This is the third of six blog posts looking at the first 3 verses of Psalm 34, and attempting to understand the idea of “continual praise”.
Series: Who? | What?| Whom?| When?| How?| Why?
I will bless the Lord at all times;
His praise shall continually be in my mouth.My soul shall make its boast in the Lord;
The humble shall hear of it and be glad.Oh, magnify the Lord with me,
Psalm xxxiv.1-3
And let us exalt His name together.
3. Whom?
The Psalm calls us, as individuals, to a lifestyle of steady-state worship. Now notice the object of our worship.
LORD –– LORD –– LORD
We are not worshiping some generic idea of god, some undefined deity, we are worshiping the LORD. In your English Bible you might notice that the word LORD is all caps. This is the standard way of translating the Hebrew name of God, Yahweh. Worship is being directed toward him. He is God. He is Creator. He alone is worthy of worship. And He has revealed Himself to us in the Holy Scriptures.
We shouldn’t be worshipping the god we want him to be, or imagine him to be, but rather, we should worship Him as He is and has revealed Himself to be.
And what’s more, look at verse 5.
They looked to Him and were radiant,
Psalm xxxiv.5
And their faces were not ashamed.
Elsewhere, the Bible teaches that we see God only when we look to Christ. Jesus said,
“He who has seen Me has seen the Father.”
John xiv.9
Paul tells us in Colossians that Jesus is,
“the image of the invisible God . . . that in Him all the fullness should dwell.”
Colossians i.15,19
God has revealed Himself most clearly in the person of Son. Look to Christ, worship him in the ways we talked about in the previous post. I’m going to leave it at that, but for a full treatment of this idea I cannot commend to you strongly enough Charles Spurgeon’s sermon on verse 5. He preached it in 1858, and it is masterful in its magnifying of Christ.
An absolute God, apart from the Lord Jesus Christ, can afford no comfort whatever to a troubled heart. We may look to him, and we shall be blinded, for the light of Godhead is insufferable, and as mortal eye cannot fix its gaze upon the sun, no human intellect could ever look unto God, and find light, for the brightness of God would strike the eye of the mind with eternal blindness. The only way in which are can see God is through the Mediator Jesus Christ.
Charles Spurgeon, “Looking Unto Jesus”
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