of the Lord Jehovah in them.

You notice it right at the beginning. "Ascribe to the Lord, ascribe to the Lord, ascribe to the Lord, worship the Lord." So the first four lines of the psalm have the word Jehovah. And then there's a special combination of the word Jehovah and something else that you find in the middle portion, verses three through nine, and that's in the phrase "the voice of the Lord." So the word Jehovah occurs there as well, but in the phrase "the voice of the Lord," and that occurs seven times. So here you have this remarkable set of repetitions of the name of God in those two combinations.

Then the parallelism is obvious as well, very striking. Notice verses one and two. I already gave a slight indication of how that happens. There you have three absolutely parallel lines followed by a fourth, which is also parallel but varies it somewhat. It's the way Hebrew verse is written. Look, "Ascribe to the Lord, O mighty ones, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength, ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name." Now, those are three lines that are almost directly parallel. Then the fourth comes on, which is parallel in thought but varies in words: "Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness."

You have the same thing in the middle portion of the psalm. There, most of the verses contain two lines, except the first and the last. Almost all of those verses containing the two lines are parallel. The first simply amplifies it a bit, it sets it off. "The voice of the Lord is over the waters, the God of glory thunders, the Lord thunders over the mighty waters." You see how that works? You have the voice of the Lord in the first line being over the waters. You have the glory of God thundering in the second line. Then the third line combines the two ideas.

All the rest, as I say, are couplets with the exception of verse seven, which is a couplet but doesn't involve a repetition, and verse nine, which adds a final line: "And in his temple all cry, 'Glory!'" And then finally, at the very end, you have a set of parallels again. "The Lord sits enthroned over the flood; the Lord is enthroned as King forever. The Lord gives strength to his people; the Lord blesses his people with peace." So poetically, that's the way it operates.

Now, you might say at that point, if you have all of that repetition, you have the name of God being repeated eighteen times, no other names for God introduced here, just Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah. If you have "the voice of the Lord" repeated seven times, if you have all these ideas in parallel, what is it that keeps the poem from being boring or dull? If you and I were to write a poem and say the same thing over and over again, well, nobody would want to read it.

This poem is not like that, and you say, "Well, what is it that keeps it from being that way?" What does it is the motion that you have in the poem. You have two kinds of motion. Verses three through nine are describing a storm. We're going to look at that in a moment, come back to it and look at it in some detail. That storm begins out over the Mediterranean toward the North and it moves inland and down the whole coastal range, and finally, it expends itself out over the desert. So although you have this repetition of the voice of the Lord going on again and again and again in those verses, the storm itself is moving, and that keeps the poem from being dull.

Then bracketing that, going back to the first two verses, which precede the description of the storm, and the last two verses, which follow it, you have a second kind of movement, which is a movement from heaven to earth. At the very beginning, as David begins to praise God, he calls upon the mighty ones of heaven, that is the angels of God, to join him in his praise. Glory is set up in heaven. Then you have the storm. Finally, as you get to the very end of the poem, you have peace on earth. No wonder Ironside, who liked this a lot, called it possibly one of the greatest poems in the Bible, and he said perhaps his favorite poem in all of literature.

Now, you see, you have to approach it that way. If you don't approach it poetically, if you stand back and say, "Well, we all know that the voice of God is not the same thing as the thunder, but thunder is caused by colliding oppositely charged electronic particles," and so forth, you're going to miss it all. This is poetry, it's not scientific writing. But if you'll approach it poetically, as we are called upon to do, and David obviously was a great poet, then it will speak to you. It will speak to you of the glory of God and it will speak to your heart in a moving way, just as we are often greatly moved when we experience some great turmoil in the heavens, such as we see in a storm.

Spurgeon said something interesting about this. He compared this psalm that has this magnificent description of the storm with Psalm 8 and Psalm 19. You know what Psalm 8 is. That's the one that talks about man being made a little lower than the heavenly beings. The reason Spurgeon said we have to compare it with that is that that psalm talks about the heavens and the moon and the stars. You recall that verse, "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place." Spurgeon said you ought to read that psalm by moonlight.

