I Will Sing to the Lord | Exodus 15
Brian Hedges | October 30, 2022
Let’s turn in our Bibles this morning to Exodus 15. We’re going to be looking at Exodus 15:1-21.
While you’re turning there, let me tell you about an experience I had several years ago now. I took one of my kids, Matthew, to a concert in Chicago. We went to see that great band U2. Has anybody ever seen U2 in concert? Just a few of you have.
I don’t go to a lot of concerts. This was actually the first time I’d been to anything that was a non-Christian, non-school related performance or concert. I’d been to some plays, but nothing quite like this; nothing like a big band. I mean, there were thousands of people there. It was huge, the spectacle of this . . . I’d never seen anything quite like this before. It was really loud. If you think our music is loud, it’s nothing like a U2 concert. I mean, that’s really loud. It was something else!
I like listening to U2, they’re a great band, and I’ve enjoyed listening to their music over the years, and Matthew was really into them at that time, so we went. I enjoyed it, but I have to tell you, I felt something like an outsider as I was there, because everybody around me was much more into it than I was. I mean, people were just electric with their energy and their passion for seeing this band.
It occurred to me about halfway through the concert that what I was observing was worship. This was worship! God’s not the object of worship, and I’m not worshiping the same thing they are, but it was worship. I mean, there’s nothing else that would really explain just how deeply emotionally and affectionately engaged everybody was in this concert.
Brothers and sisters, the world is full of worship. The world is full of worshipers, but they’re not all worshiping God, they’re not all worshiping the true and the living God. The reality is that our lives are also full of worship. You’re a worshiper and I’m a worshiper; every single one of us, every day, is worshiping something. We are worshiping someone. The question is, are we worshiping the true God or are we bowing the affections of our hearts down to idols, to false gods?
I introduce the sermon in that way this morning because this passage is all about worship. Exodus 15 is all about worship. In fact, it is one of the oldest worship songs in history, one of the oldest worship songs in the Bible. It’s something like a hymn. When we read it through you’re going to see it feels a lot like a psalm. In fact, the psalms of Israel in the book of Psalms draw on Exodus 15 heavily. There are many, many echoes of Exodus 15 in the Psalter. So it’s one of the oldest songs or hymns in the history of Israel. It is the first song that the Israelites sing together following their redemption from Egypt, and, as we saw last week in Exodus 14, the Israelites had experienced this great act of deliverance through the mighty hand of God, conquering their enemies. Then immediately what they do is they sing. They bring that experience to God in worship.
We’re going to read this together this morning. It’s Exodus 15:1-21. We’re going to talk about worship. That’s the main focus of the message today. Let’s begin by reading the text. It’ll be on the screen, but I hope you’ll also open up your Bible and will have your Bible open so that you can refer back to the Scriptures when the text is not on the screen.
Hear the word of the Lord.
Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lord, saying,
“I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.
The Lord is my strength and my song,
and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him,
my father's God, and I will exalt him.
The Lord is a man of war;
the Lord is his name.
“Pharaoh's chariots and his host he cast into the sea,
and his chosen officers were sunk in the Red Sea.
The floods covered them;
they went down into the depths like a stone.
Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power,
your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy.
In the greatness of your majesty you overthrow your adversaries;
you send out your fury; it consumes them like stubble.
At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up;
the floods stood up in a heap;
the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.
The enemy said, ‘I will pursue, I will overtake,
I will divide the spoil, my desire shall have its fill of them.
I will draw my sword; my hand shall destroy them.’
You blew with your wind; the sea covered them;
they sank like lead in the mighty waters.
“Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?
Who is like you, majestic in holiness,
awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?
You stretched out your right hand;
the earth swallowed them.
“You have led in your steadfast love the people whom you have redeemed;
you have guided them by your strength to your holy abode.
The peoples have heard; they tremble;
pangs have seized the inhabitants of Philistia.
Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed;
trembling seizes the leaders of Moab;
all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away.
Terror and dread fall upon them;
because of the greatness of your arm, they are still as a stone,
till your people, O Lord, pass by,
till the people pass by whom you have purchased.
You will bring them in and plant them on your own mountain,
the place, O Lord, which you have made for your abode,
the sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established.
The Lord will reign forever and ever.”
