Make a Joyful Noise
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Read Psalm 100 in full before proceeding; it is only five verses. Notice how it calls the whole earth to joyful worship, and how it grounds that worship in who the LORD is: our Maker, our God, our Shepherd, whose loyal love endures forever. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.
For the LORD is good. His loyal love endures, and he is faithful through all generations.
Psalm 100:5
From the quiet of the still waters we step out into a shout. Psalm 23 sang of the Shepherd in the singular (my shepherd, I lack nothing), the trust of a single sheep. Psalm 100 gathers the whole flock together, and then throws the doors open wider still, summoning not Israel only but all the earth to lift its voice in glad worship: Shout out praises to the LORD, all the earth! Worship the LORD with joy! Enter his presence with joyful singing! (vv. 1–2). It is one of the best-loved calls to worship ever written, the psalm behind the old hymn the church has sung for centuries, and it rings from end to end with joy.
Its title in the Hebrew is simple and telling: A thanksgiving psalm, that is, a psalm for the thank offering, sung as God’s people brought their gratitude to His house. So this is, at its core, a thanksgiving psalm, and thanksgiving is its native air. Where the laments taught us to bring our griefs to God and the penitential psalms taught us to bring our sins, this psalm teaches us to bring our thanks: to come before the LORD not only when we are desperate but when we are glad, and to let gratitude have its full, loud, singing voice.
It is worth pausing to see how this fits the whole arc of the Psalter we have been walking. The book of Psalms does not give the soul one note to sing but the full range of them. The laments taught us to bring our grief and our fear and even our rage to God, refusing to pretend before Him. The penitential psalms taught us to bring our sin, and to find mercy. And now the psalms of praise and thanksgiving teach us to bring our gladness, to come before God not only out of need but out of sheer grateful joy. A healthy soul learns all these notes and is impoverished if it knows only one. The Christian who can only lament has forgotten the goodness of God; the Christian who can only praise has not yet been honest about the valley. Psalm 100 does not cancel the laments; it completes them, supplying the note of glad thanksgiving that the whole-hearted worship of God requires. Today, the psalm says, it is time to sing the glad note, and to sing it loudly.
The psalm has a clear and beautiful shape. Twice it issues a string of joyful commands (shout out praises, worship with joy, enter with joyful singing, vv. 1–2; enter with thanksgiving, give him thanks, praise his name, v. 4), and twice it grounds those commands in a statement of who God is. After the first call comes verse 3: Acknowledge that the LORD is God! … we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. After the second comes verse 5: For the LORD is good. His loyal love endures. The worship is not free-floating enthusiasm whipped up out of nothing; it rests on solid ground, on who God is and what He is like. The commands tell us what to do; the indicatives tell us why. We praise because of the truth, and the truth is glorious.
And every line of it opens, when read with the whole of Scripture, onto the Lord Jesus and the gospel. The all the earth summoned to worship is the world the gospel would go out to gather. The we belong to him is true not only because He made us but because, in Christ, He bought us back. The sheep of his pasture are the flock of the Good Shepherd who laid down His life for them. The gates we enter with thanksgiving were thrown open by His cross. And the loyal love that endures forever found its fullest proof when that love went all the way to a cross and out of an empty tomb.
So we will lift our voices, with all the earth, through this short and joyful psalm: the universal call to glad worship, the ground of it in the God who made us and shepherds us, the entering of His presence with thanksgiving, and the goodness and loyal love and faithfulness that make Him so abundantly worthy of our praise. After resting beside the still waters, it is time to sing.
Make a Joyful Noise, All the Earth
Shout out praises to the LORD, all the earth! Worship the LORD with joy! Enter his presence with joyful singing! (vv. 1–2). The first thing to catch is the sheer scope of the summons: all the earth. Not Israel only, not the temple crowd in Jerusalem, but the whole wide world is called to worship the LORD. This is one of those moments in the Old Testament where the horizon suddenly opens beyond the borders of one nation and takes in the globe, where it becomes plain that the God of Israel is not a local deity but the God of all the earth, to whom every nation owes its praise. It is a missionary note sounded a thousand years before the Great Commission, a foretaste of the day when worshipers from every nation and tribe and tongue would stand before the throne and sing.