Then you come to the 19th Psalm, and that has that great description of the sun. It begins, "The heavens declare the glory of God," and then it's evident what he's talking about because you get on in verses four and five, "In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion." He says you ought to study that psalm by daybreak. Then he comes to this one and he says you really need to understand it in the context of some great storm.

Here's the way Spurgeon puts that. Just as the eighth psalm is to be read by moonlight when the stars are bright, and as the nineteenth needs the rays of the rising sun to bring out its beauty, so this can best be rehearsed beneath the black wing of tempest by the glare of the lightning or amid that dubious dusk which heralds the war of elements. It's obvious that Spurgeon himself is poetic and he loved that kind of passage. He wrote, "The verses march to the tune of thunderbolts; God is everywhere conspicuous, and all the earth is hushed by the majesty of his presence."

Now, let's look at it that way. Let's start with verses one and two. David here addresses himself to the heavenly beings, which is what that phrase "O mighty ones" refers to. It's an unusual phrase. It's Bene Elim in Hebrew. The reason it's unusual is that the normal way of describing the heavenly beings along those lines is by the words Bene Elohim. Now, that's usually translated the sons of God. You find it in Job and in other places and it obviously refers to angels.

Bene Elim really means sons of gods, and literally taken, that would seem to suggest a lower level of divine beings. There is God and then the gods and then the sons of the gods. But that is so foreign to anything in Hebrew theology, it's rightly rejected. Probably we simply have a variation of the other idea here. If you say, "Why do you have that strange kind of double plural?" We really don't know. It might just be an unusual form or it might be a way of accentuating the number. It might be a way of saying angels of angels of angels, and that's probably the case.

At any rate, that's what David seems to be doing. He directs his eyes heavenward and he calls upon the angels of God to join him in ascribing glory to the one whose glory is being revealed so powerfully in the storm that he's about to describe. Now, you see, you have to be poetic at this point because if you find yourself being too rationalistic, you're going to miss it. You're going to say things like this, "Why should David be calling upon the angels to praise God? After all, that's what the angels do all the time. That's their job, to praise God."

And what he really should be doing is calling upon human beings to praise God because we're the ones who don't praise him. You don't have to say to the seraphim who surround the throne of God, "Now be sure you say, 'Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty,' and don't forget to keep it up." That would be obnoxious on our part. That's what they're doing. They know how to do it far better than we do. If that is the way you're thinking, you're missing it.

You see, why is David saying that? He knows perfectly well the angels are praising God. But what he's saying is this: he's saying the glory of God is so wonderful and we've seen it in such a glorious way in this storm, no possible human voice can do God glory. We could get all the people of God, all the ones who know him, all assembled in the temple praising God, "Glory, glory, glory," and it wouldn't begin to do him justice. So angels, come on, help us out, join us as we sing. You see, what he's doing is calling upon all the created order to ascribe glory to the one who sits upon the throne.

And maybe he's doing something else too. He uses two words there when he calls upon the angels. One is the word ascribe, he repeats it three times, and the second word is worship. Now, those have particular connotations, and what they suggest is how we should glorify God. To ascribe to the Lord glory and strength has to do with the mind. You see, it involves content. You say God is glorious and so, recognizing that he is glorious, you give him glory. That's a mental activity and it's a reminder that worship is mental.

Worship is not just having a good time, just getting a kick out of singing a hymn or some sort of song so you go away and say, "Wasn't that neat?" That's not worship. Worship is recognizing the attributes of God and praising him for them. So he says that. And then that word worship, this particular word worship, has the idea of bowing down, and that involves the will. In other words, the surrender of our will to him.

Putting those two together, you have what worship really is. It's recognizing the glory of God with our minds and then bowing before him. You say, "I suppose there's a sense in which the devils recognize the glory of God." They don't ascribe glory to him, they hate him for it, but they recognize it. They just don't bow before him. But God's people do. You say again, "Well, are the angels failing to do that?" No, no. What David is doing as he addresses himself to the angels is reminding human beings that as the angels ascribe glory to God and bow down before him, so should human beings. Want to know how to worship? That's how.

Now, we come in verses three through nine to the heart of this, and the heart of it is this great description of the storm. You really have to have experienced some great storm to have a feeling for what David is doing here. I'm sure you have, different times in your life, if you think back over it, some time when you were actually exposed to the fury of the elements.