For when the horses of Pharaoh with his chariots and his horsemen went into the sea, the Lord brought back the waters of the sea upon them, but the people of Israel walked on dry ground in the midst of the sea. Then Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women went out after her with tambourines and dancing. And Miriam sang to them:
“Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.”
This is God’s word.
It’s a simple outline this morning—three questions:
1. What is worship?
2. Why should we worship?
3. How do we worship?
What I want to do by the end is try to give some practical helps to us as we think about our worshiping life together as a community, as the people of God.
1. What is worship?
First of all, what is worship? It’s actually really hard to define worship adequately. It would be easy to fill the whole screen with a list of synonyms and words and descriptors and adjectives that describe worship. But I want to try to give you a simple definition that I think fits what’s going on in this passage. This is not comprehensive; it doesn’t cover everything the Bible says about worship, but I think it will still help us. So here’s an attempt at a definition. Worship is our whole-hearted ascription of worth and praise to God in response to his revelation of himself. Let me read it one more time. Worship is our whole-hearted ascription of worth and praise to God in response to his revelation of himself.
I want to break that down a little bit to explain what I mean and ground it in these first couple verses of Exodus 15. Let’s look at those verses again.
It says, “Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lord, saying, ‘I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him, my father's God, and I will exalt him.’”
So, worship is our whole-hearted ascription of worth and praise to God. I’m going to come back to the whole-hearted part in the last point. The only thing to say about it here is that it involves the whole being. Your whole being will be involved in worship. It is the whole-hearted ascription of worth and praise to God.
You see that in verse 2: “This is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him.” That word “praise” means simply to glorify or to praise, and the word “exalt” means to lift high, to exalt God. It’s to lift him high, to lift his name high. That’s a word that is used many, many times in the Psalms for exalting the name of the Lord, for exalting God, for lifting up his name in worship. It is an ascription here of worth to God, value to God, showing that God is glorious and that we see him as worthy of our adoration and our praise.
We might break that down a little further and say that it involves both declarations about God as well as ascriptions to God. You really see both of them here in this passage. There are declarations about God. You see it in verse 2, “The Lord is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation.” Those are declarations about who God is.
Again in verse 4, “The Lord is a warrior [or a man of war].” Then in verse 11, “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?” These are declarations about God, the character of God.
But notice how the declarations become ascriptions. They move from saying something about God to saying something directly to God.
In verse 2 it’s talking about God: “The Lord is my strength and my song [and my] salvation.” But by the time you get to verse 11 he’s speaking to God: “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?” In fact, it really shifts in verse 6. Everything shifts to speaking directly to the Lord in verse 6. “Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power; your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy.”
Now, all of this shows us that worship is to be God-centered, God-focused, and God-oriented. God is the ultimate audience of our worship. We’re worshiping him. Again, it’s also right there in verse 1: “Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lord.” They’re singing to him. “I will sing to the Lord.” That’s what they’re doing.
Then, in verse 21, which in some ways serves as kind of a bookend—verses 1 and 21 are bookends to this whole psalm or this whole hymn, with Moses and the people referenced in verse 1 and then Miriam in verse 21; Miriam, who is this prophetess, she is the sister of Aaron, which means she’s also the sister of Moses, which means we finally get the name of the sister in Exodus 2 who had hidden Moses in the ark and had been instrumental in his deliverance. Now she emerges as a leader of worship in the people of Israel. “And Miriam sang to them—” and she’s not just singing to the daughters; “them” is a masculine plural. She is saying this to the whole congregation. She says, “Sing to the Lord,” so it’s a command. “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.”
All of that to say that worship has this Godward focus: declarations about God and ascriptions to God. It is ascriptions to God of his worth.
Now, before we move on, just notice here that right here we have a biblical reason for the different kinds of songs that we sing together in worship. There are songs of declaration where we essentially are singing to one another about the Lord, and there are also songs of what some worship leaders have called “pure ascription,” where we are singing directly to God. Our eyes are on him; we are focused on him; we are worshiping him in that moment.
We need both kinds of songs. We need the songs of declaration, like “I Will Glory in My Redeemer,” or “Living Hope,” or “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us,” or “He Will Hold Me Fast.” Those are songs that are declaring things about God.