And the second thing to catch is the tone. Listen to the words piled up here: shout out praises, joy, joyful singing. This is not the language of grim religious duty, of worship grudgingly performed because one ought. It is the language of celebration: a glad shout, a song, the noise a people makes when their hearts are full. The psalm assumes that worship, rightly understood, is one of the most joyful things a creature can do; that to come before the LORD is not a burden to be endured but a gladness to be entered. We met this note already in the pilgrim who was glad to go to the house of the LORD; here it swells into a command. We are not merely permitted to be glad in worship; we are summoned to it.
And notice that the psalm asks for a shout. Older translations render it make a joyful noise, and the word is a loud one; it is the shout a people raises, the full-throated cry of hearts that cannot keep quiet. The worship of Scripture is not always hushed and restrained; here it is exuberant, audible, wholehearted. David, who knew this God, once danced before Him with all his might; the psalms call for the clap of hands and the blast of the trumpet and the crash of cymbals. This is a useful corrective in either direction. To the soul that thinks reverence means only silence and solemnity, the psalm says: shout; let the gladness be heard. And to the soul that worships only when it can summon a feeling, the psalm says: the command is to lift the voice, and the gladness will often follow the obedience. Whatever our temperament, we are creatures made to praise out loud, and the God who made us delights in the joyful shout of His people.
If our own worship has lost that gladness (if it has become a routine to get through, a box checked, a duty discharged without joy), the psalm gently asks why. The gladness drains away not because God has become less glorious but because we have stopped looking at Him, stopped remembering who He is and what He has done. And so the psalm does for us exactly what we need: it does not merely command the gladness, as though joy could be manufactured by sheer effort; it turns us back to the reasons for it. The cure for joyless worship is not to try harder to feel glad, but to look again at the God who is good, who made us, who shepherds us, whose loyal love endures forever, and to let the gladness rise, as it will, from the sight of Him.
And there is comfort hidden in that great word all (all the earth) for the one who fears he stands outside the circle. If the whole earth is summoned, then no one is too far away, too foreign, too unlikely, too long a stranger to be called in. The summons reaches to the very ends of the earth, which means it reaches to you, however far away you have felt yourself to be. This is precisely the wonder the gospel makes good: you who used to be far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. The Gentile world that had no claim on Israel’s God, the outsider with no covenant and no hope, the sinner who supposed himself beyond the pale: all of them are named in this all the earth and called to the same joyful shout as the people of God themselves. The believer who wonders whether he truly belongs in the worshiping throng may hear in this psalm his own invitation: the call went out to all the earth, and that is wide enough to include even you.
Know That the LORD, He Is God
Acknowledge that the LORD is God! He made us and we belong to him; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture (v. 3). Here is the first ground of all the worship, and it begins with a command to acknowledge, or, as the Hebrew word is more often rendered, to know. Worship rests on knowledge: not on a vague religious feeling, but on the solid truth of who God is. And the truth is threefold. First, the LORD is God: YHWH, the covenant God of Israel, is the one true God; there is no other, and no rival deserves the worship that is His alone. Second, He made us: we are creatures, and He is the Creator; we did not make ourselves, and we do not belong to ourselves. And third, we are his people, the sheep of his pasture: we stand to Him not only as creatures to Creator but as a flock to its shepherd, a people to their God, in a relationship of belonging and care.