When I read this, particularly the motion of the storm as it goes from North to South, I think of something that I believe I've mentioned on other occasions. One summer, my family and I had the privilege of spending some time on Lake Brienz in Central Switzerland, not far from Interlaken. Interlaken means between the lakes, and the two lakes are the Thunersee on one side and Lake Brienz on the other.

We were on Lake Brienz, which is the least occupied, at least sparsely occupied of the two lakes. We were on the south shore of that lake. There was not a great deal of building there and we were rather high up, so we had a wonderful vantage point to look out over the whole of Lake Brienz and then down to our left from the balcony of the chalet in which we were staying, we could see the edge of Interlaken and beyond that, although we couldn't see it farther down the valley, was the Thunersee.

Now, we were there one August afternoon when a storm came by, the likes of which I had never seen. We saw it gathering down the lake, very cloudy down there. We saw rain being driven before it as it passed its way over Interlaken and began to make its way up the lake. It was like staring at a snake, we were fascinated by it. We were in bright sunshine, and yet down there there were all those dark clouds and we watched it. At first, we didn't even know what it was. We said, "What is that going on down there?"

And we stood on the balcony and watched this thing as it came toward us. It got bigger and darker and fiercer, and all the time, it was like nothing had touched us at all. There we were, the bright sunshine, everything was calm, the flowers were blooming. It was like an afternoon in the pages of Heidi. And then suddenly, this storm hit. And we recognized that we had been treating it far too lightly. It was like a hurricane, the wind blew. One of our children was out on the balcony and we barely got her in in time.

We finally got inside and we battened down the hatches and we saw that storm go by and it moved on up the valley and finally faded out into the mountains to our right. Now, that's the kind of storm you have here. You actually have three motions of the storm interrupted by a description of the lightning in verse seven. You have the gathering of the storm in the North in verses three and four, you have it moving down the land in verses five and six, then the lightning, and finally you have it passing out over the desert to the South.

Verses three and four are interesting because they describe the voice of the Lord, which means the thunder, gathering over the waters. What does that mean? Well, there are two things it could mean. It could mean gathering out over the Mediterranean Sea, or it could mean the waters in the heavens, that is the thunderclouds that contain the water. The latter is a biblical idea because if you go back to Genesis, you know in the creation account, the Lord makes a firmament, that is the sky, separating from the water above the firmament and the water below the firmament.

The water below is the water you find in ponds and streams and rivers and the ocean, and the water above is the water in the atmosphere. So that's a biblical idea. I think personally it's describing the storm as it begins out over the Mediterranean. At any rate, wherever it is, the thunder is beginning to shake the land and warn the people that the storm is coming.

It begins in the North, as I said. Verses five and six make that clear. Up over Lebanon, which is mentioned twice, and Sirion, which is a name for Mount Hermon, an ancient name for Mount Hermon, and then it begins to move down the land. Here's this great storm passing down the great mountainous ridge that marks the Holy Land. I described earlier how you have all these wonderful parallel statements and the repetitions.

The repetition as you read it, particularly in the Hebrew, suggests the sound of the storm and the sound of the thunder. Verse seven doesn't fit. It has a different tone in the Hebrew, and you can pick up something of it in the English translation: "The voice of the Lord strikes with flashes of lightning." That's exactly the way it's written. You see, in the midst of all this rolling thunder and repetition that you have in the earlier verses, the lightning now is flashing, you see?

And then finally, the storm having passed down through the land of Israel, you get to verses eight and nine that describe how it moves on out into the southern desert, the desert of Kadesh. "The voice of the Lord shakes the desert too; the Lord shakes the desert of Kadesh. The voice of the Lord twists the oaks and strips the forests bare." And what are the people of God doing all this time? Well, you find it in that line that David has tacked on, "And in his temple all cry, 'Glory!'"

Now, that could refer to heaven, of course. He began by calling upon the angels to praise God. It could be the temple of God in heaven. But probably not. If there's nothing explicit in the text that would indicate that what he's thinking about is heaven, he's probably thinking about the temple in Jerusalem. This storm is passing over, and while it's passing over, the people of God are there and they're saying, "Glory, glory, glory!"

