Psalm 29:1-11 A Psalm of David. Give unto the LORD, O you mighty ones, Give unto the LORD glory and strength.
Give unto the LORD the glory due to His name; Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.
The voice of the LORD is over the waters; The God of glory thunders; The LORD is over many waters.
The voice of the LORD is powerful; The voice of the LORD is full of majesty.
The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars, Yes, the LORD splinters the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes them also skip like a calf, Lebanon and Sirion like a young wild ox.
The voice of the LORD divides the flames of fire.
The voice of the LORD shakes the wilderness; The LORD shakes the Wilderness of Kadesh.
The voice of the LORD makes the deer give birth, And strips the forests bare; And in His temple everyone says, “Glory!”
The LORD sat enthroned at the Flood, And the LORD sits as King forever.
The LORD will give strength to His people; The LORD will bless His people with peace.
A famous saying goes like this: God wrote two books, the book of nature and the book of Scripture. Both books teach us about Him, about ourselves, about the world. But they are different. One speaks in words, the written words of the Bible. The other speaks in works: the sun and moon and stars proclaiming God’s wisdom. One of them speaks to those who have ears to hear, the other speaks to all men everywhere.
In some ways the books depend on each other. You cannot rightly read nature properly unless you have Scripture to interpret it rightly. But many of Scripture’s illustrations, and indeed its use of human language, come from nature.
But one is primary, the other is secondary. The catechism question asks, “How do you know there is a God?” The answer is “The light of nature and the works of God, plainly declare that there is a God; but only His Word and Spirit effectually reveal Him to us for our salvation.”
We can only know God rightly through His Word. But often enough, His Word points us back to the book of nature, and helps us to understand what we are seeing. Psalm 19 directs us to the stars, the sun, and the moon. Proverbs 6 directs us to the ant. Job 38 through 41 directs us to the constellations, the weather, and many animals. These all reveal something of God to us.
What can we learn from a thunderstorm?
Johannesburg, as you well know, is no stranger to thunderstorms. Lightning strike density is measured in flashes per square kilometre per year. Europe on average only gets 3 flashes a year. Johannesburg averages a density of 15 flashes per square kilometre per year.
Psalm 29 is a moment where the book of Scripture points us to the book of nature and reveals much about knowing and loving God. Instead of seeing these flashes and running for cover, Psalm 29 can teach us to turn the many thunderstorms we have here into worship. Spurgeon even recommended reading this psalm during a thunderstorm. “Just as the eighth Psalm is to be read by moonlight, when the stars are bright, as the nineteenth needs the rays of the rising sun to bring out its beauty, so this can be best rehearsed beneath the black wing of tempest, by the glare of the lightning, or amid that dubious dusk which heralds the war of elements.”
Here in this psalm, we hear the psalmist sing to us of two realities brought out by a thunderstorm. He calls us to worship in verses 1 and 2, and he then gives us the cause for worship in verses 3 to 11. The first two verses tell us what to do, and the remaining verses tell us why.
I. The Call to Worship
A Psalm of David. Give unto the LORD, O you mighty ones, Give unto the LORD glory and strength.
Give unto the LORD the glory due to His name; Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.
These two verses are a call to worship. The second part of verse 2 tells us that: Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness. And in these first two verses, David gives us a very compact, succinct description of what worship really is.
To see that, let me lift the bonnet on the car and show you something here in the engine of the words. It is in the engine of Hebrew poetry. When you see something of how it works, you’ll understand more of what it is doing.
When you and I think of a poem, we usually think of something that rhymes words, snow – below, love – above and so on. Hebrew poems in the Bible did not rhyme words, they would rhyme ideas. They weren’t listening for words that sounded the same, but for ideas that meant the same thing.
This rhyming of ideas is called Hebrew parallelism, and it is all over the psalms, Proverbs, Job, almost anywhere the Hebrew Bible uses poetry.
It looks like this: one sentence gives the idea, the second sentence says the same thing in a different way. So as you look at verses 1 and 2, you are going to see ideas of worship that rhyme. Each phrase means the same thing, but it is said a different way, or developed somewhat differently.
Sometimes it develops the idea and takes it further, in what is called climactic parallelism. You see that in verse 1. Give unto the LORD, O you mighty ones, Give unto the LORD glory and strength.
Sometimes it means exactly the same thing (synonymous parallelism);
Give unto the LORD the glory due to His name; Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.
Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness is the same idea as giving the Lord the glory due to His name, and giving the Lord glory and strength. Let’s take verses 1 and 2 and understand this thing called worship that David is calling us to.