Dwell for a moment on He made us and we belong to him. These few words cut against the deepest instinct of the fallen heart, which is to believe that we are our own: self-made, self-owned, answerable to no one, free to live as we please. The psalm says otherwise, and says it gladly: we did not make ourselves; we were made, and we belong to the One who made us. Far from being a threat to our freedom, this is the very ground of our security. To belong to the LORD is to be His responsibility, His concern, His treasured possession; to be, as the next phrase says, the sheep of His pasture, whom He feeds and guards and leads. The creature who insists on owning himself is, in the end, a lost and frightened sheep without a shepherd. The creature who confesses we belong to him has found his place in the universe, and his peace.
And the gospel deepens we belong to him beyond anything the first singers could have known. We are His, yes, because He made us, but we are His twice over, because He also bought us back. You are not your own, Paul tells the church, for you were bought at a price. The sheep that had strayed were purchased again at the cost of the Shepherd’s own blood; the church, the Scriptures say, is the church of God that he obtained with the blood of his own Son. So when the believer sings we belong to him, he confesses a double ownership, Creator and Redeemer both, and the redemption is the costlier claim. We belong to God not only as the work of His hands but as the purchase of His Son’s death. You once were not a people, but now you are God’s people, and the sheep of His pasture are the flock the Good Shepherd has gathered, at the price of His life, from every corner of the earth He called to sing.
We should not pass over the fact that the psalm grounds all this worship in a command to acknowledge, to know. True worship is not a matter of working up a feeling; it is the response of a heart to truth it has come to know. The psalm does not say feel something toward the LORD; it says acknowledge that the LORD is God, and lets the worship follow from the knowing. This cuts against a common notion that doctrine and devotion are at odds, that thinking hard about God somehow drains the warmth out of worshiping Him. The opposite is true. The gladness of Psalm 100 is fueled, not hindered, by knowing rightly who God is: that He is God and there is no other, that He made us and we are His, that He is good and His love endures forever. Right knowledge of God is the kindling of right praise. The more truly we know Him, the more reason we find to shout out His praises, which is why a worshiping people must also be a people who learn, and why the careful study of who God is, far from being a cold or academic thing, is the very fuel of the fire of praise.
Enter His Gates with Thanksgiving
Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give him thanks! Praise his name! (v. 4). The second call to worship is a call to come in: to enter the gates and the courts of the LORD’s house, the very place the pilgrim of the Ascents had climbed toward with such gladness. And the psalm prescribes the manner of the entering: with thanksgiving, with praise. This is how the people of God approach Him: not creeping in with dread, not barging in with demands, but coming through the gates with thanks already on their lips and praise in their mouths. Gratitude is the doorway. The believer enters God’s presence the way a child comes home to a good father’s house: glad to be there, thankful for all that waits inside.
There is a discipline in this worth learning. We so easily come to God beginning with our complaints, our requests, our anxieties, and there is a place for all of those, as the laments have taught us. But this psalm trains us to enter, first, with thanksgiving: to begin by remembering and naming what God has already done, before we ever get to what we want Him to do next. To enter His gates with thanksgiving is to set our requests inside a frame of gratitude, to approach the Giver remembering His gifts. A heart that has first given thanks asks differently than a heart that has not; and a life that habitually enters God’s presence with thanksgiving is a life slowly reshaped toward contentment and joy.
And we should not miss how freely we are now bidden to enter. Under the old covenant the gates and courts were ringed with restrictions; the way into the holiest place was barred to all but one man, once a year, and never without blood. But the Lord Jesus has opened the way in. We have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, the Scriptures say, by the fresh and living way that he inaugurated for us through the curtain. The gates we are told to enter with thanksgiving have been thrown wide by His cross; He is Himself the door through which we come. And the courts we enter now are an anticipation of the city whose gates, John says, are never shut at all: the new Jerusalem, into which the redeemed of all the earth will stream with thanksgiving forever. We enter with thanks because the way has been opened at such cost, and stands open still.
