Sunday Devotional: Psalm 95:6-7

⁶ Come, let us prostrate ourselves and bow; let us kneel in the presence of the Lord who made us. ⁷ For He is our God and we are the people of His pasture, and the flock of His hand.

Psalm 95 is a worship psalm. It may have been sung in procession to the Temple, with the various commands denoting aspects of the liturgy: singing, shouting, kneeling, bowing, and so on. It could simply be a song used in the home for family devotion. Whatever its original intent, it speaks of the need we have to give praise and worship to our great God, who is King above anyone and anything else that might be called a “god.” He is the one who created all things, whose hands contain the very depths of the earth, who owns the highest mountain peak, and who made the sea and formed the desert. There is nothing in creation that doesn’t belong to God. He made it, and it’s His. And that includes us. God owes us nothing; we owe Him everything. Of course, we should worship Him.

I translated the first Hebrew verb in verse 6 with the English “prostrate” to try to get across the sense of bowing very deeply. This, and the other verbs in this verse are verbs of humility. The idea of bowing, as with kneeling and curtseying, is to place oneself lower than the the person to whom you are bowing. By bowing down, you elevate the other person, so they tower over you. You are symbolically putting yourself beneath them. While we don’t need to make God appear bigger than us–He is already–the act of bowing and prostrating is one way of showing our subjection to God. We humble ourselves in His presence by lowering ourselves as a way of recognizing our worthlessness in comparison to His worthiness. He is our Maker and deserves our unreserved devotion and complete obedience.

Given that God is King and Lord of all, He could destroy us as easily as He made us. He is within His rights to deal with us as He sees fit. This is a frightening thought given our sinful state. But verse 7 casts God’s relationship with His people in a very different light. He is not some despotic overlord, ruling with an iron fist and a cold heart. Rather, He treats His people as a shepherd tends to his sheep. If we recall the picture David gave us of the divine shepherd in Psalm 23, we remember that the Lord leads us to water, guides our steps, protects us in the valley of death, and cares for us. We are not the sheep in His pen, but the sheep of His hand. His love and care for us is personal.

May we know the love and care of our great Shepherd, and may we grow in our love for Him and worship Him accordingly.

Have a great week!