First, when you worship God, you give Him something. Of course, we can only give because He gives first. We love Him because He first loved us. David said, “Out of your bounty have we given back to you”. Our giving is not giving God something He lacks or needs.
But it is giving. It comes from us, out of us, and goes to Him. Worship is not passive. It is not simply absorbing, or watching. Worship is not entertainment, where you are passively amused by someone else. Worship takes of something you have, whether it is your energy, your affections, your attention, your mental concentration, and you give it to God. This is one of the reasons why worship in both the Old and New Testament is connected with sacrifice. In the Old Testament it was actual animal sacrifices. In the NT, because of the final sacrifice of Christ, it is now a sacrifice of praise, a sacrifice of our bodies and lives.
David calls on the mighty ones to do this. David here calls for an action from the mighty ones. The mighty ones could refer to angels, but David’s point probably isn’t to describe angelic worship as much as it is to call the more elevated beings of all to worship the Most Elevated Being of all.
The second thing we see is that we are giving God glory and strength. Glory is the same idea as beauty. It is what is lovely, admirable, adorable. When you give God glory, you don’t give Him something He lacks. Instead, you show by your worship that He is glorious. You show that He is valuable beyond counting, one to be treasured, delighted in. Worship is the action which shows how much we treasure God. So, worship is giving. What do we give? We give glory, to show how much we value and treasure God.
How much glory must we give? That’s what verse 2 answers.
The third thing we see Verse 2 tells us that it is the glory due to His name.
If something is due, what does that mean? If we say your yearly fees are due, what do we mean? We mean you owe something. There is a debt, and that debt must be met. If we say that we speak with all due respect, we mean that someone deserves a kind of respect, and we are granting that. We even use it to mean something is payable – your rent is due.
In other words, to say God has glory due His name is to say His character, His reputation, His person has a certain value and calls for a corresponding response. God, because of who He is, deserves a certain kind of treasuring or honouring or valuing, and such a response is payable by all His creatures. So to give God this glory is to make the attempt to show forth how much God is worth, both objectively for all, and subjectively for ourselves.
Worship is ascribing true value to God. The old English word tried to capture this idea, because it literally means ‘worth-ship’. The worth of God, the value of God. Worship is evaluating God, and expressing what you believe God is worth. You give out your estimation of His worth.
In fact, when you think about it, human beings are always in the business of evaluating and expressing value. They are always giving glory to people and things. Whether it’s natural scenery, or foods, or activities, or people, they are always, in conversation and through action and emotion expressing their positive or negative evaluation of things and people. “That place was amazing!” “This food is incredible!” “This town is a bit dingy!” “He is such a back-stabber.” “She is so gracious.” “This ring is so beautiful!” Human beings have been made to value beauty, whether it is a natural or a moral kind of beauty. When we’re confronted with beauty, we admire and praise and love it. We ascribe value to it.
So what Scripture calls us to do is to do something we are always doing. We are born worshippers. We worship the wrong things in the wrong ways until we are saved, but we cannot help worshipping. Someone said we are not homo sapiens, we are homo adorans.
To worship God is to take the faculties God has given you for evaluating and ascribing value, and turn their focus onto God Himself. Evaluate who God is, and once you’ve found that out, once you have learned what He is worth, then express that: give Him due, or the appropriate glory.
Worship is giving to God. Second, worship is giving God glory, treasuring Him. Third, worship is giving God the treasuring value that corresponds to His value.
But the fourth thing David says tells us one more thing about worship
Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.
The giving of glory to God must be done in a way that is appropriate for who He is, and the kind of God He is. When we worship, or give glory due to His name, we must do it in the beauty of holiness.
What does that mean? It means the way we worship God must be like the God we are worshipping. If He is holy, the worship should be holy. If He is majestic, the worship should be majestic. It is not just how much God is worth, it is what He deserves, what kind of worship we offer Him.
See, the world understands this. They understand the nature of what you are praising determines the nature of the praise. When the world wants to praise running shoes, it uses certain actors, certain music, certain scenes. When it wants to praise a low-price supermarket, it uses certain graphics, certain voices, certain music. And it doesn’t often mix them up.
For example think of a very high-end jewellery store, showing an ad for its latest collection of diamond or tanzanite rings. You’re expecting slow-motion shots of jewellery on dark velvet backgrounds, the camera angling to catch the gleam of light on the metal or in the jewel, a smooth-talking announcer with classical music playing in the background.
What would you think if instead of this they had a man in a large chicken suit with a tuba playing oompa music, jumping around and hysterically shouting “Gold! Jewels!” and big graphics of the prices flashing and bouncing on the screen. Eventually, you’d say, “What sort of jewellery store is this?” Eventually, you might even say, “What sort of gold is this?”