And it is worth remembering, as we enter, what we are entering into. The gathered worship of God’s people is, first of all, God serving us, before it is ever us serving Him. When the church comes through the gates, God meets His people with His gifts: He speaks to us in His word, He washes us in baptism, He feeds us with His Son’s body and blood, He pronounces over us the forgiveness of our sins. The thanksgiving and praise the psalm calls for are, properly, our response to all that He gives, gratitude welling up because He has first been good to us. This is the right order, and it keeps our worship from becoming a performance we put on to win God’s favor. We do not enter the gates to earn anything; we enter to receive what He delights to give, and to give thanks for it. The psalm’s word in Worship the LORD with joy is the ordinary Hebrew word for service (older translations read Serve the LORD with gladness), but it is not the strain of trying to please a reluctant master. It is the glad answer of a people already loaded with His benefits, which is exactly why thanksgiving, and not anxious effort, is the proper key in which to enter His courts.
His Steadfast Love Endures Forever
For the LORD is good. His loyal love endures, and he is faithful through all generations (v. 5). Here is the final ground of all the worship, the great because on which the whole psalm rests, and it is threefold. The LORD is good: goodness is His very nature; He is not a grudging or capricious God but good through and through, the source of every good gift, kindly disposed toward His creatures. His loyal love endures: there is our anchor word again, chesed, the covenant love (older translations say steadfast love) that has held every psalm in these recent sessions, and here it is stretched out to the horizon. The Hebrew says it endures forever (so the older rendering, his steadfast love endures forever): without end, never running dry, never being withdrawn. And he is faithful through all generations: He keeps His word not for a season but across all time, faithful to the great-grandchildren of those He was faithful to before.
Let the first of those three words bear its full weight: the LORD is good. It is the most fundamental thing the psalm says about God, and the most quietly contested. For the oldest lie ever told was a lie about the goodness of God: the serpent’s whisper in the garden that God was holding out, that His commands were stingy, that He could not quite be trusted to want our good. That doubt has dogged the human heart ever since, and it surfaces most sharply in suffering, when the dark valley tempts us to wonder whether the LORD is good after all. Against that ancient doubt the psalm plants its flag: the LORD is good, good in His nature, good in His dealings, the fountain of every good thing and the giver of every good gift. Another psalm dares us to put it to the test: Taste and see that the LORD is good! And the believer who has tasted (who has known His provision in the pasture and His presence in the valley, His forgiveness and His patience and His loyal love) can answer the serpent’s old slander with a settled confidence, and raise his joyful shout on the bedrock truth that God is good.
That middle phrase, his loyal love endures forever, is one of the great refrains of the Old Testament. It is sung over and over in Psalm 136, line after line; it was the song the choirs raised when the temple was dedicated and the glory of the LORD filled the house. It is the sentence Israel reached for whenever it wanted to say the deepest true thing about God. And it is the perfect ground for worship precisely because it does not depend on our circumstances. Our moods change, our fortunes rise and fall, the seasons of life turn from joy to grief and back again, but His loyal love endures forever, the same in the valley as in the green pasture, the same to this generation as to the last. We can shout for joy in any weather, because the reason for the joy never changes.
And we who read with the gospel know just how far that loyal love endures, and what it cost to prove it. God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. The chesed that endures forever is not a vague divine benevolence; it is the love that went all the way to a cross, that did not turn back even from death, that took the worst we are and the worst we deserve and answered it with mercy. When the psalm says His loyal love endures forever, the cross is the measure of forever, for there the love of God was poured out to the uttermost, and there the faithfulness of God to all generations was sealed in blood. The whole earth is summoned to worship a God whose goodness has a face and whose loyal love has a wound in its side. That is reason enough, and more, to sing.