We had an experience like that here some years ago at one of the Philadelphia conferences on Reformed theology, if you come to all those conferences you may remember it. Joel Niedenhut was preaching on that occasion, and he was preaching on the judgment of God. And one of those thunderstorms that come in the spring began to pass over the city. And it was just like that. We could hear the thunder off in the distance, we knew it was coming, the air was humid.

He began to preach on the judgment of God, and the more he talked about the judgment of God, the louder the thunder became. And finally, it descended on us, and a tremendous crash and the lightning was flashing and the rain was pouring, and he was preaching judgment, judgment, judgment, as if we were all here together saying, "Glory, glory, glory!" You see, that's what David is describing that took place in Jerusalem in that day.

Now, I ask the question, is all he is doing here is talking about a storm? It would be worthwhile to do that. The glory of God is seen in his creation. You see it in a sunset, you can see it in a storm. Probably doing more than that. And the reason I say that is his emphasis upon the voice of the Lord. Voice of the Lord is referring to the thunder, but no Jew would read that "the voice of the Lord" and say, "Well, that's all it's referring to."

When a Jew would think of the voice of God, the voice of Jehovah, a Jew would be aware of how powerful that voice is and it would conjure up all kinds of associations. I say the Jew, but that should be true of us as well, Jew and Gentile. What do you think of when you think of the voice of the Lord? If you know your Bible, it's hard to think of the voice of the Lord without thinking of creation. First chapter of Genesis. How does all of the created order come into being? Well, God speaks, doesn't he?

God says, "Let there be light," bam, and there's light. And God says, "Let there be a heaven," and there's a heaven. And God says, "Let there be a sun," and there's a sun. And God says, "Let there be a moon and stars and the earth and the things on the earth, the plants and the animals," and all those things follow upon the voice of God, the creative voice of God. I think that's not missing here. It's hard to think of God speaking in the storm without thinking of God also speaking in creation.

And how about the voice of God in calling sinners to himself? I don't think that is here, at least I don't find it here. Somebody will tell me afterward that they find it somewhere, but nevertheless, you can hardly read that without thinking that it is the voice of God that brings spiritual life out of spiritual death and apart from which there is no spiritual life. Jesus calls his own, and when he calls them, his voice creates life in them and they come.

Spurgeon liked that. This is one of the points at which Spurgeon is better poet than he is an expositor. But what he does is find the effect of the voice of God on all these different things that are mentioned here as David describes the storm. Here's the way he does it. He thinks about those mighty cedars of Lebanon, those great symbols of strength and power in the Ancient Near East, like our redwood trees in California.

And then Spurgeon says this, this is pure Spurgeon, "The Gospel of Jesus has dominion over the most inaccessible of mortals, and when the Lord sends the word, it breaks hearts far stouter than the cedars." And then he reads down a little bit further and he discovers the effect of the voice of God upon the mountains. You see, it says there even the mountains shake. And he writes this, "The glorious Gospel of the blessed God is more than equal power over the rocky obduracy and mountainous pride of man."

There's a poetic way of handling it. And then he gets to verse seven that talks about the lightning and he says this, "Flames of fire attend the voice of God in the Gospel, illuminating and melting the hearts of men. By these he consumes our lusts and kindles in us a holy flame of ever-inspiring love and devotion." And he reads down a little bit further in this description of the psalm and he gets to the desert and he says, "Low-lying plains must hear the voice of God as well as the lofty mountains. The poor as well as the mighty must acknowledge the glory of the Lord."

Now, I have to say, that's better poetry than exegesis. I don't think that's what the text is saying at all. And yet, if you are a child of God and have heard the voice of God, you know the truth of what Spurgeon is saying. You know that if God's voice had not broken through the hardness of your heart, you would never have come to him. And that if the voice of God had not watered the parched desert of your soul, you would never have experienced the reality of spiritual life. And God does that.

So when we think about the voice of God, we think about the voice of God in the physical creation, but we think about the voice of God in the spiritual creation too. And there's one other thing. When we think about the voice of God, we think about the voice of God in judgment. Now, that's here. You see, the first is here and the third is here. But you find it at the end. Let me back up a minute.