We also needs songs of pure ascription. We began with one this morning, “Great Things.” We’re singing to God himself. “God, I Look to You,” or “Great Are You, Lord,” or “Your Glory Is So Beautiful,” or “How Great Thou Art.” Those are songs that are directly addressed to God himself. You have both kinds of songs in the Bible, and we need both kinds of songs in our own lives.
So, worship is our whole-hearted ascription of worth and praise to God—and here’s the last part of the definition—in response to his revelation of himself.
You see that if you just look at the context. The occasion for this hymn of praise is God’s deliverance of his people Israel from Egypt and the whole Exodus event, culminating in the Red Sea in Exodus 14. Exodus 15:19 gives us the reason. The end of the song is verse 18, and then verse 19 is giving us the reason for the song. Verse 19 says, “For when the horses of Pharaoh with his chariots and his horsemen went into the sea, the Lord brought back the waters of the sea upon them. But the people of Israel walked on dry ground in the midst of the sea.” That’s the event that prompts their worship.
In fact, if you go back to Exodus 14, the very last verse of Exodus 14 actually tells us that the Lord saved Israel that day. The last verse says, “Israel saw the great power that the Lord used against the Egyptians. So the people feared the Lord.” That phrase “fear the Lord” is shorthand for worship. They revered God; they were in awe of God. The overflow of that experience in their hearts was this song of worship.
That means, brothers and sisters, that worship, rightly understood, is always responsive. It’s always what Eugene Peterson calls secondary language, a secondary word. God’s word is first, God’s word is primary; God speaks, and then we respond to him. God acts, and then we worship him.
This means that truth is the necessary soil in which worship grows. There will be no worship of the true and living God without the work of God. There will be no worship of God without us seeing God as he has revealed himself to us in his word, in and through his mighty deeds, and especially in and through his fullest and most complete revelation of himself, Jesus Christ, his Son, the word made flesh, the one in whom the Father has spoken.
It just means that we don’t worship in a vacuum, we worship in response to what God has done. We worship in response to what God has said. That means that for our worship as a church to remain God-centered, it means that we must always remain word-centered. The word of God is foundational to our worship.
Now, that was all just trying to define worship. What is worship? That’s all the first point. What is worship? It is this whole-hearted ascription of worth and praise to God in response to his revelation of himself.
2. Why should we worship?
The second question is, why should we worship? We could do a whole sermon just on this, but I’m going to limit myself here to what’s here in the text. I want to give you four reasons from this passage why we should worship God. The whole book of Psalms is giving us reasons to worship God; the whole Bible is giving us reasons to worship God; but here are four. This is actually a pretty good summary of what much of the rest of the Bible says.
We could put it this way: Why should we worship God? We worship God because of who he is and what he does. Those are the two broad reasons: because of who God is and because of what he does. God’s attributes and God’s actions. God’s perfections and God’s mighty deeds are both prompters for worship, both reasons for worship.
You see those combined here in this passage. The writer here is giving us a number of descriptions of God, characterizations of God, telling us who God is and what God has done. Let me just point out four of them. I’m not going to read it all, but I’ll read just a few verses to highlight.
(1) First and foremost, we worship God because God is a warrior. You see that in verse 3: “The Lord is a warrior, the Lord is his name.” The Lord is a man of war; that’s what the Hebrew literally says; he is a man of war. But it means he is a warrior.
Again, remember the context. Israel has just been delivered from their enemies, and they were delivered without lifting a finger. They didn’t fight the battle, God fought the battle for them. The Lord defeated their enemies.
Lest you think that this seems merciless of God, you have to remember that the Egyptians had been oppressors of Israel, guilty of partial genocide. All of the people of Egypt had been complicit in this. Even after multiple warnings from God and acts of judgment that should have turned them to the Lord—even after all of that, they still pursue Israel.
Israel’s helpless. Israel would have been slaughtered by Egypt if God had not destroyed the Egyptians. God was simply exercising judgment on the wicked. He did it, showing his justice, his righteousness, and his commitment to his people.
That’s what this song is mostly about: “The Lord is a warrior, the Lord is his name.”
Then verses 4-10, in highly poetic language, recount for us the events of Exodus 14, as God divides the Red Sea and then drowns Pharaoh and his chariots and his hosts in the sea. All of this is showing us that the Lord is this warrior for his people, and it’s showing us that this is the God who had committed himself to redeem Israel.
