Reasons to Praise

“It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name, O Most High; to declare your steadfast love in the morning and your faithfulness by night” (Psalm 92.1-2).

My simple question is this: Why? Why is it good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to His name and to declare His steadfast love? Of course it is good for God the receiver, to be on the receiving end of thanksgiving, praise and declaration, but the idea here is that it is also good for the giver. So again, I ask, why?

I think Charles Spurgeon sums it up nicely. He writes in his commentary on the Psalms, “It is good ethically, for it is the Lord’s right; it is good emotionally, for it is pleasant to the heart; it is good practically, for it leads to others to render the same homage.”

Take each one of those.

The Lord’s Right

It is good because it is the Lord’s right, or to say it another way, He is worthy of it. When something is worthy of praise, it is an offence to not give it the praise it is due. To talk to your neighbour while the New York Philharmonic plays Beethoven’s 9th Symphony; to make jokes in front Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son; it is borderline blasphemy. How much more blasphemous to not give praise to the God of the universe; the good, omniscient, omnipresent, all wise, all satisfying, reigning, ruling King; the one so glorious that no human can see His face without crumpling up like a piece of paper and dying; the one so magnificent that His very presence sent the prophet Isaiah into calling down judgment upon himself, “Woe is me for I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6.5)?

It is good to give Him thanks, to praise Him, to declare His goodness, because it is good to give God what God is due. We ought to praise Him night and day because He is worthy of praise, because He just is that great. Really the question should be, how could we not give Him praise?

As the multitudes in Revelation sing, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” (Revelation 5.12)

Pleasant to the Heart

It is good because it is pleasant to the heart. In other words, it is good to do because it is good to do what we were created to do.

Since He is worthy of all adoration, of all praise, thanksgiving, and declaration, and since we are the creations of a God who is worthy of all of that, it is no surprise that we were created to give it. We were created to glorify God. Isaiah 43.7 puts it like this, “Everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory.” Now everyone knows how good it feels to do things that you were created to do. Humans were created to run, that’s why it feels good to run. We were created to enjoy food, and that is why it feels good to enjoy good food. If we were created first and foremost for the glory of God, then it is going to feel simply incredible to give glory to the God who created us. At the same time, it is going to feel empty and wanting to live a life that does not give Him glory, that does not live in the role we were created to fill. And isn’t that something we have all experienced at some point? The emptiness of self glorification?

All that to say, our hearts rejoice when we give glory and honour to God because it is what our hearts were made for. It is sweet to give glory to God.

Practically Good

And it is good because it leads others to do the same thing.

Hopefully as Christians we desire for all men and women everywhere to honour and rejoice in God. Well, the simple truth is that most people are followers. They tend to wait to do things until they see others doing them too. That doesn’t necessarily take away from the genuineness of the action, its just how humans usually operate. There might be a whole swath of people who know deep down that God deserves their praise, their thanksgiving and their declaration, but it is not until they see and hear others directing it all to God that they are driven to turn and to do it as well.

That should be enough reason in itself to want to praise God, to want to direct all our thanks to Him and declare His goodness, because we know that as we do it that others will do it as well. This one raises the question though of where. Where do we do this so that others are exposed to it? Are we supposed to stand in the streets and praise Him? Based on Jesus words in the Sermon on the Mount, I don’t think so. Instead I think it takes place as we speak in ways and live our lives in ways that give all glory and honour and power to God. As our lives direct all praise to Him then people around us will take notice, and, God willing, will direct their praise to Him as well.

I am sure the reasons could go on, but Spurgeon gives us a good place to start. For at least these three reasons, “It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name, O Most High; to declare your steadfast love in the morning and your faithfulness by night” (Psalm 92.1-2).

Easy Christianity

It is truly wild how seemingly easy we have made Christianity in the West. We have crafted this version of Christianity (which is really no Christianity at all) that requires so little effort. You don’t have to get your knees scraped or your hands dirty; you barely need to break a sweat. You almost don’t even need the power of the Holy Spirit. You just accept Jesus into your heart, then proceed to do your private devotions each day, sit in a church once a week like you’re at the movie theatre, try not to curse in public and maybe send some money out to a few different charities. I mean there is probably a little more to it then that in most people’s minds, but at the same time, maybe not.