Verses three through nine describe the passing of the storm. When you get to verses ten and eleven, the storm has passed. "The Lord sits enthroned over the flood; the Lord is enthroned as King forever," and so on. It's a little bit like that description of God passing by Elijah. You recall that Elijah was discouraged after his great battle against the priests of Baal, and God told him to go stand on the mountain and he would pass by. Elijah did, he hid in a cave. And God came by. And he came by as a fire and he came by as a whirlwind, came by as an earthquake.

And yet it said the Lord was not in any of those things, and when they had passed, there was a gentle whisper. And Elijah went forth, covering his face in order to meet with God. That's what it's like here. You see, you've had the earthquake and the storm, everything but the fire unless the lightning counts as that, and finally, at the very end, it's quiet. And God is there in the quiet just as God was present in the storm.

The way that's described is significant, and this is where we get to the matter of judgment. It says in verse ten, "The Lord sits enthroned over the flood." This is the only place in the Old Testament that particular word occurs except in the flood narrative of Genesis 6 through 9. If you understand the word as any Jewish reader would, the thought would immediately run back to that scene of great judgment. Now, it's true that you can understand this in a physical way.

Here you've had this great storm with all the water of the thunderclouds unleashed upon the mountains. The water has run down into the ravines, there's been flash flooding in the low-lying areas. That's what Jesus was talking about when he talked about the storm coming and washing away the house of the man who had built in a valley and not built upon a rock. All of that is very literal. But you see, if this is a word that is reminiscent of the flood of Genesis 6 through 9, it's a way of saying that God is the God of judgment.

There's even something else, although it's not evident in our translation. They made it all present tense, but in the Hebrew, the first part of that is actually past tense. "The Lord sat enthroned over the flood" is what it says. That seems to be a very direct reference back to Genesis. And then it passes on to the present, "The Lord is enthroned as King forever." In other words, God sat in judgment once and God continues to sit enthroned, and God is going to come in judgment once again. You see, that's the way it ends.

The voice of God in creation, the voice of God in regeneration, and the voice of God in judgment. It's meant to be sobering. Certainly, that was the purpose of the storm, it's the way David saw it. And although this is a great description of the glory of God, and Christians can read it as that and praise him for his glory in nature, it is at a far deeper level a warning against any who continue in sin, somehow oblivious to the knowledge that the judgment of God will certainly come.

And when that judgment comes, it's going to be far worse than any mere thunderstorm. The Lord Jesus Christ, talking about it, said it'll be so terrible in that day that men and women will call upon the mountains to fall upon them and cover them, to hide them from the fury of Almighty God. And the mountains will not do it because they obey the voice of God and not the voice of man. You see, what it calls upon us to do is find our refuge in the Lord Jesus Christ while there is still time and it's a day of grace.

And I don't think that's reading much into it either because at the very end, you see, after you've had all of the turmoil, the psalm ends with peace. "The Lord gives strength to his people and blesses his people with peace." Where do you find peace? You find peace at the cross of Jesus Christ. You go back to the very end of verse nine and you find the word glory. You go back to the beginning, you find the word glory. There you have glory in the highest, don't you?

As soon as you think of that, you think of Luke 2:14 and the announcement of the birth of Jesus Christ by the angels. "Glory to God in the highest, gloria in excelsis," and what? "And on earth, in terra pax, peace to those upon whom his favor rests." The favor of God rests upon us in Jesus Christ. So if we have a proper sense, as I trust we do, of the glory of God in nature, know that that glory of God and power of God in nature will be unleashed in judgment except if we find ourselves in Christ. Let's pray.

Our Father, we thank you for this psalm, a great one. We're aware as we study it that we have not exhausted it. It's a psalm that goes far beyond any understanding that any of us have, and yet what we find there is more than enough to stir us to adoration and worship, causing us to bow down. And if we haven't done that, to lead us to flee to Jesus Christ where alone we might find refuge from that final storm of judgment. We thank you that you've made peace at the cross of Christ. Bless us and grant that by your grace, many might through this psalm and through the teaching of your word throughout find peace in him. For Jesus' sake. Amen.

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