Psalm 149

Psalm 149, is a call to participate in the wonderful privilege of giving glory to the name of our God. It's such an interesting thing. You'll remember when Jesus came into the city on that day that we call Palm Sunday, the people were praising and so forth as He came in riding on that foal of a donkey. And they were using praise from the Old Testament, actually, that was supposed to be given to Messiah, and rightly so. Because Jesus was and is the Messiah. But of course, the religious leaders objected greatly to that. And they came to Jesus and said, tell your followers to knock it off. Do they realize what they're doing? And remember what Jesus said? He said, I tell you the truth, if they don't rejoice and praise, and so forth, the very rocks and stones and inanimate nature will rise up and give praise. (Luke 19:37-40) And this whole idea of... I mean, I would have loved to have seen rocks praise the Lord. I have every reason to believe that there's coming a day when we will see inanimate nature praising the Lord, in ways that'll probably just blow our minds. But have you ever stopped to think about the privilege that you and I have been given, to participate in praise as an act of our own personal volition? I mean, please understand there's coming a day... The Bible says, there's coming a day when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God, the Father. And we're told that's going to be universal. That's going to be every knee shall bow and every tongue will confess in heaven earth under the earth. Right. (Romans 14:11, Philippians 2:10-11) And there will be a time, yet in the future, when all will praise and confess to the glory of God who Jesus Christ is. You and I have been given this precious privilege to do it now by an act of the will. To say, I will praise the Lord. I'm going to do this. I don't have to. I'm going to. I choose to do it. And this Psalm speaks of the privilege that it is for you and I, to praise God. Look at how it goes.

You get the sense that this is a jubilation. This is it! Right? This is not like how often, sometimes, you come to church and you see people singing (Pastor Paul is mimicking unemotional singing) and they're going, Pray God is love. This is... You can tell they're just... They're whooping it up! There's dancing, and there's tambourines, and so forth. Look at this, Verse 4,

So, here's the conclusion.

Now, this statement in verse 5, "Let the godly exult in glory;" I liked the way the NIV translates this particular phrase. They have it like this: "Let the saints rejoice in this honor." But the ESV is saying, this is our glory to exult in the Lord. It is our glory. And that's a way of saying, it is given to us as an honor; and as an honorable thing to exult. Which again, is to jubilantly praise and give thanks to the Lord, and so forth. And to sing to the Lord. Now, in the final verses of this Psalm, which are verses 6 through the end, we deduce from these few verses here that there was some kind of a growing threat from a nearby enemy of Israel. And this enemy was looking like they were about to attack and come to conquer Israel. And the psalmist is going to speak about that, in the midst of this praise.

He says,

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