Here’s an interesting thing Christopher Wright points out in his commentary. When it says, “The Lord is a warrior, the Lord is his name,” Yahweh is his name, this is the name of God that God had revealed to Moses in Exodus 3, but this is the first time that that name is on the lips of the people of Israel. They have finally seen that he is the Lord; he is Yahweh. “This is our God, the God who has delivered us in faithfulness to his covenant.” That’s the focus of verses 3-10; God is a warrior.
(2) Then verses 11-12—really verse 11—show us that God is supreme. He is the only God. Again, it’s kind of a shorthand summary of everything that had just taken place. “Who is like you, O Lord [O Yahweh] among the gods? Who is like, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders? You stretched out your right hand; the earth swallowed them.”
You remember what God had told Moses he would do in Exodus 7, as kind of a preface to the plagues? He says, “I’m going to stretch out my arm against Egypt, and I will show my wonders.” Well, now they’ve seen it, and they have seen that this Lord is the true Lord. He has defeated all of the gods of Egypt, from the Nile River to Ra, the sun god, to Pharaoh himself, who was honored as a deity among the Egyptians. God has executed his justice against the false gods of Egypt, and he has shown that he is the one and the only, the true God; he is the supreme God. “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?”
(3) Thirdly, we should worship God because God is our shepherd redeemer. This is the focus of verses 13-17. Verse 13 says, “You have led in your steadfast love [his covenant love] the people whom you have redeemed.” There’s that word “redeem” or “redemption.” It goes back to Exodus 6. This is the God who liberates the slaves through the payment of a ransom price. That’s what that word “redeem” means.
“You have guided them by your strength to your holy abode,” perhaps looking prospectively to the time when God will establish his presence with his people Israel in the sanctuary and ultimately in the temple. But in Exodus 40 it’s the building of the tabernacle, the building of the sanctuary. Then ultimately in Israel’s history it will be the temple of Solomon.
This gets picked up again, then, in verses 16-17. Verses 14-15 are kind of about the terror of the nations as they have heard about this God, but look at verse 16. “Terror and dread upon them; because of the greatness of your arm, they are still as a stone, till your people, O Lord, pass by; till the people pass by whom you have purchased.” There’s another one of those important words. He is the redeemer, the God who purchases his people. “You will bring them in and plant them on your holy mountain, the place, O Lord, which you have made for your abode; the sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established.”
God is our shepherd and redeemer. I put it that way because the language, the verbs here—“You have led and guided”—that is shepherding language. In fact, the commentaries point out that these are some of the exact words that David uses in Psalm 23 when he talks about God’s shepherding care for him, leading him beside the still waters, and so on. It’s portraying God here as the shepherd for his people Israel, the one who has redeemed them and who has saved them.
(4) Here’s one more reason to worship God, verse 18: because God is King. You have it in the verbal form, “The Lord will reign forever and ever.” Again, this is a first in the Bible. You read the book of Genesis and you can kind of implicitly see that God is the King in the sense that God is exercising control, but the language of reigning . . . the Hebrew language for “reign” or “king” or “kingdom,” that language is not used of God until right here. This is the first time you have God portrayed as a King in the Bible.
You see again—I mean, read the Psalms. Get in Psalm 97, 98, 99, those psalms that are talking about the Lord reigning—this is all echoes of Exodus 15. The Lord who is the King over his people Israel and who reigns over all things on their behalf. It’s stated right here in verse 18: “The Lord will reign forever and ever.”
Those are four reasons for worship that just come right out of the psalm, and they illustrate this basic principle that we worship God because of who God is and what he has done. It demonstrates again the point that our worship has to be grounded in the truth of God’s revelation of himself.
3. How do we worship?
We’ve looked at what is worship and why we should worship; now the third and final question, how should we worship? Let me underscore the importance of this. I’m not sure what the conscious motive is in your heart and your mind every Sunday when you come to church, but our conscious motive should be that we’re coming to worship God. That should be the conscious motive. I mean, that’s what this is. This is a worship gathering. This is a time for us to gather with the people of God to worship. We need to do so intentionally. We need to do so thinking about how we’re going about it.
I want to give you some direction, and I think these are things, again, that emerge from this passage that will be helpful for us in thinking about how to worship in our hearts and in our lives. I want to give you four things in the last nine minutes here. How should we worship?