I remember N.T. Wright wrote in a commentary on Mark some years ago, “Jesus is not leading us on a pleasant afternoon hike, but on a walk into danger and risk. Or did we suppose that the Kingdom of God would mean merely a few minor adjustments in our ordinary lives?” I think that is exactly what many of us think Jesus is leading us on these days, a pleasant afternoon hike that means little more than a few minor adjustments to our otherwise ordinary lives. Again, I say it is wild because just like N.T. Wright is highlighting, nothing could be more contrary to what Jesus is actually calling His disciples to then that.

Take one verse. It is a short and simple verse and its one that caught my attention this morning and reminded me once again how uncomfortable and dangerous the Christian life is and also how impossible it is without the Spirit’s power. It is 1 Corinthians 10.24. Paul is addressing the Corinthian Church on eating food in the marketplace, i.e., is food sacrificed to idols, and he sums up his instructions to them with this command: “No one should seek their own good, but the good of others.”

Did you hear that? Well maybe read it again to make sure you are picking up what Paul is putting down. Do not seek your own good, but the good of others. That is a crazy command! How is that even possible to do consistently? How do you do that without adjusting your whole life? Now just in case your knee jerk reaction is to say that that statement pertains only to the situation Paul is addressing in 1 Corinthians, take note of two other places that such a command comes up: Romans 15.1-2, “We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbour for his good, to build him up,” and Philippians 2.4, “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”

The interesting thing about all of these references is that they are all rooted in the person of Jesus. In every one of these references Paul gives the command, then points to Jesus as the example of one who truly walked out this command, and then he tells the crowd that he is writing to, “Now imitate Christ.” Well to be completely accurate, in 1 Corinthians specifically he follows up the command by saying, “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ,” but you get the point. This command comes from the example of the person of whom Christians are disciples of. In other words, there is no getting around it. The command to put others needs before our own is a universal command for disciples of Jesus everywhere. This is a slice of what it means to follow Him.

When I really think about it, I am not sure that I could find a more difficult ethic to walk out then this one. I mean come on, no one naturally seeks the good of their neighbour before the good of themselves, or at least not all the time. Its impossible. But I think that is kind of the point. As Jesus once told His disciples while speaking of another impossible part of the Christian life, “With man this is impossible, with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19.26).

If you have found some version of Christianity that doesn’t make you frequently think, “How can I even do that?!” then I would guess you have found something that is not Christianity at all. The reality found in the pages of Scripture is that Jesus is not calling us to an afternoon hike, but instead is calling us into danger and risk. He is calling us into an innumerable amount of uncomfortable adjustments to our otherwise ordinary lives. Jesus never calls His disciples into an easy Christianity, instead He calls them into the kind of lives that can only be lived through the power of his Holy Spirit; the kind of lives that make little of themselves and instead make much of the needs of others so that in turn they make much of Jesus Christ.

Before the Foundation of the World

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him (Ephesians 1.3-4).

Lately I have been reading Ephesians chapter one over and over and I just cannot shake the wonder that comes over me every time I read verse 4 in particular, that God chose to save us, to make us blameless in Him before the foundation of the world. I think it hits especially hard because I can actually go and read about the foundation of the world. Just turn to Genesis 1 and you get the account of God laying out the earth’s foundations. He speaks everything into existence. He creates night and day. He separates the water from the heavens. He makes the mountains rise up out of the sea. He shapes the first man and woman out of the dust. He creates the entire universe and before all of that takes place Paul is telling me that God was thinking about me and my salvation. Before all of that happened, however many thousands of years ago, He knew me and knew that I would one day be found in Him.

What an insane concept, that God’s knowledge of us, His love for us and His concern for us began before the world began! If we ever think that God doesn’t care about us, Ephesians 1.4 should blow those thoughts out of the water. We have been on his mind since before there was an earth to stand on. And if we ever think that we are not worthy of His love or that somehow we need to earn His love, again this verse should lay those thoughts in their grave. He foreknew our redemption before we took our first breath, which means His love could not have been based on anything we did or didn’t do, but solely based upon His sovereign and ageless love.

Before the foundations of the world. Think about that.