And do not pass over that last phrase, he is faithful through all generations, for it widens the comfort across time. The God we worship is not faithful only to us, in our brief moment; He was faithful to those who came before us (to the patriarchs, to David, to the long line of believers who sang this very psalm in temple and synagogue and church down the centuries), and He will be faithful to those who come after us, to our children and our children’s children, long after we have sung our last. There is a humbling and steadying grace in this. We are one link in a chain of generations who have proved the faithfulness of God, and we hand that faithfulness on. The parent who teaches a child this psalm, the congregation that sings it over its newly baptized, the old saint who whispers it on a deathbed: all are bearing witness that the God who kept faith with their forebears will keep faith with those still to come. His loyal love does not expire with us; it endures to all generations, and we sing it forward into a future we will not live to see.
The Worship of All the Earth
Gather it all up, and Psalm 100 turns out to be a small window onto the largest scene in Scripture. It calls all the earth to shout out praises; and the last book of the Bible shows us that call answered in full. There John sees an enormous crowd that no one could count, made up of persons from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne and the Lamb, crying out their praise: the whole earth’s joyful shout gathered at last into one song. Every nation the psalm summoned, the gospel went out to gather; and the Good Shepherd who said I have other sheep that do not come from this sheepfold has been bringing them in ever since, until there is one flock and one Shepherd, and the sheep of His pasture are drawn from every corner of the world.
And so the worship of Psalm 100 is the worship the church joins every time it gathers, and the worship it will join forever. We enter His gates with thanksgiving now, through the door the Lord Jesus opened, into the courts His blood made accessible, and we will enter the gates of the new Jerusalem, which are never shut, with the redeemed of all the earth. We give thanks now for a goodness we have tasted in part; we will give thanks then for a goodness seen face to face. We sing now of a loyal love we trust by faith; we will sing then of the loyal love we have proved, world without end. The joyful shout of this psalm is the opening note of a song that will never stop.
So shout out His praises. Not because life is always easy (the psalm does not promise that, and the rest of the Psalter forbids us to pretend it), but because the LORD is God, and He made us, and we belong to Him; because we are the sheep of His pasture, bought by the blood of the Shepherd; because the gates stand open and the way is sure; and because His goodness and His loyal love and His faithfulness do not depend on our weather but endure forever and through all generations. The whole earth has reason to sing, and the people of God most of all. Worship the LORD with joy. Enter His presence with joyful singing. Enter His gates with thanksgiving. For the LORD is good, and His loyal love endures forever.
And let it be said clearly, lest the joy of this psalm seem to belong only to the days when life is easy: the joyful shout it commands is not the denial of our griefs but their defiance. We have not forgotten the valley; the laments are in the same book, and they tell the truth. But Psalm 100 teaches the soul to sing on a ground that does not move with our weather, for the LORD is good and His loyal love endures forever whether our particular day is bright or dark. The New Testament calls this a sacrifice of praise: praise offered up to God precisely when it costs us something, when the heart is heavy and the song must be chosen rather than felt. Such praise is not pretending the grief away; it is the soul preaching to itself the unchanging goodness of God in the teeth of changing circumstances, and finding, often, that the gladness it chose to voice begins to become the gladness it feels. The believer can shout for joy in any weather, not because the weather is always fair, but because the reason for the joy never changes.
Gathering the Threads
We stepped from the still waters into a shout, and found in five short verses the great call to joyful worship. Psalm 100 summons not one sheep but all the earth to shout out praises (a missionary horizon sounded long before the Great Commission), and it sets the tone as gladness, singing, thanksgiving, the native air of a people who come to God grateful. We saw that its joyful commands rest on solid ground. Twice the psalm grounds its worship in who God is: that the LORD is God, that He made us and we belong to Him, the sheep of His pasture; and that the LORD is good, His loyal love enduring forever, His faithfulness reaching through all generations. The gladness is not whipped up out of nothing but rises from the sight of God, so that the cure for joyless worship is not to try harder to feel but to look again at Him.