(1) Number one, worship both personally and corporately. You see both. It’s interesting that in verses 1-2 the opening of the psalm or the hymn is spoken in the first person singular. “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation. This is my God, and I will praise him, my Father’s God, and I will exalt him.”
Worship starts there. It starts with a personal devotion to the Lord. He’s my God, and I will worship him. Every single one of us has to come to that point, where God is the object of my worship. It’s personal.
But it’s also corporate. This is so important. Notice that it’s Moses and the people of Israel who sang this song, and the whole hymn is written as this song for the whole people of God. I don’t know that I can state this strongly enough, that we have to have both. You need both.
I know it’s common for people to say things like this: “You know, I can worship God just as well out in the beauties of nature as I can in the church. I can worship God just as well on the golf course as I can in a church.”
Listen, if anybody would want to use that, I would want to use that. I like to be on the golf course; I enjoy that a lot. And don’t mistake me—there are moments on a golf course when I worship God. I thank him for this blessing and for the beauty of creation and being able to do something enjoyable and wholesome and so on. That’s appropriate. But it is no substitute for corporate worship! It’s not. We need both. There are things that we can do together as the people of God that we cannot do all by ourselves.
I’m concerned about this, because I’ve observed—I think this is true—that one of the first steps when people go through a so-called “deconstruction” of their faith, one of the first steps towards that is the privatization of spirituality, privatizing their worship, and then they withdraw from the church, pulling away from corporate worship.
The great Puritan John Owen wrote a whole book on apostasy, the danger of apostasy (turning away from the Lord). The book is structured in this way: he warns against apostasy from the doctrine of the gospel—that happens when people stop believing the truth and move into heresy; apostasy from the holiness of the gospel—that happens when people fall away from the Lord into sin; and apostasy from gospel worship. Apostasy from worship; turning away from the true worship of God.
There’s a reason why we have a whole book of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs that were written for the people of God, and they’re calling the people of God to worship: the book of Psalms. There are reasons why in Paul’s letters, Ephesians and Colossians, there are exhortations to the community, the church, to sing to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, “making melody in your hearts to the Lord.”
There’s a reason why you have this series of verses in Hebrews 10. This is a command, and it is a command that you and I are obligated to obey as Christians. It’s all about worship. Listen to what it says.
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near [this is worship language] with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
Don’t neglect corporate worship. You cannot have complete worship of God in your life all by yourself in your living room or in your bedroom or in your closet, as important as that is. You need to be with the people of God, because worship is a corporate experience. We worship God both personally and corporately.
(2) Number two, we are to worship God with both mind and heart. I said I’d come back to the wholehearted worship, and by wholehearted I mean with the whole being, with everything that is within us. One of those great mystics from many years ago, Madame Guyon, said, “To give your whole heart to God is to have all the energy of your soul always centered on him.” The whole heart given to God.
Isn’t that what Jesus commanded? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength”—everything in me! The psalmist says, “Bless the Lord at all times, and all that is within me bless his holy name.”
You see it in this psalm here. It’s obviously a song where the mind is engaged, because there’s so much theology packed in. As I’ve already said, we have to have the word. But the heart is engaged too, because they’re singing.
What is singing? Singing is truth is on a higher emotional, affectional register. It’s the truth being expressed in poetry, through music, with skill, with artistry, and with our hearts engaged.
Here you have the people singing in verses 1 and 21, you have musical instrumentation (Miriam with her tambourine) in verse 20. You even have—hold your breath—bodily engagement, because there’s dancing in verse 20. It’s right there in the Bible. The word here literally means “to move in a series of rhythmical steps or movements in time to the music.”
It probably pictures a group of people who are together in a circle, dancing around together. It’s a word that’s used many times in Scripture, and often with a negative connotation. It’s the same word that’s used in Exodus 32 when the children of Israel dance around the golden calf. It just shows that dancing can be either reverent and worshipful or it can be sensual and idolatrous.
I’m not advocating for anything in particular right now; I’m just saying, it’s okay to loosen up a little bit. You can clap your hands, you can raise your hands, you can sway. You can tap your foot. It’s okay. It’s in the Bible. The whole mind and heart.