The Good Portion

I find Scripture to be quite clear on what is supposed to be the primary pursuit of the Christian life. Verses like John 17.3 don’t leave much up to the imagination: “And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Or how about the story of Mary and Martha? Mary sits at Jesus’ feet while Martha runs around serving, and who does Jesus commend? “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10.41-42).

It is hard to read even a page from the Bible without being confronted with the simple but shocking reality that God wants us to know Him and to know Him deeply. It is what were created for, and it is what Jesus died to secure; it is the epitome of joy and the true source all peace and rest, to know God and to be known by Him. And yet, how quickly we forget.

You would think weekly sermon preparation would equal extra communion with God for me, but that is not always the case. Instead, I find myself far too often in that preparation focused on knowing more about God from the Scriptures, instead of on knowing more deeply the God that the Scriptures are about. It sounds crazy, even as I type it, but its the snare I continually fall into. I exchange the pursuit of knowing God for knowing about Him. Thankfully though, again, the Bible is not lacking in verses to remind me of what is primary, and to re-calibrate my aim.

J. I. Packer once wrote, “Knowing God is a relationship calculated to thrill a man’s heart.” There is nothing that will ever compare to knowing Him. God forgive us for ever letting anything compete with that pursuit.

May we daily and continually choose the good portion.

If we preach, may it be out of the overflow of knowing God through His Word.

“Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3.8).

People of the Book or the Person

I used to think that the early church must have came into being with the Bible in its hands. I just assumed that they had, at least after a few short years of existence, a finished Old and New Testament compiled into one book just like we have today; all books completed and agreed upon as God’s divinely inspired and authoritative Word. The reality seems to be that it took a little big longer that.

Old Testament Variation

When it comes to the Old Testament there are those who would argue that the OT as we know it, the OT of the protestant church, had come together and found its final form as early 300-165 BCE.[1] The biggest problem with such early dating is the early church itself who’s collections of sacred writings seemed to be quite a bit broader than what we have today. While there was clearly some OT literature that the whole Christian church was agreed upon from the beginning as being authoritative (i.e., the Pentateuch), there was still some fluidity in terms of a complete and fixed list of sacred OT books.

Take for example Origen of Alexandria, a Christian scholar from the 2nd century. While Origen recognized the majority of our OT books as authoritative, he also states in his writing that it is not good to set before the reader either Numbers or Leviticus,[2] and at the same time recommends a number of deuterocanonical (or apocryphal) books for the Christian’s diet.[3] Or look at Augustine, who is arguably still the most influential voice in the church since the apostle Paul. Augustine’s OT list was made up of 44 books total, including (like Origen) deuterocanonical books such as Sirach, Tobias, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees and so forth.

There are many more examples that could be given, but maybe these two are sufficient to show that while the church Fathers generally agreed that there were inspired and authoritative OT books, there remained through the early centuries variation as to which books those were exactly.[4] As Lee McDonald writes in his classic study, The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, “If there was a precise list of authoritative and inspired OT books handed on by the apostles stemming from Jesus, then the early church has lost it. There are simply no references to it anywhere.”[5]

New Testament Was Not Much Different

When it comes to the New Testament, as early as NT books were composed and beginning to be placed alongside the OT Scriptures the similar kind of variation or fluidity showed up. Marcion, a Christian theologian in the 1st century, is the first person known to have published a list of NT books. His list included the Gospel of Luke, Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians Philippians, Colossians, 1–2 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Of course, Marcion’s list must be taken with a grain of salt given the fact his anti-Jewish ambition was to separate Christianity from any OT and Jewish influence and/or tradition. Nevertheless, he produced the first known NT list of books for the church. In response to Marcion and the damage that his biblical list did, Justin martyr, a 2nd century Christian apologist, worked to recover the OT to the status of Scripture and as a Christian book, while also in his writings paving the way for the gospels to be recognized as Scripture as well. Picking up where Justin left off, Irenaeus, a 2nd century Greek Bishop, made the first clear designation of Christian writings being Scripture and of being a separate collection from the Old Testament. Though even in doing so he never quite defined precisely what the boundaries of that New Testament were.

