Shout for joy

wels.net/shout-for-joy/

At Christmas, happy hearts break into song! We are filled with joy because Jesus has entered our world of sorrow and tragedy. 
 
Psalm 98 encourages us to:


(v. 4). Yet such joy often eludes so many.

A world of sorrow

 I stumbled onto an 1803 rhyme. At eighteen, Thomas Love Peacock wrote:
 “Quickly pass the social glass, Hence with idle sorrow! No delay—enjoy today, Think not of tomorrow!” (from “A Glee”)

 I happened on those words the day I learned that a friend I first met when I was eighteen had just died. Alcoholism. Now comes his family’s first Christmas without him. Will it be merry? Would beer give more cheer?
 
 Two weeks after the first horror, a police chief in a nearby town killed himself, leaving a wife and two small children.
 
 In both cases, what would you offer to help hollow hearts?

And what of your deepest 2016 grief, whether secret or stretched wide for all to see? Is joy real at all, in a world so worldly, in a mess so messed up? If lasting delight does not come from a bottle, where do you get it?

An ancient song made new

Yet what if we all sang anew an ancient song that both soothes sorrows and erupts in  exuberance?

What if that song needed trumpets of more than one kind to make it loud enough? What if God himself breathed it out? And what if it were the original “Joy to the World,” wrapping God’s praise with the brightest Christmas bow and more?

Do you hear what I hear? God put the raucous song right in your Bible—Psalm 98. He  intends it to be ever new, despite having lyrics perhaps three thousand years old. It’s part  of our Christmas ever year.

“Let the sea resound, and everything in it” (Psalm 98:7). Think about the fish of the sea singing.

In 2014, Nature published a study on how many fish reside in the global ocean at a depth  of 200 to 1,000 meters, deeper than fishers can harvest with nets, down where 95 percent  of fish biomass might exist.

Researchers discovered that previous estimates of a billion tons of fishes in those waters were low—90 percent too low. In those waters swim probably 11 to 15 billion tons of fishes.
 
The most common fish, experts note, are bioluminescent bristlemouths. Do you think of chickens as the most common vertebrates on earth? They outnumber people about three to one. The number of chickens worldwide may surpass 24 billion. Yet glowing and swimming deep down in the dark may be thousands of trillions of bristlemouths.

All of them are to praise God, says the writer of Psalm 98. And they make up only one  species of about two million animal species on the planet we can identify. A million more species unknown to current science may dwell in deeper ocean depths.
 
The writer of Psalm 98 tells them all, with all people on earth, to shout and sing to the  Lord, while rivers clap their hands and mountains shout together for joy before the Lord.

An amazing message

“Joy to the world!” Why did Isaac Watts summarize Psalm 98 with those words, when he put the Spirit’s ancient song into rhymed English poetry?

Why should you rejoice too? I’m not talking about just dipping a tentative toe into some subdued celebration, but joining all the globe—even all the oceans and fish—with both wind and string instruments in utter jubilation?
 
Why shout to the Lord? “He has done marvelous things; his right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him. The LORD has made his salvation known and revealed his righteousness to the nations. He has remembered his love and his faithfulness to the house of Israel; all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God” (vv 1-3).

Likely a Jewish man wrote those words. Whoever he was, he seems to have an odd sense of timing. He sings centuries before the first Christmas as if baby Jesus already lay in a manger in Bethlehem.

That is, the psalmist does not say, “The LORD will do marvelous things,” but “he has done marvelous things.” He does not predict: “His right hand and his holy arm will work salvation,” but states a fact: “His right hand and his holy arm have workedsalvation for him.”

Mary sang similarly about God, before Jesus was born: “He has brought down rulers  from their thrones but has lifted up the humble” (Luke 1:52). Had proud potentates  tumbled from power? Were God’s lowly ones lifted up? Not yet. But God always fulfills his promises. Mary believed.

So do we, as we sing Psalm 98. Here is joy. We believe that as sure as Jesus came the first time to die in our place, he will soon reappear. It’s as good as done. The arrogant will be banished. All creation will worship Christ.

We trust what holy angels sang of the first Christmas night: First, “Glory to God in the highest heaven.” Then, “on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests” (Luke 2:14).
 The glory goes first to God because, as Psalm 98 recognizes, “his right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him” (emphasis added).

But think again. He saved for himself? If you rescue someone from drowning, don’t you dive in for the benefit of that helpless person, not yourself? But what could deploy more joy than recognizing that God is different? He did all the saving, all on his own initiative, to glorify his holy name.

And whom did he save, when Jesus took flesh to die for all the world? The psalmist says that the Lord revealed his righteousness to the nations. Again, how odd that would have sounded in Israel. If the Lord uncovered his righteousness not just to Israelites, but to the nations, wouldn’t that be bad news for Israel? Foreigners were so depraved, so dirty, so  distant. If the Lord promised to be Israel’s God, how could all of the ends of the earth see his salvation?

But by the Spirit of the risen Christ, who gives us his righteousness as the best Christmas clothes, it is happening. Again this Christmas, believers around the world worship Jesus, from massive Chinese metropolises to tiny refugee camps in northern Iraq.
 Two years ago Iraqi refugees in one camp set up a meager tent with a manger scene. “All you have got left is the love of that refugee child,” explained their British-born pastor. “That to us in the Middle East is all that matters this Christmas.”

Or visualize Christians I met in Uruk Uso, a village in Nigeria. Down dirt roads they stroll, boisterously caroling late into the sticky night on Christmas Eve, blown away by God’s  rescue.

Join them in song

Sing Psalm 98, seeing wonders of God’s love worldwide in believing hearts. And think of the ultimate tomorrow. Long for Jesus’ reappearing, when the song will fully, finally come true: “Joy to the world.”

 Daniel Witte is pastor at Trinity, Nicollet, Minnesota.

   ...more