People who watch God’s people worship should never say, “What sort of god is this?” in a disparaging way. They should be able to tell: the God of this people is of infinite value.
David says, when we worship God by giving Him glory, due to His name, it must also correspond to who He is. People must know what kind of God he is by the way we sing, the way we pray and speak of Him, the kind of approach we use. It should be the beauty of holiness.
Holiness means God is unique, not common, not ordinary, not everyday. So the beauty of holiness is the kind of beautiful, reverent worship that shows our God is not of this world, not a mere human, not someone ordinary, or even completely familiar and recognisable. He is unique, and so the worship we give Him is unique.
What is worship? It is giving to God. It is giving to God glory: our response of treasuring Him. It is giving Him glory due to His name: a treasuring response that shows how much He is worth. It is worshipping Him in the beauty of holiness: giving Him this treasuring response that shows what He is like.
In two verses, David has given us almost a theology of worship. But songs do their work best not just when they tell us what to do, but when they tell us why. In the next verses, David is going to give us just one example of why the true God is worthy of glory and beautiful worship.
II. The Cause for Worship (vv 3-11)
The voice of the LORD is over the waters; The God of glory thunders; The LORD is over many waters.
The voice of the LORD is powerful; The voice of the LORD is full of majesty.
Here David is describing a thunderstorm.
David describes the storm building up over the Mediterranean. From the coast of Israel, the white and purple flashes of dark clouds light up the sky and the sea. As the storm builds up and approaches the land, David says, “This is the God of glory thundering, this is His powerful voice, this is His voice full of a deep throated majesty”. Lightning and thunder are here called the voice of Yahveh. Seven times we are told of what the voice of the Lord is like and does.
When lightning courses through the air, it is around 50,000 degrees Celsius, which is five times hotter than the surface of the sun. When that lightning travels through the air, it heats up the air around it to move in massive contractions faster than the speed of sound. The shockwaves are sonic booms, which our ears hear as thunder.
The problem with us is not that we don’t know this, it is that we have depersonalised creation. We separate the glories of thunder from the Person of God, and act as if they are separate. Nature is this impersonal mechanism that runs on its own; God is somewhere else in heaven, doing something else. But David says, thunder is God clearing His throat, speaking, as only He can, with a voice of powerful majesty.
Actually, many Scriptures tell us this. Job 37:2 says:
Hear attentively the thunder of His voice, And the rumbling that comes from His mouth. He sends it forth under the whole heaven, His lightning to the ends of the earth. After it a voice roars; He thunders with His majestic voice, And He does not restrain them when His voice is heard. God thunders marvelously with His voice; He does great things which we cannot comprehend. (Job 37:2–5)
At Mount Sinai, God’s own voice announced the Ten Commandments, and we read, “There were thunders and lightnings, exceedingly loud and long.” God spoke then, and He spoke so terribly in thunder, that the people requested that they might hear that voice no more.
In fact, there is an incident in the New Testament that shows there is more to thunder than the impersonal movement of air particles.
“Now My soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour. 28 Father, glorify Your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, saying, “I have both glorified it and will glorify it again.” Therefore the people who stood by and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, “An angel has spoken to Him.” Jesus answered and said, “This voice did not come because of Me, but for your sake.” (John 12:27–30)
Apparently, at least in one instance, Jesus heard His Father’s actual voice with words, whereas the bystanders heard only an indistinct sound that seemed like thunder to them. Who knows what might be decoded in the rumblings of thunder if we had the ears or the means to hear? If this is His voice, give Him glory, the glory due to His name.
David wants us to know that the thunder is personal, it is someone’s voice. And David is very clear of the identity of the speaker. Eleven times in this Psalm we have the personal name of God, Yahveh or Yehovah. Remember that Canaanites and some idolatrous Israelites worshipped Baal, the god of thunder, believing that if they served Baal, he would bring rain on their crops and bring them wealth and health. David identified the voice behind thunder as the Great I AM, the I AM that I AM.
When this one speaks, there is power, majesty, glory. So give Him glory, the glory due to His name.
Now the storm moves east in from the Mediterranean Sea and it makes landfall in the forests of Israel to the far north, in Lebanon and Sirion, which is another name for the highest mountain in Israel, Mount Hermon. What does God’s voice do now?
The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars, Yes, the LORD splinters the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes them also skip like a calf, Lebanon and Sirion like a young wild ox. The voice of the LORD divides the flames of fire.
