Keith Simons emphasizes that the message of the Bible, particularly Psalms 100, is for all nations, not just the Jews. He explains how God chose Israel to be a light to the world, inviting all people to worship Him with joy and thanksgiving. The psalm encourages believers to serve God with gladness and to recognize His goodness and faithfulness across generations. Simons highlights the importance of joyful worship and the call for all nations to join in praising the one true God. Ultimately, he reminds us that God's mercy and truth are everlasting, extending to every generation.

Welcome. A lot of Christians will tell you that the Old Testament is all about the Jews and the New Testament is all about the Gentiles, the people from other nations. They're not right, you know. God told Abraham in Genesis chapter 12 and verse 3, I will bless them that bless thee and curse him that curseth thee and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Yes, God's good news has always been the people of every nation. Today we're going to look at Psalm 100. My name is Keith Simons. I'm a Bible teacher from England and each week I present a talk on how to understand the King James Bible by working through a psalm verse by verse and word by word. So turn with me, if you would, to Psalm 100 and we'll see how just as God promised to Abraham his message is good news for Israel and good news for the whole world. God called Israel's people, he made them special people so that the people in every nation could know his goodness and his kindness and that is the subject of Psalm 100. The heading of Psalm 100 in our King James Bible is a psalm of praise and that's curious because the Hebrew word for praise there is the word that the King James translators translated in verse 4 of the same psalm as thanksgiving. So literally that title is a psalm of thanksgiving, a psalm to give thanks to God. So why then did the King James translators choose to translate thanksgiving as praise? Well I've looked at some of the older commentaries and I see that it was generally understood that that thanksgiving in the title was intended to mean more than just giving thanks to God. It referred particularly to when a special sacrifice, an animal, was given to God at the temple for the purpose of giving thanks to God and because the King James version translators thought that, it seems they decided that to put a heading like a psalm of thanks wouldn't express deeply enough the devotion to God and the commitment and the praise that was going on with that sacrifice. So they translated that heading as a psalm of praise. Let's have a look at verse 1. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all ye lands. All ye lands, the whole world of course. It's inviting people of every nation, of every family on earth, to make a joyful noise to God. Okay so who is the speaker? Who is calling on people of the whole earth, all ye lands, to make a joyful noise unto the Lord? Well the answer seems to be that it's Israel's people who are saying this. It's Israel's people who are calling on the people in every country, the Gentiles, to make a joyful noise to God. They are inviting the people in foreign nations to praise God with them because God's goodness is for the people from every nation. And that's an important principle in the Bible. Do you remember what I read to you at the beginning from Genesis chapter 12? God said to Abraham, from whom the Jewish people, the Israel's people all came, God said to him, in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed. God chose Israel's people, the Jewish people, so that people in other countries could learn from them how to serve him. And it's true that in history Israel's people often failed to do this because they weren't faithful to God and they didn't live for God in the way that God intended. But that didn't destroy God's purpose or God's plan because God raised up the Messiah Christ from the Jewish nation so that he, on behalf of the Jewish people, could continue the work that God had given to the Jewish people of making God's message known in all the earth. The good news that God had given to the Jewish people is for people in every nation. So of course they should be joyful, the people in every nation about God. Of course they should make a joyful noise but you might ask what sort of joyful noise is that? Well the answer is that the words for a joyful noise in the Hebrew mean a joyful shout. When people shout for joy they're encouraging people to shout for joy to God in every nation. So you might say well why do our translators translate make a joyful shout as make a joyful noise? And it seems there's something about the day and age in which the King James Bible was translated in this. 400 years ago in the English churches services were very serious and respectful and respectable. No one made a joyful noise as in some of our modern churches people might shout out praise the Lord or hallelujah. And so it just didn't seem to fit to the King James translators who were bishops of the Church of England to write make a joyful shout. So instead they said make a joyful noise. That's the nearest we in our day and age understand what's written here. So this is the Jewish people speaking to people in every nation and they're telling them that they should serve God, that they should obey God, that they should do what God wants but that they should do it with gladness. They should do it with their whole heart. They should truly desire and be joyful as they serve God as they do what God wants. That's God's call on people not to serve him grudging or with a lack of respect but to have true joy in their hearts and to sincerely worship God from their whole hearts. Now you may know this psalm from the the ancient hymn called the old hundredth. I'm going to read you the first verse of that from the Scottish psalter. This is the the version of the psalms which are sung in the Scottish churches in Scotland. It says all people that on earth do dwell sing to the Lord with cheerful voice, him serve with mirth, his praise forth tell, come ye before him and rejoice. The third line there began him serve with mirth. Mirth means great joy and happiness. It's saying serve God with great joy and happiness and that's what we had in the King James Bible. But let me read to you that same hymn from an edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern, the hymn book of the English church or one of the important ones. That line says him serve with fear. It doesn't say mirth, it says fear. Why have they changed mirth to fear? Well the answer is they didn't get that from nowhere. It tells us in psalm 2 that we should serve God with fear. By fear there it means respect. We should respect God. But the Scottish church have him serve with mirth, with great joy, with happiness because they're not singing a hymn, they're singing a psalm. Even though it's the same song, they want their words to be accurate to what it says in the Bible and what it says in the Bible is serve the Lord with gladness, serve God with great joy. So is the English church wrong to change it? Well if that's a version of Psalm 100, yes they were wrong to change that. But if it's intended to be a hymn of praise to God then it's equally right. We should serve God with fear, with great respect, just as we should serve God with great joy. So back to the King James Version, verse 2, the second half of the verse, come before his presence with singing. Come before his face it is in the Hebrew. It means come to the temple, come to the house of God, here in the house of God, give your praise to God, honour him, worship him, be joyful before him, use your voice. That singing there literally again is shouting, it's a different word from in verse 1 but