Here’s the deal: I don’t really care whether you move or not, but I do care if your heart is moved. If your heart is moved in such a way that it has to get out through your hands or your feet, then that’s a good thing. The whole heart, the whole energy of your soul, always centered on him.
Listen, one of the dangers for us is to adopt a kind of gnostic spirituality that neglects the body and that does not take into account the bodily nature of discipleship that is found in the Bible. Listen, if you never kneel, if you never bow down before God, if you never get on your knees or on your face, if you never raise your hands or clap your hands, if you never in any way in your worship of God have the posture and the movement of your body affected, there’s a whole dimension of your being that has not been consecrated to God. Somehow, our bodies have to come into the picture. So, worship God with both mind and heart.
(3) Number three, worship with respect for the past and relevance for the present. I don’t have time to really expound this, but let me just make a couple of observations and make the application.
This is the first of Israel’s worship songs that we know of, right here in Exodus 15. It gets utilized, reused, reconfigured again and again and again. I read Isaiah 12:2 in the assurance of pardon. Most of you probably weren’t paying attention to the specific words, but it actually is an echo of Exodus 15. If you go read Psalm 118, there are echoes of Exodus 15. So the language here gets utilized again and again and again.
Then it gets used in the New Testament as well. Our call to worship this morning was from Revelation 15—I’m going to read it again in a minute—is the language that comes out of Exodus 15.
There was this centuries-long respect for the past. They never move on from Exodus 15, but they do keep contextualizing it to their present situations. That’s the model. We don’t move on from biblical truth, but we do have to keep recontextualizing it to the present moment.
Let me give you an example of how this is done. In the Old Testament they sang Psalm 46, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. We will not fear though the earth is moved and the mountains are cast into the sea.” Psalm 46.
Then you get to the 16th century—it’s Reformation Day, right, so I have to say something about Martin Luther. What did Martin Luther do? He would say to his friend Melanchthon, “Let’s sing together the 46th.” It was what has now come down to us in English as, “A mighty fortress is our God, / A bulwark never failing.”
This morning we didn’t sing “A Mighty Fortress,” but we did sing the 46th Psalm when we sang that song “Overcome,” because it’s language straight out of Psalm 46.
You see what I’m saying? We take these truths and we keep writing new songs without completely losing the old. There’s respect for the past, but there’s fresh contextualization for the present.
(4) Finally, let’s worship with our eyes on Jesus. I mean, that’s the most important thing, and it’s part of contextualizing this Old Testament passage for our use today, because Jesus is the one who has fulfilled all of this for us. Jesus is our warrior who has delivered us from our enemies. Jesus is our shepherd redeemer who has laid down his life for the sheep and has redeemed us with the price of his own precious blood. Jesus is the one and only true God. If you’ve seen Jesus, you’ve seen the Father. And Jesus is the King of kings and the Lord of lords.
The New Testament authors understood the importance of this hymn in relationship to Jesus. You can hear it in Revelation 15:3-4. “And they sing the song of Moses, servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, ‘Great and amazing are your deeds, O Lord God the Almighty; just and true are your ways, O King of the nations! Who will not fear, O Lord, and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship you, for your righteous acts have been revealed.” It’s the song of Moses and the song of the Lamb because it is worship that is centered around Jesus Christ.
You are a worshiper. You’re worshiping something. Are you worshiping the true and the living God? Are you worshiping with your whole being engaged in response to who God is and what he has done? That’s the call on us as a church. Let’s do that together this morning. Let’s pray.
God, we thank you this morning for your word, and we thank you for your revelation of yourself, your greatness and your power, your majesty, your holiness, your steadfast love, your saving mercy. We thank you that you have shown yourself to us through your Son, Jesus Christ, and that you have redeemed us from our sins through his blood. Lord, the only appropriate response to such mercy is, as the apostle Paul said, to present our bodies to you as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to you. This is our rational, reasonable worship.
So, in these moments, we give ourselves to you, we consecrate ourselves to you afresh. We ask you, Lord, to renew us in your grace, to fill us with your Spirit, and fill our hearts with joy as we worship you and our lips with praise. We ask you to draw near to us as we come to the Lord’s table, as we come to taste and see that you are good. Thank you that we have this privilege to worship you, and thank you that we can do this together. We can do so freely this morning. May we not take it for granted. This is a blood-bought privilege. So draw near to us, we pray, as we come to the table. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