And every line opened onto the gospel. We are His not only because He made us but because, in Christ, He bought us back, the sheep purchased at the price of the Shepherd’s blood and gathered from every nation into one flock. The gates we enter with thanksgiving were thrown wide by the cross, the way in opened by the blood of the Lord Jesus, and they anticipate the gates of the new Jerusalem that are never shut. And the loyal love that endures forever found the measure of its forever at Calvary, where God proved His love for sinners by the death of His Son. So we shout for joy, not because life is easy, but because the LORD is God and we belong to Him, because the way stands open at such cost, and because His goodness and loyal love and faithfulness do not depend on our weather but endure forever. The joyful shout of this psalm is the opening note of the song of all the earth, the song that will never end.
For Discussion
The psalm calls not just Israel but all the earth to worship the LORD (v. 1). What does this universal call tell us about who the LORD is, and how is it fulfilled as the gospel goes to all nations (consider Revelation 7:9)?
We are told to worship the LORD with joy and enter His presence with joyful singing (v. 2). Why is worship meant to be glad and joyful, not grim duty? And what tends to drain the gladness out of our worship?
The ground of all this worship is to acknowledge that the LORD is God! He made us and we belong to him (v. 3). How does worship flow from knowing who God is and that we belong to Him, by creation and, in Christ, by redemption (compare 1 Peter 2:9–10)?
The psalm keeps the shepherd image: we are his people, the sheep of his pasture (v. 3). How does this connect to Psalm 23 and to the Lord Jesus, the Good Shepherd who gathers one flock from every nation (John 10:16)?
We are to enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise (v. 4). What does it mean to come before God with thanksgiving first, and how has the way into His presence been opened for us (consider Hebrews 10:19–22)?
The reason given for all this praise is that the LORD is good. His loyal love endures, and he is faithful through all generations (v. 5). How do God’s goodness, His unending loyal love, and His faithfulness across the generations give us solid and lasting reason to worship, whatever our circumstances?
Looking Ahead
Psalm 100 called all the earth to praise the LORD. The next psalm turns that call inward, as a believer summons his own soul to the same praise. Psalm 103, one of the richest of all the psalms of thanksgiving, begins: Praise the LORD, O my soul! With all that is within me, praise his holy name! Praise the LORD, O my soul! Do not forget all his kind deeds! (Psalm 103:1–2).
And then it names those kind deeds, one glorious gift after another: He is the one who forgives all your sins, who heals all your diseases, who delivers your life from the Pit, who crowns you with his loyal love and compassion. It is a psalm about not forgetting, about deliberately calling to mind the goodness of God when the soul grows dull or downcast, and about the tender mercy of a God who knows what we are made of and realizes we are made of clay, a God of whom David sings, as the skies are high above the earth, so his loyal love towers over his faithful followers. We will learn, with David, to preach to our own souls, and to praise the LORD by remembering all that He has done.
Read Psalm 103 in full before the next session; it is twenty-two verses. Notice how David calls his own soul to praise the LORD, and how he refuses to forget “all his kind deeds,” naming them one by one.
Closing Prayer
O LORD, You are good, and Your steadfast love endures forever. With all the earth we make our joyful noise to You; we serve You with gladness and come into Your presence with singing. Forgive us for the times our worship has gone cold and dutiful, and turn our eyes again to You, that gladness may rise where it belongs: at the sight of who You are. We confess that You are God, that You made us, and that we are Yours; we did not make ourselves, and we do not belong to ourselves, but to You, the sheep of Your pasture.
We thank You that we are Yours twice over, made by Your hand and bought by the blood of Your Son, our Good Shepherd, who gathered us into His one flock from the ends of the earth. We thank You that the gates stand open, that the way into Your presence was thrown wide by the cross of the Lord Jesus, and that Your love proved its forever at Calvary, where You showed Your love for sinners by the death of Your Son. Make us a people of thanksgiving, who enter Your gates glad and grateful now, and who will enter the gates of the new Jerusalem, never to be shut, with the redeemed of all the earth, to give You thanks and bless Your holy name forever. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.