they could translate that come before his presence with shouting. Yes in God's presence there is great joy to be with God, to be his loyal people who serve him and who love him and who rejoice before him. When you come into his presence you come with the greatest joy. Verse 3, know ye that the Lord he is God. The Lord is God's sacred name when we see it in block capitals in the King James Bible. It's the sacred name of God, it distinguishes him from any false God. And so what Israel's people are saying to the people in foreign nations is know this, the Lord is God, he's the only God, he's the true God. At this time all the nations followed false religions and false gods but there is only one true God, only one God who made heaven and earth by his power, only one God who will rule over all things, who rules them all now but whose rule will be complete in the future age, it's Lord, the true God, the real God. It's he that hath made us and not we ourselves. Now notice there's a change here from ye which means you in verses 1 and 3 to us and the us of course refers to the speakers, the speakers of Israel's people, the Jewish people. It is God who made Israel's people to be his special people, it's God who chose the family of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to be his special nation and to declare to the world his goodness. It's God who chose us, not we ourselves, we ourselves didn't choose to be his people, it's God who chose us, it's God who decided that we should be his people. If it were down to us to decide whether we should be his people, well we'd have fallen four sorts of evil things and gone in wrong ways and we wouldn't have chosen God. It's because God has chosen us that we're his people and that's true in the New Testament age as well. It's God who chooses us, it's God who calls us and invites us to follow him. Remember Jesus' story of the lost sheep that wandered away, it didn't come back of its own accord to the shepherd, no the shepherd left the 99 sheep in the wilderness and searched for his lost sheep till he found it, yes it's God who found that lost sheep and who made it a member of his flock again. It's God who finds us and makes us a member of our family, it's not we who do it, not we ourselves. There's an alternative reading to that and not we ourselves which is and we are his and that's equally true, we belong to God, as God's people we belong to him, we are his people says the psalm and the sheep of his pasture. What a privilege to belong to the people of God, the people who serve the true and living God, the people who the creator of the universe has chosen to be his own and made it possible for them through his own gracious and good acts to be his children. For Israel's people that related to how God freed them from slavery in Egypt, they were not a nation but God made them into a nation and he led them through the wilderness to their own land, the land of Canaan, like a shepherd might lead a flock of sheep, we are says the psalm, we are the sheep of his pasture, we're like a flock of sheep that God provides for, his pasture, a pasture can refer to a place or it can be referring generally to how it was with the shepherds in ancient Israel, they led their sheep from field to field knowing the places where there would be good food for them and so this is the people, the sheep who God provides for, who God is looking after, who God is showing his kindness to. Okay if that's true for us Israel's people then what about the people from every nation? The answer in accordance with what God told Abraham is that God has called Israel's people so that the people from every nation might know him, they built Israel's people the temple in Jerusalem, the sacred house of God which is called in one of the prophets a house of prayer for all the nations. Now it's true that later temples, the later temple, the temple at the time of Jesus very carefully separated non-Jews from Jews, non-Jews were not allowed to go beyond a certain point and if they did they were subject to the death penalty but that doesn't seem to be how the temple was originally built. If you read the instructions at the beginning of Leviticus for the sacrifices, the most important sacrifice was a whole burnt offering and the Bible makes it very clear that that wasn't just for Israel's people, that was for any person to bring an offering to God that that person could go and they could bring an offering to the temple. First four says enter into his gates with thanksgiving, this is Israel's people inviting the people from other nations to worship with them in God's holy temple and those gates whether they were restrictive and restricted only to certain people at the time, at the time of David or not or rather at the time of Solomon who built the temple, in this psalm, maybe in prophecy, it sees a day when people from every nation are worshipping alongside Israel's people and that is what Israel's people call the people in other nations to do here. They say enter into his gates, come into the temple courts, come into the place of worship, worship God, be thankful, thank God for all his goodness to you and into his courts, these are the yards that surround the temple where Israel's people would gather and they're now inviting people from every nation to join with them because God is the God of the whole world and so people from every nation should join Israel's people to praise him, enter into his courts with praise, be thankful unto him and bless his name. The language here is a very physical sort of action in the Hebrew, that be thankful unto him means raise your hands to him, that bless his name means kneel down before the holy name of God. Worship God not just with words, we've had worshipping God with shouts and with singing but now in worship, in true worship, raise your hands in prayer, kneel humbly before God to give honour to him as you give your whole lives to him. Verse five gives us a reason for this because God's goodness is without limit, it's not just limited to Israel's people or to the Jewish people, no, God's goodness is for people from every nation and every age for the Lord is good, his mercy, his kindness, we sometimes translate that his love and kindness, God's mercy is everlasting, God's mercy doesn't have a limit, it lasts for future ages and his truth endureth to all generations, his truth really means his faithfulness, in other words people can rely on him, God will keep his promises, God will do everything he said, God will reach out to people and will save them in every generation or rather from one generation to another, each generation should tell the next generation, a generation means the people living at one point in time and it's for each generation to tell the next generation, just as Israel's people have told the people in foreign nations in the Psalms, so each generation should tell the next generation of God's goodness, of God's faithfulness, that the God who has been faithful, who has carried out all his promises to one generation will do it for future generations too. My email address is 333kjv at gmail.com, that's 333kjv at gmail.com, you won't go on any mailing lists, I'd love to hear from you, tell me you've listened to this podcast on Psalm 100. So let me read to you the whole Psalm, a psalm of praise. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all ye lands, serve the Lord with gladness, come before his presence with singing. Know ye that the Lord he is God, it's he that hath made us and not we ourselves, we are his people and the sheep of his pasture. Enter into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise, be thankful unto him and bless his name. For the Lord is good, his mercy is everlasting and his truth endureth to all generations.