As the lightning crashes into the forest, it breaks and splits giant cedar trees, cutting them in two like an axe. Here are these sturdy, unmoving cedar trees, usually 30 metres or ten stories tall, some 60 metres or twenty stories tall. Giants on the earth. Israel’s axes and saws would take hours and days to fell one of these behemoths.
But when God’s voice strikes, it slashes them like a sword through grass, like a scythe through water reeds. As it strikes some trees, these immovable giants topple and seem to bounce and skip like young animals do, like calves and young oxen. God’s voice can animate and bounce the immovable cedar.
Verse 7 speaks of the actual lightning bolt: the flames of fire that are divided into the many branches we see. The actual bolt is only about 2-3 centimetres wide, but it is so bright, it can be seen from many miles away, the flashes can even be seen from space. A lightning bolt is around 100 million volts of electricity, and the strike lasts 2 microseconds (that’s 0.000002 seconds). One bolt could power a town of 56 homes for 24 hours. There are 50 to 100 cloud to ground lightning strikes every second worldwide, that’s over 3 million strikes per day!
When this person speaks, He snaps tree-trunks like matchsticks. With His voice go flames of fire, with power unimaginable. Give Him the glory due to His name.
The voice of the LORD shakes the wilderness; The LORD shakes the Wilderness of Kadesh.
The voice of the LORD makes the deer give birth, And strips the forests bare; And in His temple everyone says, “Glory!”
The storm David pictures now moves south and covers the whole land of Israel. It moves south and passes over Jerusalem, where there are people in the Tabernacle or Temple at the time. It moves all the way to the very south, the desert, wilderness areas of Kadesh, bordering Egypt where there are few people to even witness it. Even those in the dry and rocky places feel the ground shake, experience the seismic nature of God’s voice. Animals, in their fear of the thunder, go into labour. Forests are cut down by lightning, or sometimes by the forest fires that result, leaving a blackened bare terrain.
Those worshipping God in His tabernacle, feel the rumble of His voice, feel the vibrating walls and pillars, feel the ground shake. They respond with one word, the word we were commanded to give God: glory. They see it and admire, they are in awe, they rejoice with trembling. Give this God glory, treasure Him in ways that show how much He is worth. Worship Him in beautiful, reverent ways, for this is who he is.
But there was once a storm greater than any storm we have ever seen or will ever see.
The LORD sat enthroned at the Flood, And the LORD sits as King forever.
David moves from the present storm to think back to the ultimate storm, the worst thunderstorm the world has ever seen: the Flood of Noah. When that storm was raging, lightning and thunder casting about the whole globe. The rain, wind, tsunamis, hurricanes, typhoons, as well as volcanoes and earthquakes made that the catastrophe of catastrophes: a complete reshaping of the world. Why did it happen? As judgement on a wicked humanity, who were following the evil of fallen angels.
Where was the Lord during that Thunderstorm to end all Thunderstorms? He sat. In other words, He sat as a ruler sits presiding over it all. He brought an end to all life except what was in the Ark and what swam in the waters. Why did He do that? Because He is just. He upholds goodness, and does not let evil reign.
That same sovereignty continues to this day. The Lord sits as king forever. Give Him glory, giving Him the glory due His name, worship Him in the beauty of holiness.
But it isn’t all greatness and power, it is also goodness.
The LORD will give strength to His people; The LORD will bless His people with peace.
But he is not removed or distant. This God who reigned over the Flood and reigns today, this God who has this voice: will strengthen His people and bless His people with peace. The same God who is King over storms and the Flood is king over His people’s lives. The glory we give Him is not just treasuring a faraway ruler, we treasure a Father.
The same God who sends million volt bolts of pure energy through the sky, whose voice rings out at 120db, who presided over a storm that wiped out life on Earth, He has a family. He has people, who are His. He loves His people and wants to bless them. He loves His people and wants them to have shalom.
Now we connect the whole picture. As we see these storms coming on with their deadly and frightening power, we do not look at them and see them as random, impersonal, wild ‘forces of nature’. We see them as the voice of Yahveh. This God is majestic, powerful, a King enthroned.
But the very same God is our God, in Christ. He is our Father. He is for us, working to bless us, nourish us, give us wellness, joy, peace.
The thunderstorm should frighten you, but only momentarily, when you know it is the voice of your Father. The same is true of everything that He is King over: the car accident, the diagnosis of cancer, Covid-19, the financial crash of the country, the loss of the loved one.
Why? Because the One King over it all is also Father. So what do we do? We give Him glory, glory due to His name. We treasure Him in the beauty of holiness.