While Marcion was arguably the first to produce a list of NT books, a 3rd century Bishop named Eusebius was the first to set forth a list of authoritative NT books closest to the 27-book list that we have today. In an attempt to give an account of which NT writings were being used in churches in his time, Esusebius produced his NT list, made up of what he called 1) universally acknowledged books 2) disputed books, and 3) spurious books.[6] Acknowledged/accepted books were the four gospels, Acts and fourteen epistles of Paul, 1 Peter, 1 John and Revelation. In the disputed category were Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 peter, 2 and 3 john and Revelation again. Finally, listed as spurious were several NT apocryphal books like the Acts of Paul, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Didache and then again Revelation.

Again, to quote McDonald, this time regarding the NT scriptures, “The Christian books that eventually received this normative status were not the same for all the churches and even when there was general agreement the authority of the literature was not acknowledged at the same time by every church.”[7]

Life Without a Finished Bible

Much, much more could be said about the process and timeline of the OT and NT books coming together to take the final form of the Christian Bible that we know and cherish today. Nevertheless, one thing is hopefully clear enough from this small collection of examples: that the early church did not immediately have a fixed and closed list of authoritative Scriptures. Now, to Christians who have had the finished form of the Bible in their hands their whole lives, this fact can be a little bit mind boggling. For many of us it is hard to imagine following Christ without the full and complete Bible as we know it. We feel like we would be lost without it. But for the early church, this was their reality.

Of course, it’s not that in those first few centuries that the church had no authoritative texts, but again that there was fluidity or variation in terms of which books were authoritative. Still, this begs the question for 21st century western Christians whose faith is built upon the Scriptures, how did the early church function without a completed Bible?

Well on the one hand, you don’t miss what you never had. It is probably safe to say that the early church was not consciously longing for the finished Bible. And in fact, it doesn’t even appear that the early church was that worried about or interested in figuring out which books belonged in the Bible until heresies began to emerge.[8] But on the other hand, and more importantly the early church as a whole seemed to understand well that final authority rested in the person of Christ. Their foundation was the news of his life, death, and resurrection as well as his teachings which were already being orally taught and passed on. Hans Von Campenhausen rightly states that early Christianity was not “a religion of the book,” because they didn’t have a precise and finished book. Instead, he writes, early Christianity was “the religion of the Spirit and the living Christ.”[9]

People of the Person

I say all of that to say this: there is a lesson there that I believe the modern-day church needs to continually be reminded of. With the unparalleled privilege of having the Bible in our hands comes the unseen temptation to elevate the bible higher than Jesus himself. We can foster such a passion for His Word and become so focused on His Word, that at times we can miss Jesus and become a people of a book instead of a person.

But the value of Scripture is never just Scripture in and of itself. Rather it is that it proclaims to us through both the OT and NT, the life death, resurrection and teachings of Jesus, the son of God, in whom eternal life is found. Without that, our Bible is just books and letters. And to the degree that we study the Scriptures without Jesus as the interpretive lens and the final goal, we remain like the Pharisees to whom Jesus said, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5.39-40).

Please don’t mishear me, I am not trying to encourage you to be less passionate about Scripture. Actually, I hope I am encouraging you to be even more passionate and devoted to Scripture. But in that passion and devotion may we never lose sight of who the Scriptures are about. May we love the Bible; cherish the Bible; study the Bible and always thank God for the unbelievable privilege of having His words and revelation preserved for us in the Bible. But may we never forget the aim of the Bible, that is to take us to Jesus in whom all ultimate authority truly rests.

[1] William Sanford LaSor, David Allan Hubbard, and Frederic Wm. Bush Old Testament Survey (Grand Rapids: Eardmans, 1983); David N. Freedman, “The Earliest bible,” in Backgrounds for the Bible (ed. M. P. O’Connor and D. F. Freedman; Winona Lake, Ind,: Eisenbrauns, 1987); Roger. T. Beckwith The Old Testament canon of the New Testament Church and its Background in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985).

[2] See: Homily 27 on Numbers.

[3] Lee. M. McDonald The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995), 111.

[4] To some degree this variation remains to this day, particularly between the canons of the Protestants and Eastern Orthodox.

[5] McDonald, Christian Biblical Canon, 129.

[6] Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica

[7] McDonald, Christian Biblical Canon, 9.

[8] Exploring the Origins of the Bible (Edited by Craig A. Evans and Emanuel Tov; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 204.

[9] Hans, Von Campenhausen. The Formation of the Christian Bible (Translated by J. A. Baker. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), 62-63.